Orion’s Arm looks a little complex for me to digest this morning, but I’m always happy to learn about odd stuff on the internet. Man, I really love the internet.

This isn’t a problem to which there’s any easy solution, in the short term. Long-term (well, as long-term as any discussion of the Singularity can really be), I can see two ways in which serious issues of social cohesion might be avoided. One is through network effects: it could be that the Wilburian oversoul grows out of the networked sum of all mechanical and biological compution, such that entities at every level are direct participants. Another would be through the ability of entities to move through sophic levels: a human might upgrade his mind through chemical or computation intelligence augmentation, then upload to a computer, then further amplify his cognitive power through expansion inside the artificial substrate. In this model, the post-human entities at the top end would view the swarm of lesser entities at the lower as being akin to their children (or perhaps zygotes would be a better analogy), thus encouraging a more or less benevolent outlook.

For a science-fictional outlook on how this might play out, check out Orion’s Arm, a collaborative world-building project where the world has become so ridiculously overgrown that any possibility of decent fiction growing out of it is completely eclipsed (which I’m cool with, actually. In this case, the world itself is the art-work.)

http://www.orionsarm.com/