Peter Watts, Blindsight (Tor Books, 2006).

A quote from Blindsight:

I am the curtain…
I’m not an entirely new breed
my roots reach back to the dawn of civilization
but those precursors served a different function
a less honorable one
they only greased the wheels of social stability
they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths
or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience
they were vital enough in their way
Not even the most heavily armed police state
can exert brute force on all its citizens all of the time
meme management is so much subtler
the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality
the contagious fear of threatening alternatives
There’ve always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies,
but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity
the new millennium changed all that
we’ve surpassed ourselves now
we’re exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding
sometimes its contours even in conventional space are just too intricate for our brains to track
other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable for minds built for fucking and fighting on some prehistoric grassland
so many things constrain us from so many directions.
the most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest
subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world but none can explain it
after four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer
we have such need of intellects greater than our own
but we’re not very good at building them
the forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle
our hybrids become as brilliant as savants and as autistic
we graft people to prosthetics and make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and tongues stutter
computers bootstrap their own offspring
grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiques assume the hallmarks of dementia
unfocused and irrelevant to the barely intelligent creatures left behind
and when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers
you have to take their word on faith
or…
you use information theory to flatten it for you
to squash the tesseract into two dimensions
and the Klein bottle into three
to simplify reality and pray to the gods of whatever survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons
you hire people like me, the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists
in formal settings you’d call me a synthesist
on the street you’d call me jargonaut or poppy
if you’re one of the savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized or lobotomized by powerful know-nothings interested in only market share
you might call me a mole, or a chaperone
…
I’ve never convinced myself that we made the right choice
I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep
talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information
and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension
but after all the words,
I’m still not sure,
I don’t know if anyone else is either
maybe it’s just some grand consensual con
marks and players all in league
we won’t admit that our creations are beyond us
they may speak in tongues but our priests can read those signs
Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it’s just li’l ol’ me bringing the tablets down to the masses
and I don’t threaten anyone
maybe the Singularity happened years ago, we just don’t want to admit we were left behind.