Accelerationista
“Accelerando” (Charles Stross)
This week I’ve been frittering through Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s a great book, and I’m genuinely bummed that I’m going to be finished it soon. Like, tomorrow sometime in the midafternoon probably somewhere over Nebraska. Stross has vaulted himself into my shortlist of science fiction writers with the likes of Vernor Vinge and Richard Morgan. Also, the man writes a great blog. How does he do it?
This week’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I’ve been hanging out in Silicon Valley experiencing first-hand the onslaught of the singularity. It’s not difficult to imagine that we’re approaching a technological asymptote while hanging out here, watching Googlers speeding by on their community motor-scooters, borg-like humans conf-conversing with their hive-mind over bluetooth headsets while the non-uplifted struggle to keep up. Connectivity is everywhere (Google Wi-Fi doesn’t work very well yet, but it will). Every coffee shop and eatery presents a different hot-spot, competing for your laptop’s attention. Handheld computers are roughly equivalent to the most advanced desktop computers of a decade past. In turn, an unimaginable computing resource ten years before that. Storage is now more easily measured in terabytes per household instead of gigabytes. The storage capacity of a single hard-drive easily outstripping the capacity of a single house’s volume if filled with books.
And on it goes… Moore’s Law, if unchecked, will bring us unimaginable computing powers. Mere darwinian evolution is about to be made obsolete. It already is. It was…
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