Within the genre of “science fiction” there are two main camps: hard and soft. Hard science fiction is based upon quantifiable accuracy instead of hocus-pocus; it is seen in the novels of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov.
A friend of mine pointed to a novel dealing with the technological singularity from a hard science perspective. It’s called Accelerando and was written by a computer nerd, Charles Stross.
If you can get through the superfluous waxing of economic systems and philosophies, which is imaginative — though the author seems to have some kind of BDSM fetish — the first part of the book takes place in the very near future (around 2010) in a pre-Singularity world.
Stross discusses a number of interesting phenomenon that deserve some additional commentary (note, it helps to be a geek to understand alot of the lingo, like being slashdotted, WiMAX, etc.).
Here are a few paragraphs I will discuss at a later time:
“NASA are idots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligarm. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshaka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of soalr systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!” (p. 6)
“Resource allocation isn’t a problem anymore — it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter — MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared — suspicisouly high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?” (p. 7)
“He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat generated by irreversible computational processes back during the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there’s the weirdness beyond M31: According to more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardasheve Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel atack on the computation ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever’s underneath.” (p. 9)
“The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10^27 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added tot he solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold — one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity — a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaingin before the intelligence spike is down to the single-digit years…” (p. 15)