Fantastic Troubles - Music to Fantasize About Singularity To

1st November 2010

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Music to Fantasize About Singularity To

Here is a compilation of songs about being in love with your computer. I hope you and your special droid-one enjoy it together.

I was talking about the possibility of staying in love with one person for a long time, because it was Halloween & time to get spooky. It does seem an unlikely enterprise, but fortunately for me I have a strong capacity for seamless self-delusion, and a strong track record for listening to Wuthering Heights over and over again until I’m delirious and making really big steps around my apartment accompanied by extreme hand gestures. In other words, permanent affection is a fantastical notion I enjoy believing in almost as much as the notion of that dog from The Neverending Story being real and mine.

One argument proffered by my conversational partner was the imminent arrival of singularity, which, while a dirty move in debate protocol, was a compelling point. After all, isn’t what we really want an oceanic experience of complete integration with the Other? Isn’t that where most of the brutality associated with love comes out, when we realize that there is a fundamental division between our cognitive realities which will never allow for a fully shared experience?

Think about having an A.I. SigOth: not only would they possess an infinite knowledge of your cognitive reality, but they’d probably understand it better than you could yourself. And we all know how good the sex would be, like in Sleeper, or Holy Mountain. I know I’m not the first one to point out that our relationships with our A.I. devices have become paramount to our emotional states, and I found some songs to prove it.