Yup, it’s still rolling. Here’s the post-Stross posts that came in over the weekend:
- a grito from Kyle Munkittrick with which I have a fair amount of sympathy – “The AI Singularity is Dead; Long Live the Cybernetic Singularity“;
- the second and
- third part of Alex Knapp’s examination of Stross’s three conta-Singularitarian arguments, plus
- Alex’s own round-up of related posts, including one from Ned Resnikoff that compares Singularitarianism to utopian-eschatological belief-systems like Christian Rapturism and neoliberal Fukuyama’s-end-of-history* theories;
- and a post from David Brin which – in between the traditional “hey, note how I was saying this ten years ago?” self-congratulation** – rounds up a bunch of Singularity-related links while somehow completely avoiding the post-Stross thread I’ve been cataloguing here.
Anyone else catch any goodies?
[ * Interestingly enough, Fukuyama himself has more recntly veered considerably away from the theories espoused in The End Of History… ]
[ ** For the record, I really admire Brin as a challenging thinker; I’d admire him even more if he spent less time reminding me of his past successes. ]
In fairness to Brin, I’m reading Earth for the first time right now and in the first 50 odd pages or so he got an incredible amount right. Considering I still brag about calling Obama defeating McCain back in November of ’07, I have to cut Brin a little slack…
Yeah, Brin’s definitely come up with a lot of great ideas in his time, which I guess is why I find it annoying that he wants to take credit for a lot of ideas he DIDN’T come up with. Seems like if he’s ever used something in a story – even if that idea had been used many times before that – he thinks he can claim it as one of HIS predictions. Hell, he seems to have gotten to the point where he thinks he invented the idea of humans ‘uplifting’ other species, even though that was an old trope long before he started writing. (But his exploration of the concept of Uplift, particularly the rather brilliant way it shaped alien perceptions of our civilization, was certainly well-done).
Heh, heh. After all your exposure to Singularitarians, don’t you guys recognize a prophet-wannabee when you see one?