Singularity Weblog - Latest Comments

Re: Futurists Don’t Have Crystal Balls. They Have Mirrors

Socrates — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:11:18 -0000

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Introduction

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens. . . . In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

“The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology, and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact that is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and—ideally—quantifiable.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490–97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Re: Nigel Ackland: Ordinary…Extraordinary – Life with a Bionic Arm

Socrates — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:01:11 -0000

https://youtu.be/gP25HqPS684

Re: Nigel Ackland: Ordinary…Extraordinary – Life with a Bionic Arm

Socrates — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:06:48 -0000

It is happening: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cedpz1zqp8po

Re: The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

CM Stewart — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:03:33 -0000

Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful, honest answers, comrade.

Re: The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

Socrates — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:02:49 -0000

Alas, the loss of many futures.
Yet I am not ready to give up. We have to resist. Even if it is futile. Not because we are guaranteed to succeed, but because it is worth doing whatever the outcome.
That is why, on my dark days, I seek the will to fight battles I am unlikely to win. Because the fight is worth fighting. I get stronger in the process. And who knows, maybe others, or even the world, can benefit from my efforts and example.
P.S. Love your sense of humor, and the nod to my favorite Douglas Adams. ;-)

Re: The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

Socrates — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:52:22 -0000

The short answer is that I don't know exactly.
The long answer is that I fluctuate. Some days, I think it is self-serving willful blindness. Some days, I think they genuinely feel "helpless" against the pace of technology, believe it or not, as Douglas Rushkoff describes in Survival of the Richest. Some days, I think it is pure stupidity. Other days, I think it is political, religious, or free-market ideology.
All to say: I really don't know. But I think the question is worth keeping open.

Re: The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

Gregory Sprole — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:35:42 -0000

What I mourn most is the loss of a future. AI is a cynical symptom of this loss, the future is dismal, so why should anything matter. There remains nothing to trust, reality is distorted to what we want to hear, eh? As a world, the Nuclear Age gave us the power to actually erase our future, and that knowledge sits in our consciousness. Acknowledged or not. In the beginning it was visceral, discussed, publicly; now it is verboten. If AI is a hammer, this is a cosmic bulldozer Arthur, and you'd better follow Ford quickly!

Re: The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

CM Stewart — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:04:05 -0000

You've interviewed, corresponded with, and researched some of these tech oligarchs. Can you speculate why they are speed-running an American civil war?

Re: Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness is More than Computation!

Socrates — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:17:50 -0000

https://youtu.be/tJV-vdbZ388

Re: On Singularity University and the Danger of Being Exponential

Socrates — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:38:20 -0000

Faith in the Possible: Silicon Valley has a God complex. The critics are not wrong about that. They are just wrong about which god. https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/faith-in-the-possible

Re: Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!

Socrates — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:36:03 -0000

15 years ago I interviewed Charlie Stross about a little story called "Lobsters."

Today, the world is literally raising them.

In June 2011, I sat down with Charlie for Singularity 1 on 1. Back then, "singularity" was still a word most people associated with black holes, not AI. His 2001 short story "Lobsters" (which grew into Accelerando, 2006 Locus Award winner, Hugo finalist) was one of the sharpest early maps of what happens when intelligence stops being exclusively biological.

Uploaded minds. Post-scarcity economies. Legal personhood for software. An economy run by optimization processes no human fully understands.

He wrote it before the iPhone existed.

Now look at 2026.

The fastest-growing open source AI agent on the planet is OpenClaw, built by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger (now at OpenAI). In China, installing it is literally called "raising lobsters" (养龙虾 / yang longxia), a nod to its red lobster logo. Tencent markets its OpenClaw suite as "lobster special forces." Shenzhen is handing out seven-figure subsidies to one-person companies running on it. Steinberger just took the TED 2026 stage with the line, "the lobster is loose, and it's not going back into the tank."

Coincidence? Yes, the logo and the short story have no connection.

And yet.

Stross didn't predict OpenClaw. He predicted the kind of world where something like OpenClaw would be inevitable, where autonomous agents spill out of labs into the hands of hundreds of millions of people almost overnight, where the "how" runs ahead of the "why," and where we all have to catch up in real time.

That is why I keep going back to this conversation. Great science fiction isn't about the gadgets. It's about giving us a vocabulary for futures that haven't arrived yet. Charlie had that vocabulary 25 years ago. We are finally catching up to the words.

📺 Steinberger's TED 2026 talk: https://youtu.be/7rzYDM6vMtI
What did Stross get right? What did he miss? I would love to hear from anyone who read Accelerando back before it stopped feeling like fiction.

Re: Why I Cancelled ChatGPT and Switched to Claude, And Why You Should Too

Socrates — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:50:03 -0000

Palantir's manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/palantir-posted-a-manifesto-that-reads-like-the-ramblings-of-a-comic-book-villain-181947361.html

Re: Jacinta González on ICE, Palantir, Big Tech and Surveillance

Socrates — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:48:30 -0000

Palantir posted a manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/palantir-posted-a-manifesto-that-reads-like-the-ramblings-of-a-comic-book-villain-181947361.html

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Socrates — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:25:25 -0000

Are you a fan of the movies?

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Yfke Laanstra — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:29:55 -0000

another #micdrop
this is indeed a warning of epic proportions

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Socrates — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:05:20 -0000

Frank Herbert interviewed by W. McNelly (1969) https://youtu.be/1s7muoTaCpY

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Aurelius Grendel — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:49:10 -0000

Correct up to a point, but it is facile to simply 'warn' people about a problem. A deeper thinker knows better than to warn without providing at least a proposal of a direction for a solution. Herbert did this as well, to his credit. He saw the looped cycle of human repression and stagnation, followed by inevitable rebellion and renewal, and correctly identified the crisis danger in each cycle that the human race would simply self-destruct in the process of reaching for renewal.

The entire point of what Leto II did - his 'Golden Path' - was to become the 'ultimate predator': to deliberately repress and force his 'peace' upon the entire human race. He deliberately bottled them up, allowing them no creative, self-actualized outlet for their aggressions and ambitions, and let the pressure build over three and a half millennia. Once he finally allowed them to kill him out of sheer racial frustration, he knew they would explode across the cosmos in a wave of diaspora so huge and spread out that the entire human race could never again be contained and stagnated in a death spiral under one dictatorial leader: The Scattering. He was insuring, in his way, that the light of human consciousness would never go out of the universe.

His final sacrificial gift was to spread his prescience out into the hundreds of sandtrout that were born from his death, creating so much unconscious noise in the prescient 'signal' that no single 'Messiah' with his talents could ever rise to take a predictive chokehold on all of humanity again. He did this, knowing that his semi-consciousness would be trapped forever in little dispersed slivers in each of the sandworms that grew from his death, locked in a horrible shadow existence. He would never be awake and aware, but powerless, and locked forever in a nightmare state where he was just half-awake enough in each little sliver to be horrified by his own fate.

This was the horrible fate at the end of the Golden Path that Paul shied away from and couldn't face. It was left to his son to make the ultimate sacrifice for the ensured freedom and agency of humanity.

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Socrates — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:18:29 -0000

Well said. I'm actually hoping to talk to Steven Kotler about their book's "We are as Gods" argument in a couple of weeks. So stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed ;-)

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Paul Epping — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:01:31 -0000

Hi Nikola, such a nice explanation, and the subtle style also hints at something we are witnessing in today's world: the lack of critical thinking. It is easier to follow the seductive stories of abundance, exciting developments in AI, and the trillions of dollars that are on the edges and now at the center. With so much power, we are pulled toward the vortex (of the Singularity) it creates. The latest book by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler, *We Are as Gods*, and the paper he wrote with Alex Wissner-Gross, * http://Soleeverything.org *, leave nothing to coincidence: we will enter a world of abundance, bestowed upon us by the Messiahs of trillionaires to whom we have surrendered ourselves, drinking the nectar of their creations. "Basically, AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for humans. If we grow 1,000 times more than our current economy, you probably have already saturated anything people can think of that they want," according to Musk during the last Abundance Summit. Abundance where meaning will be scarce...

Re: The Future of Humanity and AI with Nikola Danaylov: A Deep Dive into Ethics, Culture, and Technology

Socrates — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:30:39 -0000

Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear https://www.singularityweblog.com/dune-messiah-meaning/

Re: Dune Is Not What You Think: The Warning Frank Herbert Meant Us to Hear

Socrates — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:15:30 -0000

Frank Herbert speaking at UCLA 4/17/1985 https://youtu.be/5IfgBX1EW00

Re: The Skills That Will Matter When AI Can Do Almost Everything

Socrates — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:08:50 -0000

Should teaching have been featured more prominently in the article above, as a skill that should be deliberately cultivated as both unique and valuable in the age of AI?

For example: https://youtu.be/Zn0ZVxHGFC0

Re: Why I Cancelled ChatGPT and Switched to Claude, And Why You Should Too

Socrates — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:04:00 -0000

Sam Altman is The Worst Possible Person to Lead Humanity to AGI https://x.com/rcbregman/status/2031673604144791954?s=20

Re: Breaking: Did Integral AI’s Jad Tarifi Just Announce AGI?

Socrates — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:35:34 -0000

Former Google AI Researcher Sets Up AI Robotics Startup in Tokyo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-09/ex-google-researcher-seeks-to-transform-japan-s-robots-with-ai?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3MzAzMTkzMiwiZXhwIjoxNzczNjM2NzMyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUOVRLTlZUOU5KTFMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMjM0QjIzNTUzQzU0OTg0QkY3NjAzOUZGMzlERDQ5NiJ9.7_FpllhvDUTL7muqWlvlKbniGtR-QDOiBtVznRjBzXM&leadSource=uverify%20wall

Re: Why I Cancelled ChatGPT and Switched to Claude, And Why You Should Too

Socrates — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:39:17 -0000

Anthropic’s CEO explains why he took on the Pentagon https://youtu.be/0Q5J8UB3mXE