Vernor Vinge

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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Kandebo, “Navy to Evaluate Agile Eye Helmet-Mounted Display System,” Aviation Week & Space Technology 128, no. 7 (August 15, 1988): 94. 29.Furness and Kocian, “Putting Humans into Virtual Space.” 30.Thomas A. Furness, “Fantastic Voyage,” Popular Mechanics 162, no. 12 (December 1986): 63. 31.Thomas A. Furness, “Harnessing Virtual Space,” Digest of Technical Papers (SID International Symposium), 1988, 4–7. 32.Ibid. 33.Vernor Vinge, True Names, in Binary Star #5, ed. George R. R. Martin and Vernor Vinge (New York: Dell, 1981). 34.James Frenkel and Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (New York: Tor, 2001). 35.Vinge, True Names, 250. 36.Ibid. 37.Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, “The 1983 Nuclear Crisis,” Journal of Strategic Studies 36, no. 1 (2013): 4–41. 38.One science fiction novel that is sometimes credited with articulating cyberspace as the “Metaverse” is Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992). 39.William Gibson, “Cyberpunk Era,” Whole Earth Review 63 (Summer 1989): 80. 40.

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Bart Preneel, René Govaerts, and Joos Vandewalle, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 741 (Berlin: Springer, 1993), 174, 177. 18.Levy, Crypto, 213. 19.Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets (New York: Dutton, 2012), 55–56. 20.Ibid., 56. 21.Vernor Vinge, True Names, in Binary Star #5, ed. George R. R. Martin and Vernor Vinge (New York: Dell, 1981), 35. 22.Timothy May, interview by the author, April 17, 2014. 23.Ibid. 24.Timothy C. May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy,” in True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel and Vernor Vinge (New York: Tor, 2001), 83. 25.Ibid. 26.Timothy C. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” e-mail to cypherpunks@toad.com, November 22, 1992.

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One of the prime meeting places for science and science fiction at the time was Omni magazine. Founded by Bob Guccione, who also started Penthouse magazine, it was published in print between 1978 and 1995. Many futuristic ideas were either born or buried in Omni’s brightly illustrated pages. One example was science fiction writer Vernor Vinge’s word “singularity.” Having read Good, Vinge chose to describe the British scientist’s intelligence explosion as a “singularity,” the expected future moment when machines would overtake humans in their intellectual capacities.88 Vinge, himself an unsuccessful scientist at San Diego State University but a quite successful science fiction writer, compared that moment to a black hole: “When this happens,” he wrote in Omni in early 1983, “human history will have reached a transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”89 Meanwhile, a student in Germany was occupied with similar thoughts.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge by Vernor Vinge

anthropic principle, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, dematerialisation, gravity well, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, low earth orbit, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, MITM: man-in-the-middle, source of truth, technological singularity, unbiased observer, Vernor Vinge

“Conquest by Default” Copyright © 1968 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “The Whirligig of Time” Copyright © 1974 by Random House, Inc. First published in Stellar One, Ballantine Books. “Bomb Scare” Copyright © 1970 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “The Science Fair” Copyright © 1971 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Orbit 9, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. “Gemstone” Copyright © 1983 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “Just Peace” Copyright © 1971 by Vernor Vinge and William Rupp. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact.

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First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “Original Sin” Copyright © 1972 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “The Blabber” Copyright © 1988 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Threats … and Other Promises, Baen Books. “Win a Nobel Prize!” Copyright © 2000 by Nature Publishing Group. This article was first published in Nature. “The Barbarian Princess” Copyright © 1986 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact. Fast Times at Fairmont High Copyright © 2001 by Vernor Vinge. Vernor Vinge’s commentary on a number of stories which appeared in the Baen Books collections True Names … and Other Dangers and Threats … and Other Promises appeared in substantially similar form in those collections.

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Copyright Acknowledgments “Bookworm, Run!” Copyright © 1966 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “The Accomplice” Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Worlds of If Science Fiction. “The Peddler’s Apprentice” Copyright © 1975 by Joan D. Vinge and Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “The Ungoverned” Copyright © 1985 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Far Frontiers, Baen Books. “Long Shot” Copyright © 1972 by Vernor Vinge. First published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. “Apartness” Copyright © 1965 by New Worlds SF.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

In fact, the competitive advantage—economic, military, even artistic—of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will. —Vernor Vinge, The Coming Technological Singularity, 1993 This quotation sounds like a fleshed-out version of I. J. Good’s biographical aside, doesn’t it? Like Good, two-time Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and mathematics professor Vernor Vinge alludes to humans’ lemminglike predilection to chase glory into the cannon’s mouth, to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase. Vinge told me he’d never read Good’s self-penned biographical paragraphs, or learned about his late-in-life change of heart about the intelligence explosion.

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Vinge told me he’d never read Good’s self-penned biographical paragraphs, or learned about his late-in-life change of heart about the intelligence explosion. Probably only Good, and Leslie Pendleton, knew about it. Vernor Vinge was the first person to formally use the word “singularity” when describing the technological future—he did it in a 1993 address to NASA, entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam reported that he and polymath John von Neumann had used “singularity” in a conversation about technological change thirty-five years earlier, in 1958. But Vinge’s coinage was public, deliberate, and set the singularity ball rolling into the hands of Ray Kurzweil and what is today a Singularity movement.

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Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. AI researcher Ben Goertzel told me, “Vernor Vinge saw its inherent unknowability very clearly when he posited the notion of the technological singularity. It’s because of that that he doesn’t go around giving speeches about it because he doesn’t know what to say. What’s he going to say? ‘Yeah I think we’re going to create technologies that will be much more capable than humans and then who knows what will happen?’”

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Technological advance may come in fits and starts, eventually leading to a posthuman condition, but without any singular event. Part VIII clarifies and critically examines thinking about the singularity, starting with Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay. Anders Sandberg analyzes models of technological singularity in detail, looking for their commonalities and differences. The final essay in Part VIII collects the 1998 deliberations of a number of transhumanist thinkers to critically discuss the singularity, as ­initially defined by Vinge, in its technological and economic aspects. 35 Technological Singularity Vernor Vinge I. What is the Singularity? The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.

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Vinge, Vernor (1981) “True Names.” In Binary Star 5. New York: Dell. Vinge, Vernor (1983) “First Word.” Omni 10 (January). Earlier essay on “the Singularity.” “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” by Vernor Vinge, was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. Copyright © Vernor Vinge 1993. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html 36 An Overview of Models of Technological Singularity Anders Sandberg This essay reviews different definitions and models of technological singularity.

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Miller, Norman Hardy, and Christopher T. Hibbert “Diverse goods arbitration system and method for allocation resources in a distributed computer system” (Sun Microsystems, 1997); and with Norman Hardy, Linda L. Vetter “System and method for generating unique secure values for digitally signing documents” (2000). Vernor Vinge, PhD, is former Professor of Mathematics, University of California San Diego. He authored A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor, 1993, 2011); “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (Whole Earth Review, 1993); and True Names … and Other Dangers (Baen Book, 1987). Natasha Vita-More, PhD, is Professor of Design University of Advancing Technology, ­co-founder, Institute for Transhumanism, chairman of Humanity+, and co-editor of The Transhumanist Reader.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

The beyond-dense anomaly in the center of the black hole is called a singularity. “At this singularity,” writes the Cambridge mathematician Stephen Hawking, “the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.” The man who applied this metaphor to human events is the science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. His 1991 novel Across Realtime joins three stories he wrote in the mid 1980s around a central mystery: What happened to everybody? While the characters in the stories were temporarily isolated out of time in devices called bobbles, civilization and the rest of humanity disappeared from Earth.

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One such man, Ken McVay, undermined all the online Holocaust-denying discussion groups in this fashion, connecting them to a linked distributed archive of documentation proving that the Holocaust indeed took place. Metcalfe’s Law of exponential growth of the Net is proving to be even more significant than Moore’s Law of exponential growth of microchip capability. The chip is an individual’s tool; the Net is society’s tool. It may even become its own tool. As the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge has suggested, the Net is supplied with so much computer power and is gaining so much massively parallel amplification of that power by its burgeoning connectivity that it might one day “wake up.” Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, asks, “What happens when the library of human knowledge can process what it knows and provide advice?”

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The nanotechnology futurist Eric Drexler concurs: “I have found over the years that people familiar with the science fiction classics find it much easier to think about the future, coming technologies, political effects of those technologies, and so on.” At Global Business Network (GBN), the scenario-planning business that employs me, we frequently send out science-fiction books to the Network membership, and when we can get writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, David Brin, and Vernor Vinge to attend scenario work-shops with client organizations, the quality of work deepens. Scenario planning involves exploring several widely variant futures of an organization’s world persuasively in depth. Skill in science fiction adds to the depth. Still, the most important developments in the future, says Freeman Dyson, keep being missed by both the forecasters and the storytellers: “Economic forecasting misses the real future because it has too short a range; fiction misses the future because it has too little imagination.”

Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge

Asilomar, Vernor Vinge

Fast Times at Fairmont High Vernor Vinge Vernor Vinge Fast Times at Fairmont High Juan kept the little blue pills in an unseen corner of his bedroom. They really were tiny, the custom creation of a lab that saw no need for inert fillers, or handsome packaging. And Juan was pretty sure they were blue, except that as a matter of principle he tried not to look at them, even when he was off-line. Just one pill a week gave him the edge he needed.... * * * Final exam week was always chaos at Fairmont Junior High. The school's motto was "Trying hard not to become obsolete"—and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

PRAISE FOR SINGULARITY RISING “There are things in this book that could mess with your head.” —Vernor Vinge, computer scientist; Hugo Award-winning author, A Fire Upon the Deep; essayist, “The Coming Technological Singularity” “The arrow of progress may kick upwards into a booming curve or it may terminate in an existential zero. What it will not do is carry on as before. With great insight and fore thought, Miller’s Singularity Rising prepares us for the forking paths ahead by teasing out the consequences of an artificial intelligence explosion and by staking red flags on the important technological problems of the next three decades.”

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Science shows us the possibilities we could achieve; economic forces determine the possibilities we do achieve. But despite my understanding of economics, I admit that sometimes I get confused when thinking about a Singularity civilization. In the most important essay ever written on the Singularity, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer and former computer scientist, explained that accelerating technology was making it much harder for him to write science fiction because, as we progress toward the Singularity, “even the most radical [ideas] will quickly become commonplace.”25 Vinge has said that just as our models of physics break down when they try to comprehend what goes on at the Singularity of a black hole (its supposed point of infinite density), so might our models fail to predict what happens in an exponentially smarter world.26 Vinge told me that in the absence of some large-scale catastrophe, he would be surprised if there isn’t a Singularity by 2030.27 A father can much better predict how his six-year-old will behave in kindergarten than the child could predict what the father will do at work.

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Donated $1.1 million to the Institute;91 •Ray Kurzweil—famed investor and Singularity writer; •Justin Rattner—Intel’s chief technology officer; •Eric Drexler—the father of nanotechnology; •Peter Norvig—Director of Research at Google; •Aubrey de Grey—leading longevity researcher; •Stephen Wolfram—developer of the computation platform Mathematica; and •Jaan Tallinn—founding engineer of Skype and self-made tech decamillionaire who donated $100,000.92 I also spoke on the economics of the Singularity at the Institute’s 2008 Summit. Given the superficial bizarreness of some of Eliezer’s beliefs (e.g., that an intelligence explosion could create an ultra-AI), the support he receives from these men is impressive. Eliezer initially encountered the idea of the Singularity when he read Vernor Vinge’s True Names . . . and Other Dangers.93 He knew at once that “this was what I would be doing with the rest of my life, creating the Singularity.”94 At first he wanted to create a superintelligence, any superintelligence “as fast as possible,” thinking that anything sufficiently smart would “automatically do what was ‘right.’”95 But then in 2002 Eliezer came to believe that he’d “been stupid”96 for not understanding that an ultra-AI not specifically designed for friendliness could extinguish humanity.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

He believed in a future where computers would reach a moment of technological singularity. The technological singularity was a bullshit phrase invented by the Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge. The technological singularity was the name for a theoretical moment in the future when computers would achieve a critical mass of artificial intelligence and wake up and change everything. The way that computers would change everything is by emerging into consciousness and telling people like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge that they were fucking awesome. The computers and Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge would hang out and kick back and rule the universe forever. This is not an exaggeration. This is what Ray Kurzweil believed.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Transhumanism’s roots are found in the ideas of science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and the futurist biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term ‘transhuman’ in 1957. (Nick Bostrom, a well-known transhumanist, says the desire to transcend human limitations is as old as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.) Transhumanism first became prominent in California in the early nineties, the watermark period of techno-optimism. In 1993, Vernor Vinge popularised the idea of the ‘Singularity’, the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to produce new and ever more advanced versions of itself, quickly leaving us mortals behind. Vinge hoped that transhumanists would ‘exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool . . . progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else.’

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At one point in our interview he told me that he has instructed his wife to ‘stick me in the freezer’ if he dies unexpectedly.) Zerzan In the 2014 movie Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant transhumanist scientist called Dr Caster – an Anders Sandberg type – who is building a hyperintelligent machine, in pursuit of Vernor Vinge’s Singularity moment. After a TED Talk (of course), Dr Caster is shot by a member of a radical anti-technology terrorist group called Revolutionary Independence From Technology (RIFT). RIFT are sabotaging the work of artificial intelligence laboratories all over the world. Shooting Dr Caster is part of the plan to disrupt what they see as the frightening march of technology.

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., ‘The Philosophy of Transhumanism’, in More, M. and Vita-More, N., The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology and Philosophy of the Human Future, p.4. p.223 ‘(Nick Bostrom, a well-known . . .’ http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf. p.224 ‘In 1993, Vernor Vinge popularised . . .’ ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era’, available here: https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html; Good, I. J., ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’, Advances in Computers, vol.6. p.224 ‘By 1998, the burgeoning group . . .’ http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought.pdf; More, M. and Vita-More, N., The Transhumanist Reader, pp.54–5.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

air gap, combinatorial explosion, epigenetics, indoor plumbing, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, power law, random walk, risk tolerance, technological singularity, the scientific method, Vernor Vinge

Down Here, we have the edge. The End ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vernor Vinge is the author of the Hugo Award–winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End. His other novels include The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. He also wrote the seminal short novel True Names. He has won two Hugo Awards for shorter works, and two Prometheus Awards for Best Libertarian Fiction. A mathematician and computer scientist noted as a visionary proponent of the Technological Singularity, he lives in San Diego, California. BOOKS BY VERNOR VINGE ZONES OF THOUGHT SERIES A Fire Upon the Deep* A Deepness in the Sky* The Children of the Sky* Tatja Grimm’s World* The Witling* The Peace War* Marooned in Realtime* True Names … and Other Dangers (collection) Threats … and Other Promises (collection) Across Realtime comprising: The Peace War “The Ungoverned” Marooned in Realtime True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier* The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge* Rainbows End* *Available from Tor Books This is a work of fiction.

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BOOKS BY VERNOR VINGE ZONES OF THOUGHT SERIES A Fire Upon the Deep* A Deepness in the Sky* The Children of the Sky* Tatja Grimm’s World* The Witling* The Peace War* Marooned in Realtime* True Names … and Other Dangers (collection) Threats … and Other Promises (collection) Across Realtime comprising: The Peace War “The Ungoverned” Marooned in Realtime True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier* The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge* Rainbows End* *Available from Tor Books This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. THE CHILDREN OF THE SKY Copyright © 2011 by Vernor Vinge All rights reserved. Edited by James Frenkel Map by Ellisa Mitchell A Tor® eBook Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 www.tor-forge.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Acknowledgments Map Two years after the Battle on Starship Hill Chapter 00 Chapter 01 Chapter 02 Chapter 03 Three years after the Battle on Starship Hill Chapter 04 Ten years after the Battle on Starship Hill Chapter 05 Chapter 06 Chapter 07 Chapter 08 Chapter 09 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 About the Author Books by Vernor Vinge Copyright Two years after the Battle on Starship Hill CHAPTER 00 How do you get the attention of the richest businessperson in the world? Vendacious had spent all his well-remembered life sucking up to royalty. He had never dreamed he would fall so low as to need a common merchant, but here he was with his only remaining servant, trying to find a street address in East Home’s factory district.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Singer, December 7, 2006. 103 “the laws of science and our ability” As quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 72. 103 “Google all the time” Peter Moon, “AI Will Surpass Human Intelligence After 2020,” TTworld.com, May 3, 2007 (cited May 30, 2007); available at http://www.itworld.com/Tech/3494/070503ai2020/. 103 “the Internet-based cognitive tools” Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (New York: Tor Books, 2006), 5. 103 “The Coming Technological Singularity” Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium, March 30-31, 1993). 103 “within thirty years” Ibid. 103 “point where our old models” Ibid. 104 “We are on the edge of change” Vinge, as quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 71-72. 104 “It’s a future period” Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 7. 104 “It’s not merely a technology” Robert Epstein, interview, Peter W.

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Thornton, 1881), 170. 272 Information on how to build Ray Kurzweil, interview via phone, Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, December 7, 2006. 272 “It feels like all ten billion of us” Garreau, Radical Evolution, 101. 272 “It is no exaggeration” Ibid., 207. 272 “Historically, warfare” Vernor Vinge, “Shaun Farrell Interviews Vernor Vinge,” Shaun Farrell, April 2006; available at http://www.farsector.com/quadrant/interview-vinge.htm. 272 “The future is manhunting” Special forces officer, interview, Peter W. Singer, September 7, 2006. 273 Skyshield, an automated machine-gun system Alon Ben-David, “New Model Army,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, October 11, 2006, 26. 273 the automated scanners can spot Tom Simonite, “Scanner Recognises Hidden Knives and Guns,” New Scientist, September 26, 2006, http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?

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Before the creation of the printing press and the singular break it created for society, it would have been simply impossible for those monks to imagine such things as mass literacy, the Reformation, or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The idea of a singularity in relation to computer technology first came from Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a noted mathematician and computer scientist, as well as an award-winning science fiction writer. His most recent novel, Rainbows End: A Novel with One Foot in the Future, is set in 2025. He describes a world in which people “Google all the time, everywhere, using wearable computers, and omnipresent sensors.”

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

There are many reasons for this, which will be explored further in the next chapter. It’s worth discussing one more aspect of machine intelligence that has been explored extensively in fiction, but which originates in an essay from the late twentieth century. In 1993, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge wrote an article for the Whole Earth Review proposing that continuing exponential growth in computing power would ultimately result in recursively self-improving computers rapidly giving rise to a superintelligence. He called this event the “Singularity” because of its supposed similarity to a physical singularity—or black hole.8 Proponents of the concept maintain that as with a physical singularity, conditions would be so severely different beyond its horizon that it’s impossible to predict what the world would be like afterward.

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I’m extremely appreciative to the following futurists for contributing their insights, many of which are included in chapter 12: Alisha Bhagat, senior futures advisor at Forum for the Future; Cindy Frewen of Frewen Architects; Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute; Brian David Johnson, former head futurist at Intel and founder of the 21st Century Robot Project; John Mahaffie, cofounder of Leading Futurists; Ian Pearson, former BT futurologist and founder of Futurizon; Karola Sajuns, brand strategist; and Roey Tzezana of the University of Tel Aviv. I’m also grateful to Vernor Vinge for speaking with me at length about the Singularity and numerous other ideas about the future, as well as AI scientists Ben Goertzel, José Hernández-Orallo, and David Dowe, who took the time to elaborate on their theories and models for me. While I appreciate the many editors and publications I’ve had the opportunity to write for over the years, I especially want to thank Cynthia Wagner for her guidance and support as longtime editor of The Futurist magazine.

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In contrast, technological evolution follows a much more exponential pattern of growth, due at least in part to the positive feedback loops generated by prior advances. 3. A considerable volume of writing and research supports the concept of accelerating technological change, including the works of technologists Stanislaw Ulam, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and Kevin Kelly. 4. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Laurel, B., Editor. Addison-Wesley. 1990. Chapter 1 1. “Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice.” Julia Freund, Andreas M. Brandmaier, Lars Lewejohann, et al. Science, Vol. 340, No. 6133 (May 10, 2013), pp. 756–759, doi:10.1126/science.1235294. 2.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid. Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse: We call it the Singularity. Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible.

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When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one. The Singularity — a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge — describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "progress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Ian Goldin wrote an important book, Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance, and left Oxford Martin in mid-2016. The new director is Achim Steiner. “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Vernor Vinge in an op-ed in Omni magazine, January 1983. “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.” Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” originally in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, 11–22, 1993.

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When the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence met in Monterey, California, in 2009, one of the topics its members discussed, and mostly discounted, was the likelihood of humans losing control of super-intelligent computers. This line of thought, that super-intelligent machines will surpass and possibly turn on their creators, has a long tradition. In a 1951 lecture, Alan Turing suggested that machines would “outstrip our feeble powers” and eventually “take control.” Computer scientist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge popularized the concept and coined the modern term for this tipping point, “the singularity,” in a 1983 essay. “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

World-renowned cosmologist and author of the book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, has said, “Computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence at some point in the next hundred years.”35 Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999, is far more optimistic and predicts that machines will achieve true intelligence by 2029. Kurzweil is also one of the leading proponents of the technological singularity, which he expects to occur by the year 2045.36 This concept, which was originally introduced by the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge,37 suggests that at some point in the future, technological progress will simply explode incomprehensibly. Basically, things will just get away from us. If you look at the now familiar chart that follows, the technological singularity would occur at some point close to where the line becomes nearly vertical.

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Web: http://www.automationworld.com/webonly-320 34 Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, New York, The Penguin Press, 2007, p.397. 35 ABC News 20/20 Special, “Last Days on Earth”, 2006 36 Kurtzweil predicts the Technological Singularity by 2045: Fortune Magazine, May 14, 2007, Web: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/14/100008848/ 37 “Vernor Vinge on the Singularity,” Web: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html Chapter 3: Danger 38 Robert J. Shapiro, Futurecast: how superpowers, populations, and globalization will change the way you live and work, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2008. 39 Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century, New York, Farrar, Strause and Giroux, 2005, 2006. 40 China’s high saving rate the result of government policy, see: Eamonn Fingleton, In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony, New York, St.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Observers in earlier epochs might have found it equally preposterous to suppose that the world economy would one day be doubling several times within a single lifespan. Yet that is the extraordinary condition we now take to be ordinary. The idea of a coming technological singularity has by now been widely popularized, starting with Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay and continuing with the writings of Ray Kurzweil and others.4 The term “singularity,” however, has been used confusedly in many disparate senses and has accreted an unholy (yet almost millenarian) aura of techno-utopian connotations.5 Since most of these meanings and connotations are irrelevant to our argument, we can gain clarity by dispensing with the “singularity” word in favor of more precise terminology.

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But what of the seemingly more fanciful idea that the Internet might one day “wake up”? Could the Internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence—something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect? (This was one of the ways that superintelligence could arise according to Vernor Vinge’s influential 1993 essay, which coined the term “technological singularity.”83) Against this one could object that machine intelligence is hard enough to achieve through arduous engineering, and that it is incredible to suppose that it will arise spontaneously. However, the story need not be that some future version of the Internet suddenly becomes superintelligent by mere happenstance.

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Scenarios involving machine intelligence could see the world population (including digital minds) explode by many orders of magnitude in a brief period of time. But that road to superintelligence involves artificial intelligence or whole brain emulation, so we need not consider it in this subsection. 83. Vinge (1993). CHAPTER 3: FORMS OF SUPERINTELLIGENCE 1. Vernor Vinge has used the term “weak superintelligence” to refer to such sped-up human minds (Vinge 1993). 2. For example, if a very fast system could do everything that any human could do except dance a mazurka, we should still call it a speed superintelligence. Our interest lies in those core cognitive capabilities that have economic or strategic significance. 3.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Joel Smoller and Blake Temple, "Shock-Wave Cosmology Inside a Black Hole," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100.20 (September 30, 2003): 11216–18. 19. Vernor Vinge, "First Word," Omni (January 1983): 10. 20. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 21. Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 22. Vernor Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 1993.

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Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the human point of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. —VERNOR VINGE, "THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY," 1993 Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

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The first reference to the Singularity as an event capable of rupturing the fabric of human history is John von Neumann's statement quoted above. In the 1960s, I. J. Good wrote of an "intelligence explosion" resulting from intelligent machines' designing their next generation without human intervention. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and computer scientist at San Diego State University, wrote about a rapidly approaching "technological singularity" in an article for Omni magazine in 1983 and in a science-fiction novel, Marooned in Realtime, in 1986.19 My 1989 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, presented a future headed inevitably toward machines greatly exceeding human intelligence in the first half of the twenty-first century.20 Hans Moravec's 1988 book Mind Children came to a similar conclusion by analyzing the progression of robotics.21 In 1993 Vinge presented a paper to a NASA-organized symposium that described the Singularity as an impending event resulting primarily from the advent of "entities with greater than human intelligence," which Vinge saw as the harbinger of a runaway phenomenon.22 My 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, described the increasingly intimate connection between our biological intelligence and the artificial intelligence we are creating.23 Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, also published in 1999, described the robots of the 2040s as our "evolutionary heirs," machines that will "grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, ... children of our minds."24 Australian scholar Damien Broderick's 1997 and 2001 books, both titled The Spike, analyzed the pervasive impact of the extreme phase of technology acceleration anticipated within several decades.25 In an extensive series of writings, John Smart has described the Singularity as the inevitable result of what he calls "MEST" (matter, energy, space, and time) compression.26 From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The Singularity The year after Good wrote his essay, a short story appeared in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction magazine. Called ‘Bookworm, Run!’, it told the pulpy story of a brain which is artificially augmented by being plugged directly into computerised data sources. This was the first published work of Vernor Vinge, a sci-fi writer, mathematics professor and computer scientist with a name straight out of the Marvel Comics alliteration camp. Vinge later became a successful novelist, but he remains best known for his 1993 non-fiction essay, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’. The essay recounts many of the ideas Good had posed about superintelligent machines, but with the added bonus of a timeline.

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Recalling the conversation later, Ulam noted that von Neumann was fascinated – and perhaps alarmed – by ‘the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’. Like Good, Vernor Vinge did not draw explicit conclusions in his 1993 essay. Should the Singularity take place, he acknowledged that its effects could be either good or bad. ‘From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams,’ he wrote. ‘[It could well be] a place unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries.

Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things by Donald A. Norman

A Pattern Language, crew resource management, Dean Kamen, industrial robot, job automation, language acquisition, Neal Stephenson, Rodney Brooks, Vernor Vinge, Yogi Berra

People love the power of cell phone interaction, but do not seem to love any of the devices that make it possible. As a result, the turnover of devices is high. There is no product loyalty, no commitment to company or service provider. The cell phone, one of the most fundamentally emotional services, garners little attachment to its products. Vernor Vinge, one of my favorite science fiction writers, wrote A Fire Upon the Deep, in which the planet Tines is populated by animals with a collective intelligence. These doglike creatures travel in packs, whose members are in continuous acoustical communication with one another, giving rise to a powerful, distributed consciousness.

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Thanks to John King, Dean of the School of Information at University of Michigan for the quotation from Seneca. 150 "Instant messenger." Responses to my request to an on-line discussion group on design to tell me products they love or hate (Dec. 2002). The two paragraphs in this example were written by different people. 151 "Vernor Vinge, one of my favorite" (Vinge, 1993) 154 "Attention span . . . ten seconds." I believe it is in James's Principles of Psychology (James, 1890), but although I have relied on this quotation for more than thirty years, it is also more than thirty years since I read it. Try as I might, I have been unable to find it again in order to provide a proper bibliographic reference. 154 "We carve out our own private spaces."

Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

Yellow Snow is also looking distinctly yellowed around the edges, ten years on, with the Human Genome Project a nearly done deal. Part of the problem facing any contemporary hard SF writer is the fogbank of accelerating change that has boiled up out of nowhere to swallow our proximate future. Computer scientist and author Vernor Vinge coined the term “singularity” to describe this; a singularity, in mathematics, is the point towards which an exponential curve tends. At the singularity, the rate of change of technology becomes infinite; we can’t predict what lies beyond it. In a frightening essay on the taxonomy of artificial intelligence, published in Whole Earth Review in 1994, Vinge pointed out that if it is possible to create an artificial intelligence (specifically a conscious software construct) equivalent to a human mind, then it is possible to create one that is faster than a human mind—just run it on a faster computer.

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It started with an idea: is it possible to write a hard SF story—one where relentless extrapolation from a technological or scientific assumption forms the backbone of the plot—based on algorithmics, the core of computer science, rather than on physics or biology? And one that has cosmological implications, rather than merely being a story about the birth of a better spreadsheet? The answer (as Vernor Vinge has repeatedly demonstrated) is “yes,” but it took me a while to get there for myself. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Ghandi, the Pope, Thatcher—if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

It may take decades to slowly climb this path, but they believe that it is only a matter of time before the machines exceed us in intelligence. AI researchers are split on the question of when this might happen. Some say that within twenty years robots will approach the intelligence of the human brain and then leave us in the dust. In 1993, Vernor Vinge said, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended …. I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.” On the other hand, Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, says, “I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 years to 200 years.”

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Ulam wrote, “One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the human race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” Versions of the idea have been kicking around for decades. But it was then amplified and popularized by science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge in his novels and essays. But this leaves the crucial question unanswered: When will the singularity take place? Within our lifetimes? Perhaps in the next century? Or never? We recall that the participants at the 2009 Asilomar conference put the date at any time between 20 to 1,000 years into the future.

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., “Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 11, May 1999, pp. 281–83, www.­neuro.­psychiatryonline.­org/­cgi/­content/­full/­11/­2/­281. 12 “It is not impossible to build a human brain”: Jonathan Fildes, “Artificial Brain ‘10 Years Away,’ ” BBC News, July 22, 2009, http:­/­/­news.­bbc.­co.­uk/­2/­hi/­8164060.­stm. 13 “It’s not a question of years”: Jason Palmer, “Simulated Brain Closer to Thought,” BBC News, April 22, 2009, http:­/­/­news.­bbc.­co.­uk/­2/­hi/­sci/­tech/­8012496.­stm. 14 “This is a Hubble Telescope of the mind … it’s inevitable”: Douglas Fox, “IBM Reveals the Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time,” Popular Mechanics, December 18, 2009, www.­popularmechanics.­com/­technology/­engineering/­extreme-­machines/­4337190. 15 “After we solve this”: Sally Adee, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” IEEE Spectrum, June 2008, http:­/­/­spectrum.­ieee.­org/­biomedical/­ethics/­reverse-­engineering-­the-­brain/­0. 16 “Within thirty years”: Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?” paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993, http:­/­/­mindstalk.­net/­vinge/­vinge-­sing.­html. 17 “I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened”: Tom Abate, “Smarter Than Thou?

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

The origins of this use of the term singularity date back to the 1950s, at which time mathematician John von Neumann supposedly coined the term when he said, “The ever-accelerating progress of technology ... gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”17 Irving John Good, another mathematician, was one of the first to call super-intelligent AI the “last invention that man need make.” Of course, there weren’t that many people thinking about the singularity outside of science fiction and a few computer scientists at the time. In fact, the term was popularized by science fiction writer (and computer scientist) Vernor Vinge in a 1993 paper he wrote titled, “The Technological Singularity,” in which he defined it as a “singular point” after which everything will be different. Although the term has picked up steam because of the development of AI to the point of becoming super-intelligent, this is only one of the several possibilities that Vinge puts forth in his original paper: Science may achieve this breakthrough by several means (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur): Computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent may be developed.

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. [←14] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sophia_at_the_AI_for_Good_Global_Summit_2018_(27254369347).jpg [←15] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16617092/sophia-the-robot-citizen-ai-hanson-robotics-ben-goertzel [←16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics [←17] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, (New York: Penguin, 2005), 10. [←18] Vernor Vinge, “Technological Singularity” (1993), https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html [←19] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612257/digital-version-after-death/ [←20] Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol.53, No.211, pp.243‐255. [←21] Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Alfred A.

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Some of our greatest entrepreneurs and scientific minds see even darker clouds on the horizon. People like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have cautioned that technology could become so sophisticated that it decides to pursue its own goals rather than the goals of the humans who created it. The reason to worry has been articulated by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” as well as by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and most recently by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the University of Oxford. In Bostrom’s language, the fear is that technology is advancing so fast that the development of a superintelligence is imminent.

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few people today read Alice in Wonderland: A fact bemoaned by Anthony Lane in “Go Ask Alice,” The New Yorker, June 8 and 15, 2015. SEVEN. THINKING WITH TECHNOLOGY commuting a little less: www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/how-america-stopped-commuting.html. attendance at movie theaters: www.slashfilm.com/box-office-attendance-hits-lowest-level-five-years. Vernor Vinge: V. Vinge (1993). “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Whole Earth Review, Winter. Ray Kurzweil: R. Kurzweil (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books. Nick Bostrom: N. Bostrom (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Such discussion can be found in many of the works describd above, in particular the work of Vannevar Bush [31] and Douglas Engelbart [63]. Other notable works include those of Eric Drexler [57], Jon Udell [227], Christine Borgman [23], and Jim Gray [83]. See also Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the world wide web, reprinted in [14]. A stimulating and enjoyable fictional depiction of networked science is Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End [231]. Data-driven science: One of the first people to understand and clearly articulate the value of data-driven science was Jim Gray, of Microsoft Research. Many of his ideas are summarized in the essay [83], which I also mentioned above. That essay is part of a stimulating book of essays entitled The Fourth Paradigm [94].

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Jon Udell’s Radio blog, March 4, 2002. http://radio-weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/04.html. [229] UK Medical Research Council policy on data sharing and preservation. http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Ourresearch/Ethicsresearchguidance/ Datasharinginitiative/Policy/index.htm. [230] Edna Ullmann-Margalit. Invisible-hand explanations. Synthese, 39(2): 263–291, 1978. [231] Vernor Vinge. Rainbows End. New York: Tor, 2007. [232] Steven S. Vogt, R. Paul Butler, Eugenio J. Rivera, Nader Haghighipour, Gregory W. Henry, and Michael H. Williamson. The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey: A 3.1 M_Earth planet in the habitable zone of the nearby M3V star Gliese 581. eprint arXiv:1009.5733, 2010

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Pro­g ress would no longer be a known variable (if it ever was). 46 T he S implified W orld Von Neumann, in other words, suggested to Ulam an eschatology, a pos­si­ble end of times. A ­couple de­cades ­later, Good thought he’d found the mechanism: the digital computer. UCLA computer scientist and Hugo award-­w inner Vernor Vinge introduced “Singularity” into computation, and specifically into artificial intelligence, in 1986, in his science-fiction book Marooned in Realtime.3 In a ­later technical paper for NASA, Vinge channeled Good: “Within thirty years, we w ­ ill have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

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Technically, Vinge introduced the term singularity three years ­earlier, in a January 1983 article in Omni magazine titled “First Word.” It is common, however, to trace the word and Vinge’s use of it back to his sci-fi book Marooned in Realtime, where the concept was fully developed in the plot of the story. 4. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-­Human Era,” in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, ed. G. A. Landis, NASA Publication CP-10129, 1993, 11–22. 5. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When ­Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Group, 2005). 6.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

But what cities will get in return is ownership and control of this vital virtual infrastructure. Go with Coord, and you’ll get a turn-key system. But you’ll have to license the data about your own streets to actually use it—and so will every mobility provider, big and small, that wants to roll through your town. Singularities and Singletons In 1993, science fiction author Vernor Vinge made a daring prediction. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” he wrote. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” Computer power was increasing so fast, exponentially so, Vinge argued, that it would soon produce a series of breakthroughs—all-knowing supercomputers, networked brains spanning the internet, interfaces that would blur the boundary between human and machine minds, and biological enhancements to increase intelligence.

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Ann Arbor, MLive, October 6, 2017, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/can_ self-driving_pizza_deliver.html. 231“classified [Elaine Herzberg] as something other”: Ryan Felton, “Video Shows Driver in Autonomous Uber Was Looking Down Moments before Fatal Crash,” Jalopnik, March 21, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver-in-fatal-autonomous-uber-crash-was-l-1823970417. 231computer-vision algorithms: Katyanna Quach, “Racist Self-Driving Scare Debunked, inside AI Black Boxes, Google Helps Folks Go with TensorFlow,” The Register, March 10, 2019, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/10/ai_ roundup_080319/. 231marking of pavement to help orient drivers: Bill Loomis, “1900–1930: The Years of Driving Dangerously,” Detroit News, April 26, 2015, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2015/04/26/auto-traffic-history-detroit/26312107/. 232dinged for excessive idling: Andrew Small, “CityLab Daily: The Race to Code the Curb,” CityLab, April 2, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/authors/andrew-small/. 233“cities need to invest in the mapping in ways”: Kevin Webb (@kvnwebb), “We’re building smart ways to encode information like curb regulation,” Twitter, November 30, 2018, 1:41 a.m., https://twitter.com/kvnweb/status/1068485225607585798. 234“an exponential runaway beyond”: Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html. 234John von Neumann had raised: John Brockman, Possible Minds (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 8. 234“AI enthusiasts have been making claims”: Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” 234“I have set the date 2045”: Christianna Reddy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045,” Futurism, October 5, 2017, https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/. 235“machine learning” to disguise the true nature: Chris Smith et al., “The History of Artificial Intelligence,” University of Washington, December 2006, https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/his tory-ai.pdf. 235“a deep level of understanding”: Rodney Brooks, “Post: [For&AI] The Origins of Artificial Intelligence,” Robots, AI, and Other Stuff (blog), April 27, 2018, https://rodneybrooks.com/forai-the-origins-of-artificial-intelligence/. 235“Contemporary neural networks do well on challenges”: Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” New York University, accessed January 22, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.00631.pdf. 236“If . . . driverless cars should also disappoint”: Marcus, “Deep Learning.” 236Frey tallied his predictions of the jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

The Singularity The first application of the term “singularity” to a future technology-driven event is usually credited to computer pioneer John von Neumann, who reportedly said sometime in the 1950s that “ever accelerating progress . . . gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”5 The theme was fleshed out in 1993 by San Diego State University mathematician Vernor Vinge, who wrote a paper entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Vinge, who is not given to understatement, began his paper by writing that “[w]ithin thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”6 In astrophysics, a singularity refers to the point within a black hole where the normal laws of physics break down.

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Yann LeCun, Google+ Post, October 28, 2013, https://plus.google.com/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/Qwj9EEkUJXY. 4. Gary Marcus, “Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again,” New Yorker (Elements blog), January 1, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/01/the-new-york-times-artificial-intelligence-hype-machine.html. 5. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” NASA VISION-21 Symposium, March 30–31, 1993. 6. Ibid. 7. Robert M. Geraci, “The Cult of Kurzweil: Will Robots Save Our Souls?,” USC Religion Dispatches, http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/4456/the_cult_of_kurzweil%3A_will_robots_save_our_souls/. 8.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

And finally, the insight that collective intelligence isn’t just a property of a group but also a kind of group that has this property was crystallized for me in a conversation with Benjamin Kuipers in 2011. I asked Ben to write about that idea so I could cite him. He did, I did (in chapters 1 and 10), and eventually I realized that a good name for these groups would be… superminds. I would also like to thank computer industry analyst and investor Esther Dyson and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge for a remarkable dinner in 2005. In a sense, they are responsible for this book because, by the end of that dinner, I had the feeling not that I had decided what my next main research topic would be, but that I had finally admitted to myself something I had already known unconsciously: that my next research topic would be what I now call “superminds.”

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—James Manyika, chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute “Humans plus computers and networks have enormous potential. How can such wee creatures as ourselves take advantage of this potential? In his new book, Malone addresses this question in a concrete way, laying the foundation for a new discipline: the systems engineering of superminds.” —Vernor Vinge, Hugo Award–winning science fiction author and originator of the “technological singularity” concept “Malone takes us on an intentional journey into thinking about thought, intelligence, reasoning, and consciousness. He sees these notions in extremely broad terms that have changed my views of what it means to ‘think’—a property that emerges from aggregations and organized structures.

Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Robot Never attempt to extract a definition for this word from a roboticist. Nearly all robotics researchers disagree completely regarding its meaning, and their definitions change rapidly with the onset of new innovations. Singularity This trend or event is hypothesized by futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge as the oncoming rapid acceleration of AI capability to the point that it becomes self-reinforcing, with a runaway quality in which super-beings are rapidly created by a highly intelligent AI with or without the participation of humans (who may be plugged into the intelligence if we and AI systems hypothetically merge into a new race).

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

—CYLON HYBRID, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA; ALSO, MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM, TRON “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.” —THE BORG, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION “UPGRADING IS COMPULSORY.” —THE CYBERMEN, DOCTOR WHO THERE’S SOMETHING EXISTENTIAL about modern culture’s fear of “the Singularity,” author Vernor Vinge’s name for the moment when technology will have advanced so far that it transforms humanity, or perhaps transcends it, in a way we cannot yet anticipate. That hasn’t stopped us from envisioning that posthuman future in stories, and usually we figure it’ll be pretty terrible for those of us still confined to meat-sack bodies when the time comes.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

In the last year, awareness that advanced AI brings both immense promise and immense peril has become widespread. I’m sure that both Kurzweil and Bostrom would freely admit that, like Newton, they saw further than others because they stood on the shoulders of giants – in their cases people like Hans Moravic, Vernor Vinge and Alvin Toffler. There seems little point trying to pin down the exact source of each and every innovative idea our species has had: we can just be grateful that we do have them. Those of us who have been thinking about these things for years have long felt there needed to be a global debate about the future of artificial intelligence.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

The quickening pace of AI innovation has led some, such as Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi, to proclaim the imminent end of a very significant fraction of all tasks performed by humans, perhaps as soon as 2045.2 Even more radical voices argue that computers are evolving at such a rapid pace that they will outstrip the intellectual capabilities of humans in one, or at the most two more generations. The science-fiction author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge posed the notion of a computing “singularity” in which machine intelligence will make such rapid progress that it will cross a threshold and then in some as yet unspecified leap, become superhuman. It is a provocative claim, but far too early to answer definitively. Indeed, it is worthwhile recalling the point made by longtime Silicon Valley observer Paul Saffo when thinking about the compounding impact of computing.

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The year 2045 is when Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will transcend biology, and implicitly, one would presume, destiny.37 Kurzweil, the serial artificial intelligence entrepreneur and author who joined Google as a director of engineering in 2012 to develop some of his ideas for building an artificial “mind,” represents a community of many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest technologists. They have been inspired by the ideas of computer scientist and science-fiction author Vernor Vinge about the inevitability of a “technological singularity” that would mark the point in time at which machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence. When he first wrote about the idea of the singularity in 1993, Vinge framed a relatively wide span of years—between 2005 and 2030—during which computers might become “awake” and superhuman.38 The singularity movement depends on the inevitability of mutually reinforcing exponential improvements in a variety of information-based technologies ranging from processing power to storage.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

He read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, with its pseudonymous characters, Demosthenes and Locke, who are actually genius elementary school–age children influencing global politics on the Internet with their untraceable ideas. He read James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace, a history of the National Security Agency and its shadowy work, and Vernor Vinge’s True Names, a novella about a cyberspace where hackers are elevated to gods and their only weakness is the identity that ties them to their frail bodies. Soon May discovered the Usenet, the Internet’s nascent bulletin board system. He would wait until night to switch on his 1200 baud modem and log on, the better to save money on bandwidth and avoid the traffic jams that plagued the early information networks.

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one rebel group allows anyone to anonymously spill their secrets over the phone lines Jon Brunner. The Shockwave Rider (Ballantine Books, 1976). a history of the National Security Agency and its shadowy work James Bamford. The Puzzle Palace (New York: Penguin Books, 1983). only weakness is the identity that ties them to their frail bodies Vernor Vinge. “True Names.” In True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (New York: Tor, 2001), first published in Dell Binary Star #5, 1981. M. T. Graves and the Dungeon Steven Levy. Crypto (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 187. Herbert Zim’s Codes & Secret Writing Ibid. produce a solution in minutes Levy, p. 188.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Others proclaim the Internet a modern oracle, enabling simple folk to query libraries, databases, political organizations, or even corporate and university researchers, at last breaking the monopoly of “experts” and empowering multitudes with the same information used by the decisionmaking class. (See “A Century of Aficionados” later in this chapter.) Projecting this transcendent imagery forward in time, science fiction author Vernor Vinge foresees computerized media leading to a culturaltechnical “singularity.” When each person can share all stored knowledge, and exchange new ideas instantly, every field may advance at exponential rates, leading to a kind of human deification, a concept elaborated by UCLA researcher Gregory Stock in Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism.

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More domains are planned, as the initial niches are filled at a rate many times faster than the originators ever envisioned. The most interesting thing about this system is how little bureaucracy is involved. A small commercial service is allowed to franchise out domain names for a small fee on a first-come, first-served basis. 39 ... author Vernor Vinge ... For more on the “singularity” see Vingeʼs novel, Across Real Time (New York: Baen Books, 1986). 42 ... a long, hard road getting here ... I have long been amazed that some people seem driven to claim that our varied ancestors (whether European, African, Native American, etc.) were in many or all ways better, wiser, smarter, and more honorable than we are, as if this somehow honors their memory!

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

See Keller Easterling, “An Internet of Things,” e-flux, no. 31 (January 2012), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8946204.pdf, and Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT's Architecture Machine Group” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University School of Architecture, 2014). Richard Saul Wurman is widely credited with the first use of the term information architecture, and for this we may be glad. He was also the founder of TED, and for this we may be sad. 15.  Vernor Vinge, “Vernor Vinge at the Center for Design and Geopolitics” (lecture at the Center for Design and Geopolitics University of California, San Diego, June 3, 2011). 16.  The thing as “gathering” is in reference to Martin Heidegger's use in his 1950 essay “Das Ding,” and Bruno Latour's employment and furtherance of this image in his “parliament of things.”

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Before MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte founded Architecture Machine Group, which focused on the problems of human-computer interaction at the environmental scale and what came in time to be called “information architecture.”14 Today, as suggested, many speculative information space design questions are not only coordinated around building automation but also for the conjuring of exotic materials such as smart dust, a generic name for different kinds of millimeter- to nanometer-scale sensor arrays with ultralow power budgets connected wirelessly and which gather hyperlocal data as they swerve. Some of these perhaps even also in turn react back on their microcosmos and our macrocosmos—what Vernor Vinge calls “smart motes with effectors.”15 Other programs focus on the design of the spatial, temporal, and semantic relations between physical and data objects. Bruce Sterling's influential Shaping Things introduced the term SPIME to designate the hybrid profile of an object, as accumulated all the way from its virtual design, to sourcing, to assembly, through its use and consumption, and its ultimate disassembly back into entropic matter.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Possibly because we up our expectations of what we expect ourselves or others to do or produce. There’s also the thought that rising automation will lead to mass unemployment and a Luddite revolution. “I have argued that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans” natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.’ Vernor Vinge, computer scientist, professor of mathematics and sci-fi author It’s cheaper to build robots than it is to pay someone over a lifetime. Robots don’t need to sleep or take holidays either. But the value of human work could still rise, especially if some of us prefer to be served by human beings and are willing to pay extra for it.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

That being so, if our species will nevertheless have a finite lifetime, then knowing the total number of humans who will ever live provides no upper bound on that lifetime, because it cannot tell us how long the potentially immortal humans of the future will live before the prophesied catastrophe strikes. In 1993 the mathematician Vernor Vinge wrote an influential essay entitled ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, in which he estimated that, within about thirty years, predicting the future of technology would become impossible – an event that is now known simply as ‘the Singularity’. Vinge associated the approaching Singularity with the achievement of AI, and subsequent discussions have centred on that.

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., Science and Ultimate Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2003) David Deutsch, ‘Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A455 (1999) David Deutsch, ‘The Structure of the Multiverse’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A458 (2002) Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (BBC Publications, 1965) Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Allen Lane, 1998) Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007) Bryan Magee, Popper (Fontana, 1973) Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’ Plato, Euthyphro Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (Routledge, 1995) Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides (Routledge, 1998) Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2000) Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books, 2001) Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59, 236 (October 1950) Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (Faber, 2002) Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, Whole Earth Review, winter 1993 *The term was coined by the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson. *This terminology differs slightly from that of Dawkins. Anything that is copied, for whatever reason, he calls a replicator. What I call a replicator he calls an ‘active replicator’.

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Reputation can be a complex matter—just think of all the reader reviews and “People also bought...” ratings on the Amazon.com retail site—so we’ll leave its discussion to Chapter 16, and Chapter 17. Establishing trust through the use of pseudonyms is covered in Chapter 15. What lets a malicious adversary find a person in real life? One way is to know his or her true name , a term first used in a short story by fiction author Vernor Vinge[11] and popularized by Tim May.[12] The true name is the legal identity of an individual and can be used to find an address or other real-life connection. Obviously, a pseudonym should not be traceable to a true name. As an author can use a pseudonym to protect his or her true name, in a computerized storage system a user can employ a pseudonym to protect another form of identity called location .

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Andy Oram, our editor, was instrumental in turning this from an academic paper into something that is actually readable. Adam Back and Theodore Hong commented on our assessment of their systems and made our related work section much better. Furthermore, we thank Susan Born, Nathan Mahn, Jean-François Raymond, Anna Lysyanskaya, Adam Smith, and Brett Woolsridge for further insight and feedback. * * * [11] Vernor Vinge (1987), True Names... and Other Dangers, Baen. [12] Tim May, Cyphernomicon, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/cyphernomicon. [13] David Mazieres and M. Frans Kaashoek (1998), “The Design and Operation of an E-mail Pseudonym Server,” 5th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I had many discussions regarding the issue of technological unemployment, particularly during my Graduate Study Program at Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, where I had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds on the field, including the authors of the book “Race Against the Machine” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, founding executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. I stand by my thesis, that the economy will not abide in creating new jobs at the same pace with which technology destroys them. Many disagree with me, and we could have a discussion about that, but I think this is missing the point. I can envision a plethora of futures where everyone has a job.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

His main business is prophecy. Kurzweil believes fervently in AI, which he studied at MIT with its earliest pioneers, and yearns for the heaven on earth it will create. This paradise has a name—it’s called the singularity. Kurzweil borrowed the term from the mathematician-cum-science-fiction-writer Vernor Vinge, who, in turn, filched it from astrophysics. The singularity refers to a rupture in the time-space continuum—it describes the moment when the finite become infinite. In Kurzweil’s telling, the singularity is when artificial intelligence becomes all-powerful, when computers are capable of designing and building other computers.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

It applies metaphors from certain strains of computer science to people and the rest of reality. Pragmatic objections to this philosophy are presented. What Do You Do When the Techies Are Crazier Than the Luddites? The Singularity is an apocalyptic idea originally proposed by John von Neumann, one of the inventors of digital computation, and elucidated by figures such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. There are many versions of the fantasy of the Singularity. Here’s the one Marvin Minsky used to tell over the dinner table in the early 1980s: One day soon, maybe twenty or thirty years into the twenty-first century, computers and robots will be able to construct copies of themselves, and these copies will be a little better than the originals because of intelligent software.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

The worst thing that could have happened to New York City on September 11, 1901, would have been that the British fleet, the most powerful in the world, could have sailed in and started shelling the town, as it had done, by the way, some years earlier. And that might have done less damage in dollar terms and would probably have killed fewer people than what happened on September 11, 2001. Now ask yourself what would be the worst thing that could happen on September 11, 2101. Vernor Vinge, the science fiction writer, talks about how at some point in this century a person will be able to go to a Radio Shack to buy the parts to build a bomb that can blow up California. The obvious point is that the tremendous rate of technological progress will vastly expand the opportunities for the human race to do bad things as well as good.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

In his 1962 book “The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States”, the Austrian economist Fritz Machler suggested that with 29% of GDP accounted for by the knowledge industry, it had begun. [iv] The term was first applied to human affairs back in the 1950s by John von Neumann, a key figure in the development of the computer. The physicist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge argued in 1993 that artificial intelligence and other technologies would cause a singularity in human affairs within 30 years. This idea was picked up and popularised by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes that computers will overtake humans in general intelligence in 1929, and a singularity will arrive in 2045. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity [v] The event horizon of a black hole is the point beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer, or in other words, the point of no return.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

In his 1958 obituary for the physicist John von Neumann, with whom he had worked on the Manhattan Project, Stanislaw Ulam wrote about a conversation they once had about “the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” The first substantial statement of the concept of a Technological Singularity is usually attributed to the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. In an essay called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era,” first delivered as a paper at a 1993 conference organized by NASA, Vinge claimed that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended.”

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They fear that a “superintelligence”—to use the term coined by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom—will emerge that pretty quickly sees humanity as a threat, an irritant, or something to enslave.26 In other words, AI could be our last technological innovation.27 We are not in a position here to adjudicate this issue and cannot even agree among ourselves. But what has struck us is how close to economics the debate actually is: competition underpins it all. A superintelligence is an AI that can outperform humans in most cognitive tasks and can reason through problems. Specifically, it can invent and improve itself. While science fiction author Vernor Vinge called the point at which this emerges “the Singularity” and futurist Ray Kurzweil suggested humans are not equipped to foresee what will happen at this point because we are by definition not as intelligent, it turns out that economists are actually quite well equipped to think about it. For years, economists have faced criticism that the agents on which we base our theories are hyper-rational and unrealistic models of human behavior.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

They weren’t looking for advances in technology that already existed. Instead, they were focused on a bolder challenge, the development of deep and broad machine intelligence known as Artificial General Intelligence. This, they believed, would lead to the next step of human evolution. The heart of the Singularity argument, as explained by the technologists Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, the leading evangelists of the concept, lies in the power of exponential growth. As Samuel Butler noted, machines evolve far faster than humans. But information technology, which Butler only glimpsed, races ahead at an even faster rate. Digital tools double in power or capacity every year or two, whether they are storing data, transmitting it, or performing calculations.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Andrews, and Rosario Isasi, “Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations,” American Journal of Law and Medicine 28 (2002): 151–78. 44. Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy 4, nos. 1–2 (2005): 87–101. 45. Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values”; Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?” (presentation, Vision 21 Symposium, Westlake, OH, March 30, 1993). 46. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2005); Singularity University, http://singularityu.org (accessed February 5, 2017); Wikipedia, s.v. “Ray Kurzweil,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil (accessed September 2, 2016). 47.

…

“Machine-to-Machine Communications: Connecting Billions of Devices,” OECD Digital Economy Papers, no. 192 (2012). 48. Igor Aleksander, “The Self ‘Out There,’” Nature 413 (2001): 23; Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (New York: Free Press, 2011), iBook edition, chap. 11. 49. Moravec, Robot, 66–69; McKibben, Enough, 78. 50. Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?”; Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, 260. 51. Kurzweil, Singularity, 9, 136. 52. Ibid., 29–30. 53. See “The Deification of Reason” in chapter 7 and “Cogito Ergo Sum” in chapter 12. 54. Kurzweil, Singularity, 32, 311. See “The Conflict of Body and Soul” in chapter 7. 55.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“We are continually looking at the list of things machines cannot do—play chess, drive a car, translate language—and then checking them off the list when machines become capable of these things,” said Tim Berners-Lee. “Someday we will get to the end of the list.”18 These latest advances may even lead to the singularity, a term that von Neumann coined and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us mortals. Vinge says this will occur by 2030.19 On the other hand, these latest stories might turn out to be like the similarly phrased ones from the 1950s, glimpses of a receding mirage.

…

Beau Cronin of O’Reilly Media has proposed a drinking game: “take a shot every time you find a news article or blog post that describes a new AI system as working or thinking ‘like the brain’ ” (http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/05/it-works-like-the-brain-so.html), and he maintains a pinboard of stories making such claims (https://pinboard.in/u:beaucronin/t:like-the-brain/#). 18. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee. 19. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993. See also Ray Kurzweil, “Accelerating Intelligence,” http://www.kurzweilai.net/. 20. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1960. 21. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 7. 22.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

If, as Ellul has it, technology is the state religion, Singularitarianism must be seen as its most extreme and fanatical sect. It is the Opus Dei of the postwar church of gadget worship. Ray Kurzweil may be the best-known prophet of this order, but he was not the first. The true father of Singularitarianism is a sci-fi author and retired mathematics professor from Wisconsin named Vernor Vinge. His earliest written exposition of the idea appeared in the January 1983 issue of Omni, an oddball “science” magazine founded by Kathy Keeton, once among the “highest-paid strippers in Europe,” according to her New York Times obituary, but better known for promoting quack cancer cures and for cofounding Penthouse with her husband, Bob Guccione.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

We know it as the apotheosis of the algorithm, when technological change will accelerate to such speed that human intelligence may simply be eclipsed. In this scenario we no longer manipulate the symbols and we can no longer construe their meaning. It is the endgame of computationalism as considered by philosopher Nick Bostrom, computer scientist Vernor Vinge, and others, an existential referendum on the relationship between humanity and technics.73 If we follow the asymptote of the effective procedure far enough, the space of computation advances with not just a vanguard but a rearguard, and humanity might simply be left behind—no longer effective or efficient enough to merit emulation or attention.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

The first describes a libertarian revolt in the near future, the second a society with a male-to-female ratio of ten to one where women are drafted into a prostitution corps. L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach (New York: Ballantine, 1980), The Venus Belt (New York: Ballantine, 1980) and lots more that I have not yet read. His books are sometimes fun; my main reservation is that the good guys are too obviously in the right and win too easily. Vernor Vinge, True Names (New York: Bluejay, 1984), The Peace War (New York: Bluejay, 1984; Ultramarine, 1984), Marooned in Realtime (New York: Bluejay, 1986; Baen, 1987). These are science fiction novels by a libertarian with interesting ideas. The historical background for the last of the three, which is set in the very far future, includes an anarcho-capitalist society along the general lines described in Part III of this book.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Self-preservation alone would plausibly motivate this digital army to fight against us (perhaps using Siri as an interpreter for the enemy). In utopian versions of digital consciousness, we humans don’t fight with machines; we join with them, uploading our brains into the cloud and otherwise becoming part of a “technological singularity.” This is a term coined in 1983 by science-fiction author Vernor Vinge, who predicted that, “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. . . . When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”6 Progress toward such a singularity, Vinge and others have argued, is driven by Moore’s Law.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Also there was Facebook’s Yann LeCun, an innovator in deep-learning math and a protégé of Google’s Geoffrey Hinton. A tenured contingent consisted of the technologist Stuart Russell, the philosopher David Chalmers, the catastrophe theorist Nick Bostrom, the nanotech prophet Eric Drexler, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, and the “Singularitarian” Vernor Vinge, along with scores of other celebrity scientists.1 They gathered at Asilomar preparing to alert the world to the dire threat posed by . . . well, by themselves—Silicon Valley. Their computer technology, advanced AI, and machine learning—acclaimed in hundreds of press releases as the Valley’s principal activity and hope for the future, with names such as TensorFlow, DeepMind, Machine Learning, Google Brain, and the Singularity—had gained such power and momentum that it was now deemed nothing less than a menace to mankind.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

The introduction features a poem, pecked out in IBM typewriter lettering, titled “Into the Era of Cyberspace,” written with all the pocket-protector fluidity one might expect of a NASA engineer: “Our robots precede us / with infinite diversity / exploring the universe / delighting in complexity.” (Turing’s rhyming computer, you have to suspect, could have done better.) One of the first speakers at the conference was a San Diego State University professor named Vernor Vinge, whose remarks that day marked the start of an important era in our consideration of smart machines. His talk was called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era.” “Within thirty years,” Vinge began, “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”21 Kurzweil was also influenced by the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who believed this event was close at hand: “The evolution of human intelligence took millions of years. We will devise an equivalent advance in a fraction of that time. We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity … and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”22 Kurzweil takes the intelligence explosion as his starting point and then turns up the sci-fi intensity, moving from AI to nanoscience, then to virtual reality and “brain uploading,” all in the same calm, confident tone of a Delphic oracle looking at a calendar and pointing to specific dates.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

There are few explorations of history that surpass it in imagination and vividness, and as soon as I finished listening to the hundredth episode, I immediately began thinking of what the next hundred objects might be. More broadly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the writers who have inspired me: Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Hyde, Ted Chiang, George Orwell, Stanislaw Lem, and many more. Without their stories and ideas, the future would be a darker place. Thanks to my editor at MIT Press, Susan Buckley, for her invaluable advice, and the editors of the first edition, Richard Dennis and Andrea Phillips.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Moore’s law applies to the transistors and technology that control robots as well as those in computers. Add rapid advances in machine learning, data analytics, and cloud robotics, and it’s clear that computing is going to keep rapidly improving. Those who argue for the singularity differ on when it will occur. Mathematician Vernor Vinge predicts that it will occur by 2023; futurist Ray Kurzweil says 2045. But the question looming over singularity is whether there’s a limit on how far our technology can ultimately go. Those who argue against the possibility of singularity point to several factors. The software advances necessary to reach singularity demand a detailed scientific understanding of the human brain, but our lack of understanding about the basic neural structure of the brain impedes software development.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Ideologically, this was a torch carried by Wired magazine, and the ideal probably reached its zenith in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Silly me. I should have known better. It would all be spelled out clearly in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and even less-well-read classics such as John Barnes’s The Mother of Storms. Science fiction writers were always the best social scientists, and in describing the dystopian nature of the Net they were again right on target. There would be nothing even vaguely utopian about the reality of the Internet, despite preachy “The Road Ahead” vision statements by (late to the Web) luminaries like Bill Gates.

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PROLOGUE: We Know Where You Live, We Know Where Your Dog Goes to School SUE: Grand Theft Automatic ELAINE: Stitch-up JACK: Steaming INTERLUDE: CIA World Factbook, 2017 SUE: Earning Overtime ELAINE: Death or Coffee JACK: Revenge of the Mummy Lobe SUE: Wayne’s World ELAINE: A Catastrophic Loss of Goodwill JACK: mouthinsert(foot); SUE: Gaining Access ELAINE: Being Constructive JACK: In Hell SUE: Victim Liaison ELAINE: Stitched Up JACK: Designs on Your Dungeon SUE: Chop Shop ELAINE: Game of Spooks JACK: Meat Machine SUE: Heavy Mob ELAINE: Alone in the Dome JACK: This Is Not a Game SUE: Pigs in a China Shop ELAINE: System Fails, People Die JACK: The Anti-nutcase EULA SUE: Cover-up ELAINE: Shanghaied JACK: Sex Offender SUE: Missing in Action ELAINE: Morning After JACK: Body of Evidence SUE: Civil Contingencies ELAINE: Gentleman and Players JACK: Schrödinger’s Girl SUE: Making Plans for Nigel ELAINE: Zombie Mush JACK: In the Box SUE: Plea Bargain EPILOGUE: Banker Martin Mase ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Books do not get written in majestic isolation, and this one is no exception. Certainly it wouldn’t exist in its current form without valuable feedback from a host of readers. I’d particularly like to single out for thanks Vernor Vinge, Hugh Hancock, Greg Costikyan, Ron Avitzur, Eric Raymond, Tony Quirke, Robert Sneddon, Paul Friday, Dave Bush, Alexander Chane Austin, Larry Colen, Harry Payne, Trey Palmer, Dave Clements, Andrew Veitch, Hannu Rajaniemi, Soon Lee, and Jarrod Russell. I’d also like to thank my other test readers, too numerous to name today.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as Slashdot is Exhibit A. SINGULARITY—BY RANDALX What are your thoughts on Vernor Vinge’s Singularity prediction. Is it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by this new “species”? NEAL: I can never get past the structural similarities between the Singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Whether and when it will ever be there, in the outside world, and with what consequences, is what we must now consider. The first use of the term “singularity” to refer to a future technology driven event seems to have been by the legendary computer pioneer John von Neumann, in the 1950s. But it doesn’t seem to have caught on until, in 1983, the mathematician Vernor Vinge wrote about an approaching “technological singularity.”3 More recently, the “Singularity,” notably now sporting a capital “S,” has become closely associated with the name of Ray Kurzweil, who published his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology in 2005. He is currently Google’s Director of Engineering.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Good, a British statistician and Alan Turing’s sidekick on the World War II Enigma code-breaking project, speculated on a coming intelligence explosion. Good pointed out that if we can design machines that are more intelligent than us, they should in turn be able to design machines that are more intelligent than them, and so on ad infinitum, leaving human intelligence far behind. In a 1993 essay, Vernor Vinge christened this “the Singularity.” The concept has been popularized most of all by Ray Kurzweil, who argues in The Singularity Is Near that not only is the Singularity inevitable, but the point where machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence—let’s call it the Turing point—will arrive within the next few decades.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

They are not the only ones worried about AI taking over the world. Ray Kurzweil – inventor, entrepreneur and currently the head of AI research for Google – thinks that this will happen by 2030. But how did all this talk about the AI Singularity start? The answer, not surprisingly perhaps, is to be found not in science but in science fiction. Vernor Vinge is a computer scientist, science fiction writer and winner of the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction. In his novels, particularly in The Peace War (1984) and in Marooned in Realtime (1986), Vinge was the first to explore a fictitious time in the future that he called ‘the technological singularity’.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

As seen in Chapter 2, there were some inspired magazine covers from the magazine Wall Street Computer Review † that showed the unrealistic expectations for AI. One, from 1987, depicts Socrates on the steps of the stock exchange surrounded by a horde of PCs, and touts: “Teaching Computers to Emulate Great Thinkers.” * Sci-fi buffs have a rich amount of material to consider in this context. Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist who has also won five Hugo awards, deals with the topic in much of his work, including his latest novel, Rainbow’s End. If we construct an artificial superintelligent entity, what will it think of us? † Since renamed Wall Street & Technology, and a useful resource for nerds on Wall Street (NOWS) at www.wallstreetandtech.com.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Dark Lineage There was a fresh literary scene related to VR in the 1980s called cyberpunk. It was, in my view, a continuation of E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Dark stuff, usually; cautionary tales. Characters typically manipulated and deceived one another, or wallowed in existential malaise. Vernor Vinge wrote a novel called True Names and a little later came Neuromancer by William Gibson. I adored Neuromancer, but I had the ridiculous idea that I was called upon to brighten the cyberpunk movement. It’ll be a murky mess, trying to reconstruct old dialogue between me and Bill, but here goes: “It’ll attract people even though it ought to repel them,” I’d say.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

At the same time, biotechnology and its handmaiden, nanotechnology, will be increasing their powers at an equally explosive rate. When these changes join forces, we will have arrived at a moment that Kurzweil, along with others who share his perspective, calls “the Singularity.” The term, first popularized by the scientist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, is borrowed from physics. Like a black hole or any similar rent in the warp and woof of space-time, a singularity is a disruption of continuity, a break with the past. It is a point at which everything changes, and a point beyond which we can’t see. Kurzweil predicts that artificial intelligence will induce a singularity in human history.

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

In 2015, more than $8.5 billion was invested in the development of new AI technologies. IBM’s Watson supercomputer is hard at work performing tasks ranging from playing (and winning at) Jeopardy! to diagnosing cancer. What will Earth be like when humans are no longer the most intelligent things on the planet? As science fiction writer and computer scientist Vernor Vinge wrote, “The best answer to the question, ‘Will computers ever be as smart as humans?’ is probably ‘Yes, but only briefly.’”5 As the excitement grows, so too does fear. The astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Dr. Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

disinformation, Drosophila, failed state, Future Shock, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pneumatic tube, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge

Robert wasn’t quite sure what they said, though he remembered that Carlos seemed a little worried for him, perhaps mistaking Robert’s raw confusion for some kind of medical emergency. Then he was down the elevator and back on the sunny plaza. And hovering immanent all around him were the worlds of art and science that humankind was busy building. What if I can have it all ? The End ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vernor Vinge is a four-time Hugo Award winner (for novels A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, and novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” and “The Cookie Monster”) and a four-time Nebula Award finalist. He’s one of the bestselling authors in the field and has been featured in such diverse venues as Rolling Stone, Wired, The New York Times, Esquire, and NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Chris Anderson Gordon Bell Katy Borner Stewart Brand Eric Brende David Brin Rob Carlson James Carse Jamais Cascio Richard Dawkins Eric Drexler Freeman Dyson George Dyson Niles Eldredge Brian Eno Joel Garreau Paul Hawken Danny Hillis Piet Hut Derrick Jensen Bill Joy Stuart Kauffman Donald Kraybill Mark Kryder Ray Kurzweil Jaron Lanier Pierre Lemonnier Seth Lloyd Lori Marino Max More Simon Conway Morris Nathan Myhrvold Howard Rheingold Paul Saffo Kirkpatrick Sale Tim Sauder Peter Schwartz John Smart Lee Smolin Alex Steffen Steve Talbot Edward Tenner Sherry Turkle Hal Varian Vernor Vinge Jay Walker Peter Warshall Robert Wright Annotated Reading List Of the hundreds of books I consulted for this project, I found the following selected ones to be the most useful for my purposes. Listed in order of importance. (The rest of my sources are listed in the Source Notes.) Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Scott Adams wrote Scott Adams (1996), The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions, HarperBusiness, 12. 18 years if Matthew Sherman (2009), “A Short History of Financial Deregulation in the United States,” Center for Economic and Policy Research. potential failure Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), Democracy in America, Saunders and Otley. Chapter 16 the singularity Vernor Vinge (1993), “Technological Singularity,” paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30–31 March. Raymond Kurzweil (2005), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Penguin Press. against the government Leonard Deutchman and Sean Morgan (2005), “The ECPA, ISPs and Obtaining E-mail: A Primer for Local Prosecutors,” American Prosecutors Research Institute.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The assumption was that “information dominance” would assure American superiority. Saffo, who was an inveterate and careful notetaker at meetings, listened as Brand spoke on the second day. He cited cyberpunk writers like William Gibson, who pointed out that technologies often played out in unforeseen ways, asserting that “the street finds its own uses for things,” and Vernor Vinge, who had forecast the advent—only decades in the future—of a “singularity” in which machines would outthink humans. Brand warned the group that we were moving from the world of global cities, from a world where citizens had lots of privacy, to the online global village, where we would have no privacy.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

This field is less mature; we don’t yet know for sure what the best practices are, nor what accuracy rate to NATURAL LANGUAGE CORPUS DATA Download at Boykma.Com 239 expect, although the winner of a 2004 competition had 71% accuracy. The best performers in the competition were linguistically simple but statistically sophisticated. Document Unshredding and DNA Sequencing In Vernor Vinge’s science fiction novel Rainbows End (Tor Books), the Librareome project digitizes an entire library by tossing the books into a tree shredder, photographing the pieces, and using computer algorithms to reassemble the images. In real life, the German government’s E-Puzzler project is reconstructing 45 million pages of documents shredded by the former East German secret police, the Stasi.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Ruminoff, Vol. 6 (New York: Academic Press, 1965). 106Nick Bostrom, “How Long Before Superintelligence?”, International Journal of Future Studies, 1998, vol. 2.. 107 The singularity was conceived of shortly after the advent of modern AI studies, having been introduced by John von Neumann in 1958 and then popularised by Vernor Vinge, in “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era” (1993), available at: https://​edoras.​sdsu.​edu/​~vinge/​misc/​singularity.​html, accessed 22 June 2018 and subsequently by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005). 108In 1968, a Scottish chess champion bet AI pioneer John McCarthy £500 that a computer would not be able to beat him by 1979.

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy. Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod and Liz Williams. Obvious inspirations include Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among other cyberpunk and postcyberpunk writers. His first published short story, "The Boys", appeared in Interzone in 1987: his first novel, Singularity Sky was published by Ace in 2003 and was nominated for the Hugo Award. A collection of his short stories, Toast: And Other Rusted Futures appeared in 2002.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

Acknowledgments For their comments, I thank Paul Christiano, Peter Twieg, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman, Tyler Cowen, Fabio Rojas, Bonnie Hanson, Luke Muehlhauser, Nikola Danaylov, Bryan Caplan, Michael Abramowicz, Gaverick Matheny, Paul Crowley, Peter McCluskey, Sam Wilson, Chris Hibbert, Thomas Hanson, Daniel Houser, Kaj Sotala, Rong Rong, David Friedman, Michael LaTorra, Ben Goertzel, Steve Omohundro, David Levy, Jim Miller, Mike Halsall, Peggy Jackson, Jan-Erik Strasser, Robert Lecnik, Andrew Hanson, Shannon Friedman, Karl Mattingly, Ken Kittlitz, Teresa Hartnett, Giulio Prisco, David Pearce, Stephen Van Sickle, David Brin, Chris Yung, Adam Gurri, Matthew Graves, Dave Lindbergh, Scott Aaronson, Gary Drescher, Robert Koslover, Don Hanson, Michael Raimondi, William MacAskill, Eli Dourado, David McFadzean, Bruce Brewington, Marc Ringuette, Daniel Miessler, Keith Henson, Garett Jones, Alex Tabarrok, Lee Corbin, Norman Hardy, Charles Zheng, Stuart Armstrong, Vernor Vinge, Ted Goertzel, Mark Lillibridge, Michael Chwe, Olle Häggström, Jaan Tallinn, Joshua Fox, Chris Hallquist, Joshua Fox, Kevin Simler, Eric Falkenstein, Lotta Moberg, Ute Shaw, Matt Franklin, Nick Beckstead, Robyn Weaving, François Rideau, Eloise Rosen, Peter Voss, Scott Sumner, Phil Goetz, Robert Rush, Donald Prell, Olivia Gonzalez, Bradley Andrews, Keith Adams, Agustin Lebron, Karl Wiberg, Thomas Malone, Will Gordon, Philip Maymin, Henrik Jonsson, Mark Bahner, Adam Lapidus, Tom McKendree, Evelyn Mitchell, Jacek Stopa, Scott Leibrand, Paul Ralley, Anders Sandberg, Eli Lehrer, Michael Klein, Lumifer, Joy Buchanan, Miles Brundage, Harry Beck, Michael Price, Tim Freeman, Vladimir M., David Wolf, Randall Pickett, Zack Davis, Tom Bell, Harry Hawk, Adam Kolber, Dean Menk, Randall Mayes, Karen Maloney, Brian Tomasik, Ramez Naam, John Clark, Robert de Neufville, Richard Bruns, Keith Mansfield, Gordon Worley, Giedrius, Peter Garretson, Christopher Burger, Nithya Sambasivam, Zachary Weinersmith, Luke Somers, Barbara Belle, Jake Selinger, Geoffrey Miller, Arthur Breitman, Martin Wooster, Daniel Boese, Oge Nnadi, Joseph Mela, Diego Caleiro, Daniel Lemire, Emily Perry, Jess Riedel, Jon Perry, Eli Tyre, Daniel Erasmus, Emmanuel Saadia, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anamaria Berea, Niko Zinovii, Matthew Farrell, Diana Fleischman, and Douglas Barrett.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

New goods, old theory, and the welfare costs of trade restrictions. Journal of Development Economics 43:5–38. p. 355 ‘the world economy will be doubling in months or even weeks’. Hanson, R. 2008. Economics of the Singularity. IEEE Spectrum (June 2008) 45:45–50. p. 355 ‘a technological “singularity”’. This notion has been explored by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. See Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near. Penguin. p. 355 ‘says Stephen Levy.’ Levy, S. 2009. Googlenomics. Wired, June 2009. p. 356 ‘says the author Clay Shirky’. Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. Penguin. p. 356 ‘Says Kevin Kelly’. Kelly, K. 2009. The new socialism.

Kiln People by David Brin

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Easter island, index card, jitney, life extension, machine readable, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, price anchoring, prisoner's dilemma, Schrödinger's Cat, telepresence, Vernor Vinge, your tax dollars at work

But that's just part of the tradition in a genre that thrives on the unusual and loves to take on clichés. I'd like to thank those who provided assistance, especially with critical readings of early drafts, and with insights on the historical, literary, and philosophical implications of golems. Special appreciation goes to Cheryl Brigham, Beth Meacham, Stefan Jones, Vernor Vinge, Tappan King, Wil McCarthy, Ralph Vicinanza, John Douglas, Lou Aronica, Mason Rourman, Steve Sloan, Mark Grygier, Steve Jackson, Joe Miller, Vince Gerardis, Beverly Price, Stephen Potts, Hodge Cabtree, Robin Hanson, Steven Koerber, Alberto Monteiro, Steinn Sigurdsonn, William Calvin, Trevor Sands, James Moore, Nick Arnett, Ruben Krasnopolsky, Robert Qualkinbush, Jim Kruggel, Tamara Boyd, Manoj Kasichainula, Pat Mannion, Amy Sterling Casil, Daniel Jensen, Rachel Heslin, Alex Spehr, Lisa Gay, Bret Marquis, Brian Sidlauskas, Stella Bloom, Rae Paarlberg, Joshua Knorr, Dr.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Until it was popularized by Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, “singularity” was a term that was hardly used colloquially. Building on an earlier idea of a “technological singularity” introduced in 1993 by the science-fiction writer and computer scientist Vernor Vinge, Kurzweil proposed that we are approaching a singularity in which our bodies and brains will be augmented by genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to become hybrid cyborgs no longer bound by the constraints of biology. It was suggested that this would result in a collective intelligence that will be enormously more powerful than all present human intelligence combined.

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

singular The stories in this collection are too various for us to draw a tidy summary of what twenty-first-century cyberpunk is about, nor do we see the profit in it. However, so many of them imply or actually explore a post-human future that we would be remiss if we failed to point out that a logical consequence of much of cyberpunk extrapolation is the singularity. Vernor Vinge, by no means a cyberpunk, although highly respected by them, first proposed the notion of a technological singularity in 1993. Briefly, he contemplates a moment in history in which runaway technology causes a change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence.”

Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge

fudge factor, gravity well, Isaac Newton, job automation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge, VTOL

Vernor Vinge Across Realtime Book I. The Peace War - Flashback - One hundred kilometers below and nearly two hundred away, the shore of the Beaufort Sea didn't look much like the common image of the arctic: Summer was far advanced in the Northern Hemisphere, and a pale green spread across the land, shading here and there to the darker tones of grass. Life had a tenacious hold, leaving only an occasional penin-sula or mountain range gray and bone. Captain Allison Parker, USAF, shifted as far as the restraint harness would permit, trying to get the best view she could over the pilot's shoulder.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower. In addition, new AI machine-learning systems could ingest information on their own and teach themselves how to generate outputs, even upgrade their own code and capabilities. The term “singularity” was used by the mathematician John von Neumann and the sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when artificial intelligence could forge ahead on its own at an uncontrollable pace and leave us mere humans behind. “That could happen sooner than we expected,” Musk said in an ominous, flat tone. For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene. We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed Earthly civilization.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Millennia/ tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats 79 4.5 Contemporary techno-millennialism 4. 5 . 1 The s i n gu l a rity a n d tech n o - m i llen n ia l i s m Joel Garreau's (2006) recent book on the psychoculture of accelerating change, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human, is structured in three parts: Heaven, Hell and Prevail. In the H eaven scenario he focuses on the predictions of inventor Ray Kurzweil, summarized in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. The idea of a techno-millennial ' Singularity' was coined in a 1993 paper by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge. In physics 'singularities' are the centres of black holes, within which we cannot predict how physical laws will work. In the same way, Vinge said, greater-than-human machine intelligence, multiplying exponentially, would make everything about our world unpredictable. Most Singularitarians, like Vinge and Kurzweil, have focused on the emergence of superhuman machine intelligence.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

It was a personal challenge, and I thought it was going to save me time instead of writing a series, but it took me nearly ten years to write the darn thing anyways!” BS [laughter]: Is there any A Fire Upon the Deep influence on this? That’s a book you’ve read? CP: That is a book I’ve read, and I also had the enormous pleasure of meeting the author, Vernor Vinge, in an airport, between cons. I also enjoyed Rainbows End. BS: I get a little bit of that! It’s really a cool book—I’m loving all the names, unless I’m completely off base, these are all little inside jokes? I’ve caught some aliens— CP: Mm-hm. BS: I’ve caught some science fiction author names for some of the names of planets and space stations, I’ve definitely caught some Dune here and there, little nods.