I’m in the home stretch on the book (yay!) and so my post will need to be short today (boo!), but I wanted to share some of my research on the book. I’ve always had a fascination with big machines, and since Feral Sapiens takes place in an asteroid mining colony, that means I get to indulge myself by digging up (yuk! yuk!) information about some of the biggest moving machines on Earth: mining machines.

I used to do engineering consulting for a mining company, and though I never got to see any of these machines up close, even from a distance, even in pictures, they inspire awe. This site, btw, is a great one-stop shopping source for the big machines and their handiwork.

The biggest moving machine is apparently this one:

And just to give you some perspective, here is a drawing of the same machine, laid out next to the Eiffel Tower:

But my favorite has to be this big, roving earth mover:

Here’s another view:

The drivers of these things told me that they don’t even feel it, when they drive over “smaller” equipment (like bulldozers and things). Never mind people. These creatures’ descendents will be planet eaters.

I was thinking about Maureen’s post about Not Science Fiction, and I really enjoy NSF. But I have to admit, well written SF about big machines and the people who live in them definitely floats my skimmer, too. I am fascinated by the tools we build, and how they come to be an extension of ourselves, in all kinds of ways. This also has to do with the concept of the Singularity… and to illustrate, let me tell you a joke.

Once, a man had a frog growing out of the top of his head. He went to the doctor, who said, “My, my, this is unusual! How did this happen?”

The frog replied, “You’ll never believe this, doc, but it started out as a wart on my ass.”

Each of us on one level is an individual, whole and complete. But in a larger sense, we exist as a member of society. That society is a system. A sort of meta-entity. All systems we build are tools. Governments are tools. Money is a tool. Resource consumption, the vehicle of capitalism, is a tool. Language is a tool. Science is a tool, as is math. Our tools extend the reach of the entity that is humanity, both physically, and in terms of our knowledge.

What the Singularity really is, at its heart, is a question: what level of complexity must our tools achieve before they become the point of the whole exercise, and we are merely a means to ends that don’t serve our best interests?

Aren’t we already in the grip of forces beyond our control? Hasn’t technology already taken us to places we could never survive without it? There are more than six billion people on this planet. Without fertilizer, fossil fuels, and big machines, we could only feed a fraction of that number. Medical advances are enabling us to live longer, healthier lives. There is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from our ability to conceptualize, build, and use tools. But there is also no doubt that our systems are straining at the seams. It’s a long way down from the heights we’ve scaled to date.

I’m not so sure, in other words, that machine self-awareness is a pre-requisite for the Singularity.