BY LETTER
Benisolism
 Image from Galaxiel |
Benisol further asserted that the sine qua non of every Bridging event is an acceleration of communication, mediated by a novel technology, with the end result that a faster intelligence is brought into being. Working at this higher speed requires a leap of faith. As such, in every historical instance, the transition was led by an elite vanguard.
Benisol pointed out that the existence of such an indefinite sequence of Bridgings follows straightforwardly and logically from the fact that reaching an Omega Point of infinite intelligence in finite time requires that each new mode of intelligence to be successively faster in its operation. And she pointed out that the converse was true, too — successively faster communication modes imply a finite-time blowup. One need not even literally believe in an infinite Omega; for the purpose of guiding the visions of any serious actor, it was sufficient that one be uncertain that for a certain finite timespan well within historical memory (say, two thousand years), no finite limit on intelligence could be guaranteed to hold that long into the future. This became known as Benisol's Limiting Argument.
Writing over a thousand Earth years after several Information Age prognosticators, Benisol succeeded in "re-crediting" the ideas of Omegism among the serious and the pragmatic. The slow arrival of singularities, the fact that no infinite blowup had happened even in a millennium — none of this deterred Benisol. She boldly asserted that the log-log plots for practically any civilizational metric still identified a deep presiding force that would always maintain an indefinite potential to produce sudden leaps. The timing of Bridging transitions is necessarily unpredictable, because transitions do not necessitate any discovery of a new physical basis for communication or intelligence; the Gutenberg press, for example, made use only of well-known physical principles. Thus, she said, this fact should inspire us to believe that the things that will produce the "Next Bridging" are under our own control.
Benisol's work immediately created a sensation. The most rapid propagation came from individuals pursuing interstellar colonization, who struggled to justify their efforts in light of increasing AI influence and a slowdown in the rate of change in modosophonts' ways of living. Even interstellar expansion no longer seemed to promise transcendence; each new colony, grown based on a standard template, could be described as "just another colony", and the isolation created by sub-light communication, too, dampened any gains in understanding that were possible. Benisol equipped this community of explorers with a universal frame for judging whether their colonization efforts produced advancement — or, at least, to be able to credibly claim to their non-spacebound associates that their endeavor had value. Even the most isolated colony, according to Benisol, could pioneer ways of thought that could bridge the abyss.
Contemporary historians attribute Benisol's universal influence to her audacity in deriving the maximally powerful guiding credo from the minimal synthesis of Omegists' favored historical narratives. With her idea of there being a Next Bridging that we all await (or the Next Singularity, as the established AI-worship communities quickly translated the term to), she propagated an idea that stood the test of time, and which was to be assimilated as a universal meme.
Related Articles
Appears in Topics
Development Notes
Text by ParrotRobot
Initially published on 01 January 2025.
Initially published on 01 January 2025.
