Preface
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
With these provocative words, Vemor Vinge began his presentation on the future at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center in 1993, and so launched into popular culture the idea of the Singularity: that point in the future where humans are no longer the dominant species on Earth and where the rate of technological change becomes so great that predicting what the future will be like becomes nearly impossible, a tipping point beyond which "societal, scientific, and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity"—if it survives at all. A world as different from today's world as our world is from the world of the Australopithecus. A world in which humans may gain godlike powers or be wiped from existence altogether ... might be rendered obsolete and relegated to the equivalent of zoos or nature reserves, or merge with machines in strange ways to produce creatures few pe^^le alive today would even recognize as human. A world that is, in a literal sense, unimaginable—beyond the powers of our imaginations to conceive.
The Singularity had been envisioned before—Stan Ulam mentions a conversation with scientist John Von Neumann in the 1950s in which "our conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential Singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue," and the idea is sounded in a somewhat different key in Arthur C. Clarke's 1948 novel Against the Fall of Night—but Vinge's paper changed the Singularity from a vague speculation about something that might happen in the very distant future to something that probably would happen within the lifetimes of many of the people sitting in the audience. In Vinge's words: "From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in `a million years' (if ever) will likely happen in the next century." (For the entire text of Vinge's groundbreaking paper—plus links to other speculation and commentary about the Singularity—see www.ugcs.caltech .edu/-phoenix/vinge/vingesing.html. A discussion about the Singularity featuring Charles Stross and gory Doctorow titled "Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?" can also be found at www.popsci.com/popsci/science/ article/0, 20967,676265,00. html. )
The idea of a technological Singularity, plus the related ideas of posthumanity and superintelligent Artificial Intelligences, have had an enormous impact on science fiction throughout the '90s and the Oughts to date, challenging and changing the genre's vision of what the future is going to be like. Here, over a third of the way to the date Vinge predicts for its arrival, some of the best science fiction being written grapples with the implications of the Coming of the Singularity and attempts the incredibly difficult task of peering ahead, beyond Singularity, to see what the posthuman world might be like.
Of course, today's authors can't really give us the view from a posthuman intelligence, from the far side of a Singularity, any more than an Australopithecus could have written a story seen through the eyes of a contemporary twenty-first-century human; after all, the stories are being written by people on this side of the Singularity, and no matter how lavish and radical the imaginations of the authors, they remain of necessity limited to being the human perspective on posthumanity. The idea of Singularity is so new that relatively few stories dealing with the world beyond the Singularity have been written. Yet although the task is perhaps by definition impossible, SF writers such as
Greg Egan, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross (whose Accelerando stories, taken as a unit, may be the most complete vision yet of life beyond the Singularity), Cory Doctorow, Robert Reed, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Iain Banks, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Walter Jon Williams, Gregory Benford, Paul J. McAuley, James Patrick Kelly, Ian McDonald, Vemor Vinge himself, and the rest of the authors in this anthology, as well as a dozen others, continue to give it their best shot, producing work that dances right at the cutting edge of the genre—and which may be the best that mere humans on this side of the Singularity can do to predict the mysterious and perhaps incomprehensible future that may await us only a few decades down the line.
So before the Singularity swallows us and whisks us off to our unknown and perhaps unknowable fates, while we're still recognizably human, open the pages of this book to find fourteen visions of what might happen to us in the not-so-distant future—and, while you still can process such a primitive, meatbrain, mainframe-human emotion, enjoy!
(For further speculations on this and related themes, check out our Ace anthologies A.I.s, Beyond Flesh, Robots, Nanotech, Genometry, Hackers, Immortals, and Future War, and Gardner Dozois's Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future.)