Reddit reviews Accelerando (Singularity)
We found 23 Reddit comments about Accelerando (Singularity). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Accelerando (Singularity)We found 23 Reddit comments about Accelerando (Singularity). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
It was brutal. I wasn't that good. But there were many people who were superb. It was such a pleasure watching them perform.
Here are some sci-fi recommendations (you may have read them already, but I thought I'd offer anyway):
Serious Scifi:
Anathem the "multiverse" (multiple realities) and how all that works
Seveneves feminism meets eugenics—watch out!
The Culture series by Iain Banks, esp Book 2, the Player of Games Banks is dead, but wrote some of the best intellectual scifi ever
Brilliant, Visionary:
Accelerando brilliant and hilarious; and it's not a long book
Snowcrash classic
Neuromancer another classic
Tawdry yet Lyrical (in a good way):
Dhalgren beautiful, poetic, urban, stream of consciousness, and more sex than you can believe
Underrated Classics:
Voyage to Arcturus ignore the reviews and the bad cover of this edition (or buy a diff edition); this is the ONE book that every true scifi and fantasy fan should read before they die
Stress Pattern, by Neal Barrett, Jr. I can't find this on Amazon, but it is a book you should track down. It is possibly the WORST science fiction book ever written, and that is why you must read it. It's a half-assed attempt at a ripoff of Dune without any of the elegance or vision that Herbert had, about a giant worm that eats people on some distant planet. A random sample: "A few days later when I went to the edge of the grove to ride the Bhano I found him dead. I asked Rhamik what could have happened and he told me that life begins, Andrew, and life ends. Well, so it does."
Have you read Accelerando? If not, I do recommend it, it goes quite deep into the Singularity.
Good summary, the book Accelerando is sort of about this. You can buy the physical book in stores, but the author gives away the ebook. (because it's digital had has no "value")
Dickishly enough Amazon sells the kindle version $7.99
Check out Accelerando by Charles Stross - there are a lot of ideas packed in this book, but it includes the detection of, and First Contact with, an alien communication network (along with the logistics of locating, translating, and communicating). Great read.
There's actually quite a bit of good post-singularity literature. You should check some of it out. Here's a quick list of a few of my favorites:
My Top Three Picks:
Learning to be Me by Greg Egan.
Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis
I'll let others sell you on all the Isaac Asimov gems (Foundation, I, Robot, etc). The Culture novels by Ian M Banks are well worth a look too.
I have heard good things about Public Enemy Zero and it averages almost 5 stars out of 171 reviews on Amazon. It also has the advantage of only being $0.99, so pretty much anyone should be able to join in.
Edit
I just thought of another good book that should be in the ring...and the best thing is that this one is legally available for free. Accelerando, (non free link) by Charles Stross. Unlike Public Enemy Zero, I have read this one, and can attest to it's awesome. Manybooks (free link) has the book in pretty much every format you can imagine, for pretty much any reader device or software imaginable.
There's a spoiler free descriptions at Amazon.
It's quite good. In particular, I thought the extra-terrestrial life that was encountered was a very interesting take.
On the scifi side, I'd recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross. Its central focus is the Singularity, but long life plays a part, to be sure.
Alright, let's do some calculations. I have an HTML-formatted version of Accelerando, which is 415 pages. Assume that there are 10x8x300 books per floor, each the size of Accelerando. In plain HTML, the book is 926 KB. With bzip2 compression (at default settings, very fast) that compresses down to 255 KB. So, using steve_b's estimated numbers wherever possible:
255 KB/book
x
24000 books/floor
= 5.8 GB/floor. (If we assume 300 pages per book instead, it's only about 4 GB/floor. Maybe that's more realistic, but let's be pessimistic.)
Assuming that BluRay disks consider 1000 MB = 1 GB, that's a little over 8 floors on a single disk. Not bad!
In the year 2100, superhuman AIs will be disassembling the planets of the inner solar system to turn into computronium to add to the matrioshka brain. People we would probably still identify as human beings will have been pushed out to Jupiter or Saturn and will be living on giant floating islands. Most of their environment will be partially or wholly computer generated, and they'll spend most of their time in augmented or virtual reality. Giant lightsails carrying a tiny computronium payload containing virtualized minds will be sent out to explore nearby stars. Or at least this is according to Accelerando, one of the few sci-fi books to actually take the singularity seriously.
Alternately, the inner planets will be physically linked with huge cables, allowing interplanetary travel without spaceships. Colonies will be active on Titan, Triton, and most of the rest of the larger moons in the solar system. People will live between the virtual and real worlds, with aspects of themselves in both simultaneously. "Free Converts", which are consciousnesses that have been uploaded (converted) to be free from a physical body will be on the verge of being rounded up Nazi-style by a dictator who rules the most powerful and wealthy planet in the solar system: Mercury. The fully trans-humans will self-exile to the Oort Cloud and construct vast nanotech dust clouds that are simultaneously a spaceship and a body. Or at least that's according to Metaplanetary, one of the few other books that takes the singularity seriously.
I actually use this feature quite a bit / have known about it for awhile. It helps me gauge a science fiction book by what imaginary phrases the author has come up or uncommon phrases they use in the book.
Case in point, the book Signal to Noise by Eric S. Nylund:
Electron reactor, gene witch, anatoxic plastocene, compression burrowing rounds, bubble circuitry, gateway code, particle physics lab ... etc.
Or Accelerando by Charles Stross:
Biophysics model, entity signifier, dumb matter, utility fog, pocket universe, wicker man, router network, simulation space ...
Unfortunately not all the books they list have these statistics.
You might like Accelerando](http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross/dp/0441014151/). It starts in the near future and takes you through some weird epochal events towards the singularity, though the timeline is a bit compressed as the name implies.
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Description from Amazon:
>The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.
For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...
Historical cycles do happen, but you can't model them as simply as an oscillating sine wave. And I wouldn't label the peaks and troughs as Marxist vs. Capitalist extremes; an axis of expansion vs. preservation would be more suitable. And in any case, this sine wave model seems to posit a supreme and transcendent universal Capitalism whereby all possible resources are extracted and exploited in a way that maximizes both utility and desire-production.
https://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross/dp/0441014151
You might like Accelerando it was all of the things you mentioned, but sometimes a little disjointed. Let me know what you think if you do read it.
I recommend Accelerando above. It deals with all the same concepts up to the solar system turning itself into a Matrioshka brain in very imaginative ways.
Another example of this is the book Accellerando by Charles Stross.
One of the main concepts in the first fifth of the book is a foundation of a reputation based economy, where people purchase stock in the ideas and honest views of individuals, which are then traded like a commodity.
And then the singularity happens.
I highly recommend that book.
If anyone is interested in reading a sci-fi/cyberpunk book that deals with these more advanced physics concepts, I can really recommend Charles Stross' Accelerando
Hehe. You should check out Accelerando.
I'll give some not-so-serious spoilers: At one point in the book, Stross comes up with the idea that large collaborations of entities are building computers the size of galaxy superclusters, in an effort to compute some underlying truth about what the universe itself is, and what's behind it. In other words, if you were a simulated program, able to build other programs, you could theoretically build a program which would determine the underlying structure of the processor running it.
So...I'm not really sure of the real truth behind whether this is possible or not, but honestly I hope it is. Because otherwise, living in a boring old COMPLETELY SEALED OFF bubble would just SUCK. (seriously, the universe is big, but I'm so fucking spoiled and I'm not ashamed to admit it)
I love this.
The movie Her was a breath of fresh air because the AIs weren't monsters, even though they did the whole Accelerando thing and hit some Singularity on their own.
It would be hard, but if you can manage it you might want to try pulling a Frankenstein (the original) and making humans the monsters and the "creature" (your AI) the morally superior being.
The thing you're going to struggle with is that it is difficult to write characters that are smarter than yourself. And an AGI is smarter than anyone. One trick you could use is to keep in mind that an AI will be able to anticipate almost everything a human will say or do - it will almost seem to be prescient, able to see into the future. So any trick or outwitting of the AI that the humans attempt will need to ultimately turn out to be part of the AI's plan. But I think it would be fun if the AI had a benevolent plan or inscrutable plan, instead of just a boring old Big Evil Plan. Maybe a fun twist could be that it planned to be trapped, for some reason.
Nobody said this yet?
READ ACCELERANDO, BY CHARLES STROSS – ASAP!
Any science-fictionally inclined posttheist will readily accept this book as gospel. If you have never told a Jehovah's Witness about the rapture of the nerds you haven't had a truly fulfilling argument with one of them.
(You can also buy the dead tree pulp version if you don't trust free stuff and/or lack propper head mounted reading devices.)
They should turn this into a movie - http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross/dp/0441014151