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Ideas from “Accelerando”
By john | August 20, 2006
Just finished reading the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. In a nutshell, it’s a sci-fi novel involving 3-generations of a family, and follows them from pre-singularity earth through a post-singularity universe. Why I don’t think it’s his best book (it’s actually a collection of previously-published short stories), I was particularly impressed with some of the ideas about the future. We really need people with imaginations like Charles Stross to come up with ideas for where we can go with technology, and this book is loaded with them. Below are just a small list of his characters’ usage of technology that I believe are particularly in line with my interests and this blog, and should be achievable in the next 10-20 years (if not sooner):
- Using a wearable display as the primary means of interacting with his computing and information devices
- Carrying a tiny 64-node computing cluster in his jacket
- Recording a person’s life and memories, and storing them to a remote, encrypted backup
- The metacortex: “a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors…is as much a part of [the character] as the society mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge.
- Using the metacortex to assimilate gigabytes of data daily to stay on top of the ever-increasing world developments
- The ability to map the entire brain to make a digital copy of a person, and then uploading that person onto the Internet
- Being able to spawn copies of yourself to go investigate new experiences, and then integrating those copies back into yourself
Topics: singularity, enhance |