Singularity & Agency

In William Gibson's new novel, Agency (Penguin Random House, 2020), repeating a long-standing habit, he drops in a little conversation that stays with you long after the book. In the following bit (p. 275), one of the two protagonists, Verity, is living in an alternative 2017, while Rainey, wife of the other protagonist, Wilf, speaks to her from 2136, and what is presumably our timeline:

    "I thought that was supposed to change everything," Verity said, "The Singularity?"

    "We were in our real singularity all along," Rainey said. "We just didn't know it."

From what Rainey said just prior to this, it maybe that the singularity began as long ago as the Industrial Revolution, but certainly by our own time. 

Nor has Verity been thinking about the Singularity in anything like the terms Rainey sees it. The one is preoccupied with her San Francisco-Silicon Valley worldview and thinks about AI and nanotechnology; the other looking back from a future that barely survived climate change and cultural breakdown, and may yet succumb, sees it very differently. 

There are different ways of looking at this. Nor am I the first to note Rainey's statement, which seems likely to become as important as Gibson's definition of cyberspace over thirty years ago, or his oft-quoted line, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." 

We live at a juncture where/when different pasts and futures compete. The Singularity is attractive to some, some kind of geek Rapture, but poisoned and dark to others. Count me among the latter.  

The idea of the Singularity made its way into popular culture as a technological singularity via mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1993. He had several views on how it might occur, but all were rooted in computing or biotech. None of them resemble anything that has really happened yet, and we may be past the point where some could occur. A lot of people still believe in a technological singularity, and it is possible that some scenario related to technology that Vinge imagined, or with other technologies that others have imagined, may come to pass. 

Gibson is hinting at a non-technological singularity (though one that produces amazing technologies simply to ensure human survival) triggered by climate change and societal breakdown. Right now, that seems a much more likely scenario, even if some aspects of his future, e.g., time travel via the internet and quantum computing, are likely impossible. Of course Gibson is not about trying to predict the future, no matter how much his fans think he is good at it, but observing the present. (His famous definition of cyberspace was based on watching kids playing video games in arcades in the 70s and early 80s.) The other thing to realize is that Gibson does not regard technology, culture, and, I think nature, separately. In his novel Spook Country he effectively killed cyberspace, with one character suggesting there is no such thing as cyberspace, "There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction." (Spook Country, 86). 

It maybe that Agency will help us reorient our ideas of the Singularity. It may be, as I wondered at the time, that we entered a singularity in the early hours of November 9, 2016. (Gibson suggests that the election of Trump and the yes vote on Brexit were critical to the development of the Jackpot, his singularity.) It may be that we entered a singularity much earlier - 1947/1948 seems a likely start date, or perhaps 1914. Of course it may be that every day is a singularity, as we have no real way of predicting what will happen, however much we believe we may. 

The truth is that we live in an era in which destabilizing the future, breaking things, and throwing up technologies, policies, and business models without any thought of consequences and larger connections is the norm. In other words, we live in an era of continuously manufactured attempts at creating a singularity. Their cumulative effect has created a singularity of considerable duration and almost certainly catastrophic consequences for most of humanity and life on earth. 

Much of Agency is about singularities, and it does revolve around both the climate/societal singularity of the Jackpot that is described by Rainey, but also around the technological singularity of an emergent and highly unorthodox AI named Eunice in an alternate timeline. As I think back on the novel's action and its climax, I have to wonder if the singularity around Eunice is about her technology, or the direction her personality takes. I do not want to give away much more about the plot, so I will leave it at that, but the other aspect of the novel is about how those involved in a singularity act and react, that is, Agency - as in in the etymological precursor of the word, agere, implying the ability to act, to move, to produce change (see https://www.etymonline.com/word/agency). 

When we think about the Singularity, it is often as something just imposed on us and inevitable in its outcome. Much depends on the behavior both of those initiating a singularity and about the behavior of those caught up in it. Many question whether we have any agency at all as individuals, or even whether the collective mass of most of humanity (as opposed to the presumed "geniuses," who often behave more like imbeciles, who supposedly will trigger the Singularity) are capable of meaningful action. That is very convenient for those who do not like to think, whether they are those in power who deceive themselves with fantasies of control, those who just want to follow those in authority or with wealth, and also to those who cater to their fantasies with conspiracies or fawning accounts of the faux-great-and-good. 

The thing with agency is not that any of us have great quantities of it. Certain positions and certainly wealth can amplify the agency of an individual a great deal, but no one has that much. Our reality is complex and chaotic. Actions do not necessarily have equal and opposite reactions, as they interact with a myriad of other actions and their consequences each second. The Butterfly Effect is real. Bifurcations are real. No one can predict which actions will push a situation past a tipping point, nor can one predict how an action will propagate over time. It is possible to trace them retrospectively, but at the time, it is impossible to know which are important and which are not. 

When I was a child, I often heard the phrase, "what's that got to do with the price of tea in china?" As it turns out, a great deal of our present world situation depends on the price of tea (and opium), in China in the late 1830s. In many ways, it spawned a singularity. The actions of the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu and the British administrator Sir Charles Elliot in 1839 and 1840, conditioned by the British market for tea and the Chinese market for opium, not only brought about the First Opium War, which neither wanted, but became drivers for the history of both countries, of international relations, and of drugs down to the present day. If you want to know about anything from current US-Chinese relations to the war in Afghanistan, to Pugs (the dogs, I mean), you have to look at the tensions between those two men, but also even minor incidents, such as brawls between British sailors and Chinese laborers. 

Gibson gives us a demonstration of agency in his new novel, of how contingent it is, even for those with a great deal of power and wealth, and how much of it may be unconscious. In doing so, he recognizes that both apparently momentous events and seeming trifles move the world. For him, agency, both of his characters in 2017 and 2136, human and not-so-human, agency and the ability to work within and on singularities, resides in relationships and trust. As we confront the seeming lack or impotence of our own agency, remembering that the powerful have less agency than they seem, and that we retain our own agency, even in the face of a singularity, is a vital point, one we must remember and use.