a lefty’s log

My move deadline is swiftly approaching, and I have a scouting trip coming up in less than 72 hours, says a nag email I just received.

In honor of that, and the other draw that is keeping me from scouting via the net as I should be, I post this mini-review and reflection on a book that’s kept me up at nights (days)

Accelerando

At the suggestion of I don’t even remember what, I’ve started to read this book about a post-singularity Cosmos. What’s that? It’s hard to say exactly. Imagine a time when the gobbeldy-gook described in The Matrix is real, where nearly everyone has been cyberpunked with computer chips in their brains, off-loaded cognition, heads-up displays on their eyeglasses. Need to do some kung-fu? Sideload the kinematics in seconds and your kickin’ tail all Jet Li-style!

Add that to a ramped-up open-source movement, personalities who exist on internet servers that can be replicated like so many mp3s, and while business models are corporeal, now money is nearly worthless. Accelerando, by Charles Stross is the very definition of future-shock. It’s so dense that sometimes I can absorb it only in pieces, two or three pages at a time.

Stross must believe in some of this, for he has made the book freely available for download at his website devoted to the title via a creative commons license.

beware: heavy linkage ahead

“Unrealistic Nerdgasm!,” you exclaim? Consider these links:

1. Will robots have inalienable rights?

That’s the headline on a 21 December 2006 story from Marketplace, a business-centric newsmagazine produced by American Public Media, broadcast on many NPR radio stations. That’s right, that NPR. From the webpage’s rundown of that story:

A British government report says robots could soon be such an important part of the world’s economy that they might require political rights. Stephen Beard reports from London.

Listen to that story, it sounds as if it’s reading from the first chapter of Accelerando.

2. Another NPR link
from 23 July 2006

Technology
Man-Machine Merger Arriving Sooner Than You Think

Listen to this story… by Rick Kleffel

Weekend Edition Sunday, July 23, 2006 · The merging of man and machine has long been a vision explored in science fiction. But Rick Kleffel from member station KUSP reports that integration may arrive sooner than expected.

I caught this piece as I was driving back home from my sister’s place one day after she needed some dire help. I was captivated. The idea of singularity causing a gap between people, compared to the disconnect of generations bourne by communications acceleration was particuarly engaging. That our increased communication naturally leads to increased cooperation, so much so that we cease to be human by the level of cooperation(?) I’m mesmerised. I need to stop and think for a while. . . .

3. From a BBC link:

Processors made of plastic can revolutionize how we use paper, internet screens and even fabrics. The BBC has produced this interesting, albeit a little dry video of the prototype.


see the kernels of the idea of the heads up display on a contact lens concept in a BBC heavily-produced video piece.

The presenter admits that it’s some 20 years off, but that’s an interesting idea to come across while I’m reading this forward-flung book.

more random links about the plastic processor:

http://www.itworld.com/Tech/3494/IW001129hnplastic/pfindex.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6227455.stm

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/10/20051003_b_main.asp

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The day after I started this post on 7 Jan 2007, NPR did another piece that touched on singularity on the same program as the one I mentioned before, Weekend Edition Sunday. Talk about serendipity! This time, interviewer Rick Kleffel did a story on economic thrillers. Stross was quoted as saying “Corporations are, it can be argued, the first form of viable working artificial intelligence.” He was being interviewed about his book The Hidden Family, but he could have just as easily been talking about Accelerando.

Could he be talking about today?

There you go kids. Happy MLKJ day.

I’ve got more apartments to look at.