Yes, I begin my Real Drive career with a graceless Contact reference. Push past the predictability: it’s perfect for the scene pictured above, and the show in general (based on the first episode).

My friend OGT, whom you probably know, lured me into this here anime-blogging bit (simply by making entertaining posts), and I bring him up at this point because his post about Real Drive is what got me to check out the first episode. I’m glad I did, and I was just a little surprised — he’s not generally a fan of cyberpunk. OGT, correct me if I’m wrong, definitely.

And yes, I would absolutely classify this (again, based on the first episode) as cyberpunk. They’re going around digitizing people’s brains; apparently it’s become so important that they did it to a comatose man without his consent, though perhaps he still had some family around then. Or, more probably, his friend told them to do it.

Warning: I’m still at the point where I can’t remember the characters’ names. So, vague descriptions may crop up. Now you know.

What I’m liking about this iteration of my favorite Gibson (and/or Sterling) -spawned genre is that it seems to be dealing with the effects of cyberization and (possibly) post-Singularity life on the environment.

Just in case you don’t know, let me go into the Singularity and all that stuff. I find it fascinating. Moore’s Law states that technology improves at an exponential rate.

I have no idea what this graph is for, but it’s a positive exponential curve. Moore claims that the speed and efficiency of technology improves, and will continue to improve, along that kind of line. The Singularity is one of the names for the eventual vertical curve of the graph. Eventually every basic exponential line will curve into a straight line, essentially going higher and higher without any time (in our case) passing. Infinite technological growth with no time involved. The practical explanation is that our technology will improve, and we will use that technology to take the next step up the graph. We never start from the ground floor.

This has some obvious and not-so-obvious repercussions. A lot of people believe that one of the keys to the Singularity will be intelligent AI. They will effectively start to design better technology, as they’ll be more capable of design than humans are.

Note — whether you believe this will happen or not isn’t important; it’s a popular idea in sci-fi.

Anyway. Nanotechnology and the like are all considered “post-singularity” tech. That is, designers will actually have to be better than they are now, through technological means, to design functioning nanotechnology. At least, they will need to be if they are to design the stuff we pine for, like houses that build themselves.

Another facet of folks who are into the Singularity is “post-humanism.” They claim that the next evolutionary step for humanity will be technologically driven. We will improve ourselves. That’s an even more common cyberpunk element, with digital brains, cybernetic body parts, et cetera. And post-humanists advocate improvement without disaster. We’re running into problems where people with prosthetics are beginning to be called “more than human.” With post-singularity technology, we could all improve ourselves in safety, as there would be no risk in the procedures, as medical technology will benefit from the upward end of the exponential curve just like everything else.

And so some people think the singularity also holds the answers to environmental issues, especially pollution and climate. Filling our oceans and atmosphere with nanobots that eat pollution and crap water would fix everything, they claim. And, well, yes — it would fix things. The problem isn’t necessarily the technology, but the timeframe. As Karl Schroeder explains far better than I can, the Singularity must have a certain amount of time, or a run-up if you will, and Earth will crap out before then.

Hopefully the connections to Real Drive are reasonably clear, and you’re not just angry at me for dragging you around for no reason. That’s assuming you’re still reading.

Real Drive appears to be in the setting of a typical post-singularity world, possibly with some mystical earth-force involved. Our characters may simply be personifying nature, which is common enough. Either way, we’re dealing with the problems of technology exacerbated by the Singularity. The technology seems to be screwing with nature more, not less. The show also points out an interesting point about tech. reliance: when your infrastructure can be screwed with by bad weather or something, you should build some fucking redundancies.