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mjankovic comments on Greg Egan disses stand-ins for Overcoming Bias, SIAI in new book - Less Wrong Discussion
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They present a seriously posthuman future, with a populace consisting mostly of human uploads and digital substrate native people, as a normal setting. Basically, hardcore computationalist cogsci, computer science mediated total upheaval of the human condition, and observing how life goes on nevertheless instead of bemoaning the awfulness of losing some wetware substrate. Several short stories of non-shallow thought about issues with human uploads and human cognitive modification. Pretty much the same cultural milieu as the SIAI writings are based on.
The ideas about singularity and AI come from Vinge, but I have a hard time coming up with other writers before 2000 that take the same unflinching materialistic stance to human cognition that Egan does, and aren't saddled by blatantly obvious breaks from reality. Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series maybe.
Basically Egan showed how the place where SIAI wants to go can be inhabitable.
Egan's stance is not materialistic in the least. It can be best described as a "what if" of extreme idealism. It has computers without any substrate, as well as universes operating on pure mathematics. You can hardly find a way of being less materialistic than that.
The idea of singularity and AI originates with Stanislaw Lem. Vinge was following his lead.
Egan's novels do have plenty of themes relevant to transhumanism, though their underlying philosophical suppositions are somewhat dubious at best, as they negate the notion of material reality.
Yeah, 'materialism' isn't perhaps the best word since the being made of atoms part is often irrelevant in Egan's work. The connotation of materialism is being made of the math that the atoms obey, without any rule-excepting magic, and Egan has that in spades when cogsci is otherwise usually the part in even otherwise hard SF where whatever magical asspull the author needs to move the plot happens.
I guess you're talking about Golem XIV? I was talking about what early MIRI was inspired by, and they talked a bunch about Vinge and pretty much nothing about Lem. And I. J. Good's 1965 Ultraintelligent Machine paper predates Golem.