Optimism

Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life.  The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966. Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger. He enjoys his work, but he’s 31 and restless. He finds himself casting a speculative eye at the café on the corner, shabby and abandoned, ivy climbing up the wall. His landlady, a war widow, encourages him: ‘You always need a bit more hope than worries.

In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely mimic real instruments. His mission crystallised into making Vinge’s conceit a reality. He is principal researcher and ‘AI visionary’ at Google – and principal proselytiser, too, through any number of portentously titled books. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) set out his stall; The Singularity is Near (2005) staked a claim for human-level intelligence in computers by 2029 and a generalised apotheosis in 2045.