I’ve just finished reading The Rapture of the Nerds, written by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. It’s an often almost dream-like book about life in the era of the technological singularity. Wikipedia explains:
The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood.
However, followers of Ray Kurzweil, better have some sense of humor reading this book as it is a comic novel.
It often is even hilarious, and especially those who have experienced life in user-generated virtual worlds such as Second Life or Open Sim will have a good time reading this stuff. Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow are very interesting authors, who did some serious thinking about the issue of singularity and it seems they are very sceptical about it (Stross maybe even more than Doctorow). Here you find a wide-ranging interview with blogger, activist and author Doctorow:
Also visit Charlies’s Diary, being the blog of Charles Stross, and then try to comment there: you’ll be linked to an interesting Google Group where Stross interacts with his readers. He seems to use the Google Group to avoid the spam.
At The WELL you can participate in a forum discussion with both authors.
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