Analysis Of Charles Stross's 'Accelerando'
Discussion:
In Charles Stross’ novel ‘Accelerando’ (2005) we find the protagonist Manfred Macx allows his consciousness to be distributed and mind to be uploaded in different virtual reality environments. Here man and machine continue to exist in a mutually beneficial symbiosis and each is dependent on the other for its own realization. In an environment like this voices, sensory impressions, images, dreams, perceptions and streams of data can all be intercepted, encoded, represented and manipulated by means of machines and computational substrates. Here not only the external appendages, accessories and apparatuses have been treated as machines but the entire reality or the Universe is depicted …show more content…
Marx thought of alienation as resulting from the separation of the worker from ownership and Manfred in the novel has deliberately adopted this attitude of giving away his ownership as he believes in a radically new and completely modified version of an economic system in which technological progress will be the sole determiner and controlling force of the market and productivity. This novel also shows us that one of the most significant roles that machines will play in fortifying the Posthuman civilization in the future world will be based upon extraction of maximum amount of information from all ordinary matters and for that purpose the Posthumans will have to dismantle every object and convert every mass around them into computational substrate: “The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get …show more content…
MIT professor Seth Lloyd, in an article entitled “Computational Capacity of the Universe” ventured to calculate the computational power of the entire universe and he found that the total computing power of the entire universe starting from the occurrence of Big Bang itself is around 10^120 logical operations which can be calculated by analyzing the computing potential of quantum particles.This could either point towards the power required to create a perfect simulation of our physical universe on a quantum computer or could possibly represent the upper limit to the power of performance of our universe as a computer. This is essentially the picture of the digital universe that the Post-Singular, Post-Human novel ‘Accelerando’ endeavors to portray. In ‘The Physics of Immortality’ by Frank Tiplerthe author argues that just before the final moments when our universe will come to an end a sudden turnaround will occur in which the entire Universe will be converted into a final singularity which will generate one final burst of infinite energy and computing power with which it would be able to simulate entire history of the universe – its past, present and even the future. Thus this event dubbed as Omega Point will be able to resurrect everything from their death or the state of maximum entropy to reawaken and reconstitute every possible configuration to
In Charles Stross’ novel ‘Accelerando’ (2005) we find the protagonist Manfred Macx allows his consciousness to be distributed and mind to be uploaded in different virtual reality environments. Here man and machine continue to exist in a mutually beneficial symbiosis and each is dependent on the other for its own realization. In an environment like this voices, sensory impressions, images, dreams, perceptions and streams of data can all be intercepted, encoded, represented and manipulated by means of machines and computational substrates. Here not only the external appendages, accessories and apparatuses have been treated as machines but the entire reality or the Universe is depicted …show more content…
Marx thought of alienation as resulting from the separation of the worker from ownership and Manfred in the novel has deliberately adopted this attitude of giving away his ownership as he believes in a radically new and completely modified version of an economic system in which technological progress will be the sole determiner and controlling force of the market and productivity. This novel also shows us that one of the most significant roles that machines will play in fortifying the Posthuman civilization in the future world will be based upon extraction of maximum amount of information from all ordinary matters and for that purpose the Posthumans will have to dismantle every object and convert every mass around them into computational substrate: “The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get …show more content…
MIT professor Seth Lloyd, in an article entitled “Computational Capacity of the Universe” ventured to calculate the computational power of the entire universe and he found that the total computing power of the entire universe starting from the occurrence of Big Bang itself is around 10^120 logical operations which can be calculated by analyzing the computing potential of quantum particles.This could either point towards the power required to create a perfect simulation of our physical universe on a quantum computer or could possibly represent the upper limit to the power of performance of our universe as a computer. This is essentially the picture of the digital universe that the Post-Singular, Post-Human novel ‘Accelerando’ endeavors to portray. In ‘The Physics of Immortality’ by Frank Tiplerthe author argues that just before the final moments when our universe will come to an end a sudden turnaround will occur in which the entire Universe will be converted into a final singularity which will generate one final burst of infinite energy and computing power with which it would be able to simulate entire history of the universe – its past, present and even the future. Thus this event dubbed as Omega Point will be able to resurrect everything from their death or the state of maximum entropy to reawaken and reconstitute every possible configuration to