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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110502030910/http://www.urbanatomy.com:80/index.php/article/detail/414/implosion Home Guidebooks Shopping Classifieds Sign Up Login Shanghai | PRD | Beijing Article News & Features Bars & Clubs Restaurants Life & Style Arts & Culture Events YCIS Home » News & Features » Urban Future (Blog) » Detail Implosion Video City Beat by nickland @ Friday, 29 April 2011 16:23 City Beat Local Blogs We could be on the brink of a catastrophic implosion – but that’s OK Science fiction has tended to extroversion. In America especially, where it found a natural home among an unusually future-oriented people, the iconic SF object was indisputably the space ship, departing the confines of Earth for untrammeled frontiers. The future was measured by the weakening of the terrestrial gravity well. Cyberpunk, arriving in the mid-1980s, delivered a cultural shock. William Gibson’s Neuromancer still included some (Earth-orbital) space activity – and even a communication from Alpha Centauri -- but its voyages now curved into the inner space of computer systems, projected through the starless tracts of Cyberspace. Interstellar communication bypassed biological species, and took place between planetary artificial intelligences. The United States of America seemed to have disappeared. Space and time had collapsed, into the ‘cyberspace matrix’ and the near-future. Even the abstract distances of social utopianism had been incinerated in the processing cores of micro-electronics. Judged by the criteria of mainstream science fiction, everything cyberpunk touched upon was gratingly close, and still closing in. The future had become imminent, and skin-tight. Gibson’s cities had not kept up with his wider – or narrower – vision. The urban spaces of his East Coast North America were still described as ‘The Sprawl’, as if stranded in a rapidly-obsolescing state of extension. The crushing forces of technological compression had leapt beyond social geography, sucking all historical animation from the decaying husks of ‘meat space’. Buildings were relics, bypassed by the leading edge of change. (Gibson’s Asian city-references are, however, far more intense, inspired by such innovations in urban compression as the Kowloon Walled City, and Japanese ‘coffin hotels’. In addition, Urbanists disappointed by first-wave cyberpunk have every reason to continue on into Spook Country, where the influence of GPS-technology on the re-animation of urban space nourishes highly fertile speculations.) Star cruisers and alien civilizations belong to the same science fiction constellation, brought together by the assumption of expansionism. Just as, in the realm of fiction, this ‘space opera’ future collapsed into cyberpunk, in (more or less) mainstream science – Schoolboys Cross-Dress For Girls’ Student slapped by teacher Smart Car: Kobe Bryant Is “Big, In Fool's gold: Why Youku is a sell Chinese scientists discover way to

represented by SETI programs – it perished in the desert of the Fermi Paradox. (OK, it’s true, Urban nerdish obsession with this topic.) John M. Smart’s solution to the Fermi Paradox is integral to his broader ‘Speculations on Cosmic C from compressive development. Advanced intelligences do not expand into space, colonizing vast g self-replicating robot probes in a program of exploration. Instead, they implode, in a process of ‘t themselves primarily through the hyper-exponential efficiency gains of extreme miniaturization (t femto-scale engineering, of subatomic functional components). Such cultures or civilizations, nuc technological intelligence, emigrate from the extensive universe in the direction of abysmal inten near-black-hole densities at the edge of physical possibility. Through transcension, they withdraw communication (whilst, perhaps, leaving ‘radio fossils’ behind, before these blink-out into the sile If Smart’s speculations capture the basic outlines of a density-attracted developmental system, th to follow a comparable path, characterized by an escape into inwardness, an interior voyage, invo Approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city becomes increasingly inwardly dir irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic intensification, whilst the outside world fades to irrelev into cities, on a path of departure from the world. Their destination cannot be described within th and, indeed, tediously over-familiar – universe. Only in the deep exploratory interior is innovation takes place at an infernal, time-melting rate. What might Smart-type urban development suggest? (a) Devo Predictability. If urban development is neither randomly generated by internal processes external decisions, but rather guided predominantly by a developmental attractor (defined primar follows that the future of cities is at least partially autonomous in regards to the national-political cultural-architectural influences that are often invoked as fundamentally explanatory. Urbanism ca but its principal ‘goals’ and practical development paths are, in each individual case, internally an When a city ‘works’ it is not because it conforms to an external, debatable ideal, but rather becau cumulative intensification that strongly projects its ‘own’, singular and intrinsic, urban character. become itself, but more -- taking itself further and faster. That alone is urban flourishing, and und unlocks the shape of any city’s future. (b) Metropolitanism. Methodological nationalism has been systematically over-emphasized in the at the expense of methodological individualism). A variety of influential urban thinkers, from Jane sought to correct this bias by focusing upon the significance, and partial autonomy, of urban eco municipal politics to aggregate prosperity, civilization, and golden ages. They have been right to socio-historical phenomenon. (c) Cultural Introversion. John Smart argues that an intelligence undergoing advanced relativistic d landscape increasingly uninformative and non-absorbing. The search for cognitive stimulation dra cultures evolve, through accelerating social complexity, they can be expected to manifest exactly processes, of runaway intelligence implosion, become ever more gripping, engaging, surprising, whilst the wider cultural landscape subsides into predictable tedium, of merely ethnographic and singularity becomes increasingly urban-futural (rather than ethno-historical), to the predictable di nation states. Like Gibson’s Terrestrial Cyberspace, encountering another of its kind in orbit arou cosmopolitan connectivity is made through inner voyage, rather than expansionary outreach. (d) Scale Resonance. At the most abstract level, the relation between urbanism and microelectron coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by traffic prob / communications, zoning issues (mixed use), the engineering potential of new materials, questio solutions to density constraints), entropy or heat / waste dissipation (recycling / reversible compu (new viruses). Because cities, like computers, exhibit (accelerating phylogenetic) development wit they provide a realistic model of improvement for compact information-processing machinery, se practical solutions to the problem of relentless intensification. Brain-emulation might be consider computational goal, but it is near-useless as a developmental model. Intelligent microelectronic te open-ended process of urban problem-solving, but they also recapitulate it at a new level. (e) Urban Matrix. Does urban development exhibit the real embryogenesis of artificial intelligence Internet, military Skynet, or lab-based AI program, is it the path of the city, based on accelerating compression), that best provides the conditions for emergent super-human computation? Perhaps so is that the problem of the city – density management and accentuation – already commits it to

advance of any deliberately guided research. The city, by its very nature, compresses, or intensifie When the first AI speaks, it might be in the name of the city that it identifies as its body, although more than a ‘radio fossil’ -- a signal announcing the brink of silence -- as the path of implosion de the alien interior. Comments Leave a Comment

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