Review of Stross "Accelerando" (Score 1)

Charles Stross has released a novel called "Accelerando",

http://www.accelerando.org/

under a license which says you may not create derivative works from it (an action defined by a judge) or use the work for commercial purposes.

The novel is not as easy to start as other Stross' books. (I have read "Singularity Sky", "Iron Sunrise", and the "Family Trade", all of which I consider `page turners'. Singularity Sky begins with the line `The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones ...'; it is about an `out of context problem', an adventure story about what happens when a sigularity-blind government tries to deal with Von Neumann replicators.)

As I said, I had troubles. Perhaps the beginning of Accelerando comes from an earlier period in the writer's life. In any event, my troubles went away. I could not set aside the middle and latter parts of the book; either I got more interested in it or by the time he wrote those section, Stross had learned to write more attractively. (With interruptions, he wrote the book over the period 1999 - 2004.)

Regardless of the beginning, several of the ideas in the book are wonderful and new to me.

One contemporary issue is the dropping cost of information reduplication. `Accelerando' takes the notion of copying a step further. What if you can inexpensively and safely copy people?

To quote Stross:

Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences?

I had not thought of this question. What if Stross copies himself 60 million times, and each copy registers to vote, and no one else makes copies of themselves?

(This book is an example of inexpensive copying, so inexpensive that I did not consider it a cost at all: I did not have to obtain `Accelerando' on paper, which is what economists call a `rivalrous' good. The novel contains a straightforward extrapolation of the lowering cost and integrity of copying...

(A `rivalrous' good is one in which your use `rivals' mine. Thus, we both cannot wear the same shirt at the same time. If I consume paper, you cannot consume that same paper. Non-rivalrous goods are those which we can both have at no or little extra cost. Laws are an example: my obeying a law does not prevent you from obeying it. Likewise, the information content of a book is an example. Your reading a book does not prevent me from reading it.)

Another question revolves around solar systems in which there is a great deal of rapid networking:

"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip.

Scarcity is felt to be even worse if the entities are electronic rather than biological. That is because their thinking speeds may be a million times faster than human. Then, in conversation with someone 100 light years away, instead of taking 200 years for each turn around, the subjective time from a human point of view is 200 million years. That duration is much longer than the time between the death of the dinosaurs and the present.

Stross' concept, by the way, provides one answer for David Brin's question in his paper

The `Great Silence': The Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Life http://skew.ot.com/three/random/silence.html

which, as it says, was written

... to catalogue the factors which would determine and/or predict the likelihood of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligent species ...

Suppose every civilization that could communicate becomes a homebody because it likes gossip that takes less than eight million subjective years for a response (the subjective time to talk with someone on Alpha Centuri)?

The desire for a subjective latency that is less than geological eras suggests an answer to the Drake equation variables concering the length of time over which a technological species communicates by radio.

(The desire for low latency does not have to be the only answer to Fermi's Paradox: percolation voids (Landis), rareness of complex biological entities (Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee), replicating devices that act against biologically-based communicating beings (Benford and many others), war or ecology caused collapse (many, Diamond recently) -- all could be reasons.)

Science fiction readers should like other questions, too, such as those posed by molecular assemblers:

... A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

and

... If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?

Indeed, several years ago, a few days after sitting beside a Pakistani who talked vigourously against pig meat (he did not use the word `ham'), I had a discussion with an Iranian whether an `entity with the knowlege, emotions, and wisdom of a human' but not a human's physical image, should be given the same rights as a human?

When I returned to the US, a fellow commented that many American Christians would have trouble with the same question, too (including, I think, him although he was too discrete to say anything).

All in all, I like this book.