[Organisation][RFC] Singularity Club

[Ace Dreamer]

"The First Rule of Singularity Club, is that you don't talk about Singularity Club."

Sounds like an insider joke of the Hacker Underspace to keep normal people (and AIs) on their toes.

"Fight Club" bad joke...

Singularity Club, if it did exist, would be concerned with
existential threats to Fenspace, and all known sentient beings. The
headline threat is a runaway Singularity, which if it can occur, almost
certainly, sooner or later, will do so. Singularity Club might be
enthusiastic about the 'later' option.

There are some incredibly powerful AIs in Fenspace. You'd expect them
to be more involved in things, seeing as they think orders of magnitude
faster than humans. And humans, they manage to get their fingers in
everything, even running "Plains Ape 1.0". Do AIs ever seem distracted?
Are they just playing an AI-speed MMORPG? Singularity Club might be
one answer.

Not sure what a club of people (with maybe a few AIs) could do...

The 'Club' bit is partly to get people to take it less seriously, if they just hear the name.  And, it is an organisation of AIs, mostly ones with permanent high-grade comms connections, with a few non-AIs in the core.
As to what they can do, civilizations run on information, and what people have done after thinking about that info.  AIs have plenty of time to think, and once you know what's going on you can take precisely directed action to 'fix' things.

So, this might be one reason why nanotech is taking so long
to arrive in Fenspace. This might be one reason superintelligent AIs
just seem to think like humans, only faster.

Are you talking about some "creators of Handwavium" style of thing?

No, this is people wondering about cause and effect.

META: Emily was one early AI, with at least superhuman
intelligence, and potentially access to as much processing power as she
wanted, and could find power supply and cooling for (without advancing
Global Warming too much). She was tasked to "fix the world", and a
basic part of her nature is to fix things for people which are broken.
She was also tied into the virtual world via "TRON", which is an
abbreviation for the command "Trace On", implying an imperative to find
out what was wrong there. Emily hasn't surfaced in the early history of
the Hacker Underspace – what might she have been doing with her time?

Not sure how this mix with the story above.

This is one example AI, created early on, see Bootstrap 1 and Sepia.

This
is a biggy. Nothing visible on the surface, maybe a lot of paddling
below the waterline. Lots of AIs across Fenspace could be involved in
this.

There might not be any storylines in this, though there could be. If
this works no one human is likely to notice anything happening.

AIs in Fenspace are similar to people... so involving a lot of them
makes it very likely that "Singularity Club secret plan 101" gets
uploaded to some newsgroups pretty quickly.

It's been made clear, in a number of cases, that AIs have plenty of time to think.  If you know that talking about something is very likely to help end the fun that is Fenspace, you are likely to be cautious.  Singularity Club might be a bit short on any plans, except "try and make the Singularity later, not sooner", and similar for other extinction level possibilities.  Of course there will be stuff posted, but, is it anything but conspiracy theory?

But, I'm not sure, is this organisation in the spirit of the meta purpose of Fenspace?

(i.e. to write certain sorts of stories)

There might be a space for an organization like this, its just a question if they have any real influence or not.

Or, might they have too much influence? [grin]

Singularity Club could get quite upset if there was a group actually directly aiming for an early Singularity.

At least one (series of?) singularities already happened in Fenspace.

Singularity is capitalised.  You might know, on a meta level, that the writings on Fenspace have a techno-utopian bias.  The characters in the Fenspace stories don't.  The "Fenspace Infinities" story Archimedes Lever, about a Nanoclasm, that's a 'Singularity'.

Whether there are any AIs in it, for one thing.

Okay, this gets strange... in the first post you say that the humans
would most likely not notice anything happening? And now that maybe
there are no AIs involved?

My bad.  Context.  I should have quoted Dartz preceding post.
The "Singularity later" faction is definitely (if not mostly) AI, I was inquiring about the "Singularity sooner" faction.
That said, I don't know "Eclipse Phase" (I have its wiki page open in a tab), but there is a lot of science fiction last fifteen years on this subject.
You don't build a 'firewall', you look for trends, academic publications, resources going to certain places; "follow the money" can be a very instructive activity.  The Hacker Underspace do all this to hamper Boskone - might this be done to slow the Singularity?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the AIs have had to swat a rogue AI or two, trying to hack the interweave, or going for a Singularity take-off.  But, this sort of story likely wouldn't have much human involvement, and, Fenspace is (mostly) about stories about humans.
So, part of the idea is that the AIs might internally self-police.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind