11:36 am - A spoiler for "Accelerando"
If you haven't read "Accelerando" this probably won't make any sense at all.
If you're part way through, don't read beyond the cut.
If you finished it and scratched your head over the ending, :
Take a deep breath: what makes you think the events described in "Accelerando" took place the way the protagonists remember them taking place?
The overt clues that all is not what it seems are strewn throughout the final two chapters. In "Elector" we see the resimulated showing up, being spewed out by the Vile Offspring, yet believing themselves to be authentic. In "Survivor" we see Aineko playing god with members of the Macx family, up to and including resimulating them -- Pamela and Manny, anyway. And note the way Manfred and Pamela's behaviour at the end is inconsistent with their relationship in "Lobsters" and "Troubadour".
The novel's unseen narrator, the character who is present in every single part of it, is Aineko. There are hints all the way back in "Lobsters" and "Troubadour" that Aineko -- or Manfred's exocortex, which amounts to much the same thing as they're both deeply intertwingled components of Manfred's online ensemble -- was intelligent before any of the humans realized it.
"Accelerando" is Aineko's autobiography -- far more than it's a generational saga of the Macx clan. Aineko is an unreliable narrator (as any AI based on a cat simulation could be expected to be), subtly self-aggrandizing at every appropriate point. The human actors, in the state they're in when we reach the end of the book, are merely mnemonic tools Aineko conjures into existence in order to tell his/her/its story. The purpose they serve is to provide a puppet-show re-enactment of significant points in Aineko's relationship with the Macx family, but in the final analysis they've been so thoroughly contaminated by Aineko's self-serving resimulation of them that we can't be sure they're true to their originals. When Aineko takes its leave of them at the end of the novel, he/she/it is actually just putting the puppets away (or giving them their own free will -- in this context, it amounts to much the same thing) once the puppet show is done.
Finally, to the extent that this is what "Survivor" is about, it should be read as a criticism of Frank Tipler's omega point hypothesis, and all other "resurrection of the nerds" scenarios that assume we're going to live forever in a simulation at the end of time -- why should the entities conducting such simulations not have agendas of their own that render the simulations unfaithful?
(Yes, I am a fan of Mamoru Oshii's Avalon. Why did you ask?)
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awake
I suspect that was the first novel to deal with that problem in a similar way. Bear's Hegira was a cop out, in making the Omega point a true physical resurrection.
Actually no, Zebrowski did it first in the closing sequences of Macrolife, where he resurrects one of the initial protagonists purely as an instantiated watcher...
The difference here is that the strongly superhuman AIs aren't the omega point -- they're just the next level up from us, and have a sufficiently strong theory of mind to simulate a human being completely (much as we can fairly accurately think our way around the outside of the mind of a cat we've lived with for a few years).
We're not terribly complex entities. It doesn't take universe-scale godlike intelligence to simulate us -- not even close.
Eliza
It's all Society Of Mind stuff. ISTR that one of Minksy's agent classes is the Modeller, which handles simulations of other entities in order to manage interactions.
Of course, our most common model (at least according to the Mind Hacks folks) is Leopard. It's yellow and black and it comes out of the trees to eat us.
I took for granted more or less from the beginning that that cat was more than it seemed.
The human actors, in the state they're in when we reach the end of the book, are merely mnemonic tools Aineko conjures into existence
This, OTOH, I didn't get when reading it. (I'm pretty clueless when it comes to humans, though, so I do tend to take characters at face value.) Accelerando is the sort of book I can't really grok on the first reading, and I suppose it's good for a re-read by now. I was more or less scratching my head over the entire book, but the ending somehow made sense to me.
I figured Aineko had tweaked Pamela, so as to give Manfred a happy ending. This, that which you just said, goes way beyond what I was thinking. Cool.
It seemed fairly clear in Elector and Survivor that there were some fishy things going on, but that by-and-large the emotional reactions of the characters were genuine, and also being genuinely reported. Certainly I regarded Pamela's reincarnation as being suspect, but everyone else (that I can recall) seemed reasonably consistent to me. (Their memories may not have been consistent, but their personalities seemed consistent.)
I tend to assume that even in a story with an unreliable narrator, that one can reliably and without too much effort figure out what the true story is. Well, "assume" is too strong a word; what I really mean is that I deliberately try to filter out stories for which this is not true, since I always find them more frustrating than enjoyable. In particular, the "everything you think you know is wrong, and we're not going to tell you what the truth is" sorts of stories drive me batshit.
In any event, I didn't have this problem with Accelerando, which either means that I sufficiently grasped the essential points, or that I interpreted the story completely differently from how you intended. :-)
But it raises another question: who is e narrating this to?
not to mention grotesquely unfounded speculation:
could it be the price of passage for entry into the intergalactic community of super-ais?
Ticket to ride
Answer: the Festival.
"Tell us something we don't know and we'll give you anything you want."
Re: Ticket to ride
I'd gathered Aineko was more important than just a cute pet from some hints you'd dropped, but the master puppeteer? Another good reason to reread Accelerando, indeed!
I tend to take stuff I read at face value whilst keeping an eye out for inconsistencies, so the whole Aineko as puppeteer did not come as a surprise. Writers are tricksy.
But it still took two reads of 'Survivor' before I was happy I 'got' it.
As to who/what Aineko is 'telling' the story to, some cool extrapolations in this thread. I wonder if there is a whole other story there, and if so, is it one we MKI humans can grok.
Dead Kittens
Bottom of pg8 (LOBSTERS) = someone mailing Manfred dead kittens. Aineko was responsible & was, even then, already sentient & absorbing kitten brains using a sleeping Manfred as surgeon?
Now my brain hurts.