/lit/ - Literature

>>11206486
an insanely interesting question. i have no neat and tidy answers for this but only some thoughts of my own.

i mean in one sense we don't. here is land waxing poetic on this subject:

>A ‘city of the future’ is Gibsonian in precisely this sense. That is nothing new, nor could it be. It has always leaked back, in coincidence with modernity. Tomorrow is a social magnet, as has been known for some considerable time, at first merely reflectively, but ever increasingly as a techno-responsive object.

>Civilization is an accelerating process, not a steady state. As its name suggests, it is channeled primarily through cities (which explode). The incandescent intensity of a hypergrowth-dominated urban future consumes our historical horizon , and an exceptionally impressive perspective on this developing spectacle is to be found in 21st century Shanghai – a fact Hollywood has no real choice but to relay.

the thing is that the singularity may not be really be singular. and there's a question here about where these cities are located and what the people therein desire these things for. historically speaking, modernity doesn't happen all at once, nor does it actually manifest in every nation in the same way, or at the same times. something similar may be observable through the 21C and beyond. depending on where you want to begin your analysis, capitalism may well begin with medieval guilds, with Serious Globalization being the (mainly occidental) phenomenon that it is in the 15/16C. cybermodernity may unfold in the same way. the fact that this time around, both China and the US are equally competitive players also complicates things.

so God-AI is going to be iterative (obviously) and its godliness probably still only relative. what land complains about is capitalism as *underdeveloped* schizophrenia: god in this sense is being held down by his disciples. Absolute or Essential Modernity doesn't really exist, potentially any more than Absolute/God-AI. it is unlikely that any sovereign power in the world would ever willingly allow a God-AI to manifest if it was a threat to national security, but this is what cyberpunk hints at: an urban metastasization of cyborg intelligence by way of robotics and algorithms. it may not even be a self-aware Wintermute or Lawnmower Man. i don't have too much trouble imagining a kind of semisentient corporation, really. a thing that dances to the beat of its own drum that in the end is a kind of life that simply Is, in a kind of eerie and hermetic silence.

but these are just my own thoughts. we really have no idea how this is going to play out. it's just too fucking interesting not to think about tho.