Charles Stross: Accelerando (2005)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · artificial intelligence, biotechnology, posthuman, science fiction, technological singularity, technology
“The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.
For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form…”
Publisher Ace Books, New York, July 2005 / Orbit Books, London, August 2005
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
ISBN 0441012841 / 1841493902
390 pages
Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · critique, culture, filesharing, free culture, internet, intersubjectivity, open source, self, software, subjectivity, technological singularity, technology, web 2.0
“Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.
The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.
Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.”
Publisher Knopf, 2010
ISBN 0307269647, 9780307269645
224 pages
Reviews: Adam Thierer (Technology Liberation Front, 2010), Clive Thompson (Bookforum, 2010).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-4-3)
EPUB, EPUB (added on 2012-7-15, updated on 2019-4-3)
James Gardner: The Intelligent Universe. AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · big bang, cosmos, emergence, genetic programming, quantum computing, technological singularity, technology
What is the ultimate destiny of our universe? That is the striking question addressed by James Gardner in The Intelligent Universe.
Traditionally, scientists (and Robert Frost) have offered two bleak answers to this profound issue: fire or ice.
The cosmos might end in fire—a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and life forms are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang in reverse.
Or the universe might end in ice—a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of space-time in which matter and energy are eternally diluted and cooled; stars wither and die , and the cosmos simply fades into quiet and endless oblivion.
In The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner envisions a third dramatic alternative—a final state of the cosmos in which a highly evolved form of group intelligence engineers a cosmic renewal, the birth of a new universe.
Gardner’s vision is that life and intelligence are at the very heart of the elegant machinery of the universe. It is a viewpoint that has won outspoken praise from an array of leading scientists, including Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, and Templeton Prize winner Paul Davies.
The Intelligent Universe is both a look into the past and a road map for the future of the universe. It explores the mysteries of the universe and of consciousness, and provides a frank and fascinating look at where our minds are taking us.
Publisher Career Press, 2007
ISBN 1564149196, 9781564149190
Length 269 pages