by cameron | Aug 13, 2006 | singularity, Uncategorized
I can’t remember who or when, but sometime in the last year someone (to whom I am extremely grateful) recommended to me this 1994 book by Roger Williams: "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect". Yesterday I was sitting in the kid’s piano lesson, scrolling through the hundreds of ebooks on my PDA, looking for something to pass away the time, and discovered it. I started reading and I was BLOWN. AWAY. This is without a doubt the best post-singularity fiction book I have ever read. Sorry Cory – it’s even better than "Down And Out".
"Metamorphosis" deals with the ramifications of a superpowerful computer that can alter reality after a technological singularity as well as how the descendants of post-singularity humanity deal with the boredom that would come with being able to manipulate the universe at will. Brilliant, totally freaking brilliant.
Thank you, Long Tail, for making this book available.
By the way, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m also reading Chris Anderson’s "The Long Tail" and it’s also brilliant. I’m continually being struck with how well Chris is able to articulate concepts I’ve been trying to convey in my own muddled way for the last couple of years. I guess being a trained journalist has benefits after all. 🙂
Almost every paragraph in Long Tail is a quote you want to be able to recite. If I was still using highlighters, I know this is one of those books that would have more highlighted space than white.
by cameron | May 19, 2006 | Melbourne, Podcast, singularity
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by cameron | Nov 3, 2005 | Podcast, singularity, US politics
Another BIG interview today with one of my top ten list – Ray Kurzweil.
I’ve been reading Ray’s books and articles on the the future of artificial intelligence and health for years and I’m convinced he’s on the money on both subjects. If you want to get a glimpse of what is likely to happen to human civilization in the next 30 years, you need to listen to this show.
But don’t just take my word on it.
On the back of his latest book, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: When Humans Transcend Biology, there is this quote from Bill Gates: ”Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”
So who is Ray Kurzweil?
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray’s Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
I got an enormous kick out of doing this show and I hope you enjoy it.
