I was lucky enough to spend time with RG recently, and i had a fun conversation with him about singularity related optimism, positivism. He talked of Information-carrying, information-sharing objects, simple replicators, a revolutionary potential therein, in the Bruce Sterling type narrative, to provide a basic level of material support to every person on the planet. A level of sufficiency that could guarantee 100% literacy, time for every person to pursue their interests, to participate in the collective genius.
It’s a good narrative, but i wonder what basis there is for equitable and ubiquitous availability of technologies like this. The suggestion that at a certain point in development, a new infrastructure will reach everywhere at once, very fast, is appealing. I wonder how replicators will be powered, will be distributed from place to place; i wonder how an economic system based on the allocation of scarce resources and pricing by establishment of arbitrary scarcity, will encourage the distribution of powerful ne technologies. My offering to RG on this subject was the following anecdote which i read on a mailing list, a few months ago.
When a project put recycled computers into rural Indian villages without providing expensive training or support, the kids were able to figure it out for themselves — against received judgment. Well, the boys were able to pick it up for themselves — the girls were firmly told they weren’t even allowed to enter the shed where the computer had been deployed. I saw film of the boys crowding around the terminal whilst a couple of girls lurked about longingly outside the shed and most girls retreated to discuss the novelty at a safe distance. The boys treated the equipment with respect and formed heirarchies amongst themselves for access to the computer and for the provision of solutions to problems they encountered… the boys narrated the exclusion of the girls in terms of “propriety” (they shouldn’t mix with boys in physical proximity around the computer).
Imbalance can become a license to profit.
Distribution can become skewed according to the distribution of distribution networks.
The narrative of such as Bruce Sterling, of Kurzweil, does not reflect on the nested complex of social-environmental factors around it, that has always been problematic for me. I don’t mean to deny the potency of such a narrative, but it is the creation of a bubble of apparent prosperity which contains the occlusion, the unvisibility, of many kinds of people.
I think i still hold to my weird theory about the singularity: i don’t think we see a big shift, a kind of “Boom!”, everywhere at once, but a series of supercessing waves, each building on the last. I don’t think there is a need for a totalising narrative; shared stories differ in every place.
