From Charlie Stross' blog:

I'm in Munich this week, and I plan to be drinking in the Paulaner Brauhaus(Kapuzinerplatz 5, 80337 München; click here for map) from 7pm on Monday 18th. All welcome! (Yes, I will sign books if you bring them.) If in doubt, look for the plush Cthulhu!

This post spoils Greg Egan's Incandescence.

Incandescence is a success story about some people who notice an existential threat and avoid it using science and engineering.  We see them figure out how gravity works, which is more interesting than it might sound, partly because their everyday experiences are full of gravitational effects that we don't notice on Earth.  At first they do science out of pure curiosity, but it turns into an urgent collective action problem when they discover that their orbit will lead them towards all sorts of disasters, including falling into a black hole.  The solution, it turns out, is to move some dirt around.

Has anyone considered writing a success story about using Friendly AI to solve an existential threat?

I finished a novel last September, did most of the editing over Christmas, and have been procrastinating ever since. My novel has significant rationalist themes and would probably be of interest to a number of people here. Below is a plot synopsis. If you would be interesting in reading it, send me a private message with your email address and I can email you the Word file. I am still acceptiong editing suggestions.

Also, if anyone has suggestions as to where I could submit it, that would be very helpful.

Plot Synopsis: After the Flood

Ten-year-old Ash lives with a band of orphans in the flooded remains of a 21st-century city, where they live by diving for salvage in submerged buildings and trading it to adults in the mainland city. One day, when she watches a stranger attempting to climb the Wall, a mysterious and impregnable structure in the flooded city, he is injured and she saves his life. He claims that there are people living in the Wall, people who still have the knowledge and power that were lost during the long-ago flood.

Armed with her determination and cunning mind, Ash manages to break into the Wall and obtain medicine for the boy's sister, who is dying of tuberculosis. In the mainland city, however, the boy's parents are captured by the Church of Candles, which controls the city, and executed for their attempt to use the old knowledge.

Six years later, now a young adult apprenticed to a herb-woman on the outskirts of the city, Ash meets the brother and sister again and continues searching for the truth about the flood and the city's past.

From a review of Greg Egan's new book, Zendegi:

Egan has always had difficulty in portraying characters whose views he disagrees with. They always end up seeming like puppets or strawmen, pure mouthpieces for a viewpoint. And this causes trouble in another strand of Zendegi, which is a mildly satirical look at transhumanism. Now you can satirize by nastiness, or by mockery, but Egan is too nice for the former, and not accurate enough at mimicry for the latter. It ends up being a bit feeble, and the targets are not likely to be much hurt.

Who are the targets of Egan’s satire? Well, here’s one of them, appealing to Nasim to upload him:

“I’m Nate Caplan.” He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, “My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it. [...] when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution—” [...] “You can always reach me through my blog,” he panted. “Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—”

(We’re supposed, I think, to contrast Caplan’s goal of personal survival with Martin’s goal of bringing up his son.)

“Overpowering Falsehood dot com” is transparently overcomingbias.com, a blog set up by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute and Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Which is ironic, because Yudkowsky is Egan’s biggest fan: “Permutation City [...] is simply the best science-fiction book ever written” and his thoughts on transhumanism were strongly influenced by Egan: “Diaspora [...] affected my entire train of thought about the Singularity.”

Another transhumanist group is the “Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project”—the name references Yudkowsky’s idea of “Friendly AI” and the description references Yudkowsky’s argument that recursive self-optimization could rapidly propel an AI to superintelligence. From Zendegi:

“Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor, which will be armed with superior versions of all the skills the original possessed. The successor will produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Once this process is set in motion, within weeks—perhaps within hours—a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.”

Egan portrays the Bootstrap Project as a (possibly self-deluding, it’s not clear) confidence trick. The Project persuades a billionaire to donate his fortune to them in the hope that the “being of truly God-like powers” will grant him immortality come the Singularity. He dies disappointed and the Project “turn[s] five billion dollars into nothing but padded salaries and empty verbiage”.

 (Original pointer via Kobayashi; Risto Saarelma found the review. I thought this was worthy of a separate thread.)