Jones Beene wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "revtec" quoting A.C.C.'s 1966 letter:
There was a more conscious attempt at a Utopia in CHILDHOOD'S END - the second part. Incidentally you must also read Huxley's last novel, ISLAND(patterned to some extent on Ceylon.)
I don't believe any society can be static - certainly not for as long as I postulated in CITY! For my more recent views, see PROFILES OF THE FUTURE.
I really wrote CITY for fun, as a voyage of exploration. Any philosophy is incidental!
First Point. This may not be the first time that some book or work of art, ostensibly created for "fun," and with "philosophy" relegated to incidental, will be remembered by posterity primarily for its philosophical meaning. "Through the Looking Glass" comes to mind as another, as does "The Matrix"...
Whether ACC intended it or not, it has been suggested that the character Vanamonde in CITY foreshadowed a number of items in his later books, including some aspects of the monoliths in 2001 and (perhaps) some of the doings in Childhood's End.
It's interesting to note the difference in timelines Clarke postulated for the various intelligences. Vanamonde was on the order of billion years old at the end of the book, and was said to be still a "child". In Childhood's End, the entire race of humans reaches ... uh, puberty? whatever ... at the ripe old age of, say, a million, in round numbers.
Second Point: I think ACC was going "downhill" and at a rapid speed with "Profiles", which is scarcely worth a mention, certaninly not a read. To paraphrase one reviewer: It is confused mixture of propaganda and techno-utopianism which makes depressing reading compared to the fiction. Clarke, though, has never been afraid of sounding overly naïve when overtaken by enthusiasm for the new and unexpected. But when a distinguished and elderly futurologist says that predictions of the future are only provisional, he is almost certainly right. If he says that the opinions expressed "are not my own," he is almost certainly wrong, and if he hints that his predictions are to be taken seriously, he is almost certainly not speculating wildly enough.
Third Point: Realizing that more than a few readers of vortex probably think that I have gone way overboard with lavish aggrandizement of the "ulimate meaning" behind the X-box 360, which after all, is "only a toy"?... err, despite it being a teraflop-capable computer which will cost ~$300 for something that could easily have sold for 10,000 times more than that just seven years ago... hey I realize its limitations
But all new computer technology today is being harnessed for use as real supercomputers.
Casual lashups are the wave of the present, at least; one of the biggest bargains around is supposedly a bushel of Apples (they're quite fast, really, and easy to network). If you can't run xboxes in parallel "out of the box" you can bet the same or similar CPU will be available in a different package soon after and it will be networkable.
No, you're not going overboard. The continuing advance in computing power has passed almost anyone's ability to grasp it and there is going to be a lot more fallout than we expect in the next few years, I'm sure.
The Central Computer in CITY was, IIRC, a 1000-way parallel machine. (Or perhaps it was "thousands", not "a thousand". whatever) We've already blown 'way past that with the largest Linux clusters ... but then, it's turned out to take more raw power than anyone expected to do convincing AI. Either that, or we've just been falling down terribly on the algorithm end of things.
