Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast?
Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones.
Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.
It's amazing to come to the comments and find the author himself here. Thanks for writing Accelerando, I enjoyed the book. It really made me think about the future differently.
I'm convinced that it happens proportionally to information transfer. What once took 10 years to slowly detect now takes about 1 year to realize you don't want the new [thing] because you're feeling a sense of deja vu.
In 15 years, it'll be a 3-month endeavor unless we see the human limits of perceptual processing hit a hard wall. I liken it to how memory used to be expensive and engineers cheap, and it's now the other way around.
Through your writings, you helped create a new age religion of people who worship non-linear technological progress. (Though the transhumanism movement seems to be less active as of late)
Its going to be a wild ride! Hopefully it doesn't result in anything too crazy going on, I'd hate to involuntarily grow a new limb.
Related, your books, and others in the genre, helped bring about my own acceptance of people's differences. I realized that if I had no objection to a future where people modified their own DNA, then it followed that I should have no objection to people dying their hair, getting crazy tattoos, or making any alterations to their body that they so choose. Transhumanist literature was the final stepping stone that let me step back from the preconceived notions of ethics and morals that society had placed upon me and do a thorough analyze and decide what I wanted to keep versus discard.
And following up from Glasshouse with Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams where the exploration of what could have been without the Vile Offspring and computers were harnessed without a singularity... but "tools" such as Curious Yellow are a part of the nightmare scenarios in the possibilities of war.
Wow! I just stumbled across your novels a month ago (recommendation by my library) and am currently reading my 4th novel of yours. Small world! Thanks for chiming in.
> Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast?
I think Accelerando itself is precisely complaining that things are going too fast. In the specific scenario in the novel, the incomprehensibly fast automation of capitalism is going to eat us all.
IIRC, in Accelerando the ability by meat people to even vaguely understand Economics 2.0 required something like a literal bolt-on addition to the human cognition system.
Nine times out of ten, when something new seems too complex to understand, it's not. It's just been obfuscated to make it seem complicated to sell you something.
Most genuinely new things haven't had time to get too complicated for one person to get a functional understanding of the whole situation. You could talk to web servers in telnet and make the most complex web page anyone had ever made in Notepad long before starting a new web thing from a guide required a half gigabyte download.
Cryptocurrency is a small step forward with some potential to make online transactions easier. That's it. That's cryptocurrencies. Anyone making it more complicated is trying to fleece you. The most complicated thing is smart contracts, and what they are and what they do is right there in the name.
> Nine times out of ten, when something new seems too complex to understand, it's not. It's just been obfuscated to make it seem complicated to sell you something.
Either that, or if it actually is as complicated as it seems... Then it's usually too complicated to work.[1]
(Which is not to say that uncomplicated stuff can't also, sometimes, be bullshit. Like, IMO, crypto-"currencies".)
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[1]: At least too complicated to work well, and/or in the long run.
I am definitely not worried about the consequences of climate change. I am ready to deal with it.
What I am worried about are politicians forcing us to do things justified by climate change.
Conversely, I'm more worried about people with your point of view than I am about climate change. Since this kind of "I'm scared of representative government telling me what to do" stance means that even if we're able to collectively decide to take meaningful action on improving the state of the planet, there will always be a group who declares that they won't help.
Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones.
Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.