Maybe I’m a fool to try, but maybe I can also turn this discussion 90 degrees and look at it from a different angle…
On my blog -- http://pj-manney.blogspot.com/ -- I talk about the issue of bilingualism (and eventual multilingualism) as pertains to futurist communication in a piece called “Are You Bilingual?” I won’t repeat the whole argument or why I believe it here. You can read it there. The gist of it is scientists/academics/H+rs/SFers/fellow travelers speak in a language that the rest of the world doesn’t understand anymore. They speak the logical, analytical, textual language of the scientific method and the structured argument. Unfortunately, it’s a dying language, born of Descartes, Bacon and Voltaire, but whose death knell was rung by Howdy Doody. Most of the First World speaks the newer, moving visual language taught to them by Howdy and the rest of the TV/movies/Internet nexus. It’s the emotional, visceral, narrative language of the video, the blog, the sound bite, the play-to-the-emotions rhetoric we are all confronted with daily. This is the language your audience speaks.
More importantly, this TV-oriented, visual language is character-based, not idea-based. The world is attracted to personalities, because we have been taught they are important by the Close Up and "Entertainment Tonight." It is the Age of Celebrity. Not the Age of Ideas. It’s why hard SF appeals to only us Enlightenment types: it’s usually idea-based, not particularly character-based and we are the few who are still think in terms of ideas.
I have read Kurzweil and Yudkowsky and all the rest. (Although I haven’t yet read Damien Broderick – but I’ve got you on the shelf, Damien – I’m going to remedy that really soon!) Only Fellow Travelers (and I consider myself one) would do likewise. This, if I am reading your original query correctly, is NOT who you are trying to address. You are trying to address everyone else. To do that, you must tell a story. Speak their language, Ben. If you cannot, find those who can. If you’re terribly clever, you can guide a small handful of those who forgot they were bilingual back to your text/graph/math-based arguments.
I guess it isn’t surprising, but given what I do for a living, I think Yudkowsky misses the point completely in “Staring into the Singularity” when he discusses the role of storytelling in communicating the Singularity or transhuman ideas. (Otherwise, I think his essay is an enthusiastic and appropriately awe-inspiring primer and should be read by anyone with an interest in the subject.) He expects fiction writers to stick to his notions of what the Singularity is, all the while saying he can’t possibly know what the Singularity is!
But most writers don’t write stories because they want to convey complex concepts accurately. They write stories to communicate about whatever they think is important at the time, and pray it will resonate with their audience. For instance, Yudkowsky singles out “Flowers for Algernon,” as not accurately describing the transhuman experience. Daniel Keyes never had that in mind in the first place. It was written for a more profound reason: to explore what it means to be human. Not transhuman. Eliezer makes a good and classic point about not making your hero so smart that you can’t think for him. That is why we hobble our creations. We keep them human, even if that means super-duper smart human. In uplifting Charlie from mentally retarded to genius, he gets to embrace his fully conscious humanity for the first time, remaining human all the while. And as in all existential experiences, it makes him both exhilarated and depressed when he realizes the complexity, temporality and unfairness of life. When he didn’t fully grasp what it meant to be human, he was much happier. Ignorance is Bliss. This story touches everyone who reads it, because it’s not about hard SF concepts. It’s about a character whose existential concerns mirror our own, whose cause we support and yet whose fate is tragic. Each of us is Charlie, no matter where we fall on the intelligence curve. I don’t know about you, but I cry every damn time I read it. (Sorry, Eliezer, but you went gunning for my favorite short story of all time and got caught in the crossfire!)
On the other hand, Charles Stross’ Accelerando stares into the Singularity with his gimlet eye and encounters the classic problem of hard SF: the ideas are brilliant, just bloody brilliant (and I will never look at lobsters the same way again), but the characterizations are thin on the ground, sacrificed on the altar of the Big Idea. And as Eliezer predicted, once the Singularity hits, all bets are off. Character itself becomes irrelevant – which is an excellent and possibly accurate point – but there was nothing left for me to hold onto, no less the Average Joe! These are fascinating thoughts for the likes of futurists and SF geeks, but not for the great mass audience. A
