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People who actually work in the industry, including award winning authors will point out that as much work goes in to turning a manuscript in to a book as goes in to writing the manuscript. That's today, with the crappy level of editing and proofreading.

I have no formal training in "copy editing", "proofreading", or any other publishing skill.

Yet, it takes me only about an hour to reformat a book from the crappy HTML that almost all eBooks have into something that fits the ePub standard. Likewise, I have taken community-scanned books with horrific formatting and with a few regular expression search and replace, turned them into correct paragraph-formatted HTML, ready for detail formatting. Again, this only takes a couple of hours.

Proofreading the book does take whatever time it takes (a minute or two per page), though, as even spell- and grammar-checking can't catch much.

Since I'm assuming that current authors write using some kind of computer software, I would suspect that a publishing house would have far less to do in the formatting realm as they would have much better sources than I get to work with. So, unless the book is just broken in some way (characters re-named halfway through, backstory in chapter 1 doesn't match that in chapter 12, etc.), it won't need much in the way of editing, as pretty much every author has their own style and changing that isn't a good thing. eBooks especially have no real limits, so a book with an extra 30,000 words isn't going to cause the publishing run to have to be done with some other physical method, or a smaller font to fit the required page count, etc., so again unless the book is so crappy that it probably shouldn't have been written in the first place, there's really not as much need for "editing" as there used to be.

People who actually work in the industry, including award winning authors will point out that as much work goes in to turning a manuscript in to a book as goes in to writing the manuscript. That's today, with the crappy level of editing and proofreading.

What you want is no editing, no proofreading, and overall shit quality. You can get, literally, millions of books like that for free all over the internet. Enjoy.

A classic description of alienation. It seems to be a driving force for people becoming freelancers where I live - but if you can't escape that way, then perhaps taking the pink pill is a good way out.

As for your sig: I like the same stuff, and I like Iain M. Banks books too. Also most stuff by Charles Stross - sometimes chilling (his reboot of Ctulhu), sometimes going completely off the rails (Accelerando): see http://www.accelerando.org/ to read that story and see if you like his style.

This reminds me of Aineko in Accelerando by Stross. I wonder how long until it becomes sentient and surpasses human intelligence. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel) http://www.accelerando.org/

-molo

Or, if you believe we're all about to have our personalities uploaded to the great singularity in the sky like Ray Kurzweil, you could have an instance of you uploaded to a tiny computer-starship, and live in a virtual environment for the entire journey.

For an interesting and entertaining take on this concept (and other singularity-related ideas) check out the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross.

It's a great book by a fellow Slashdot user, and you can download it free!

(Then go buy some of his other fine works)

...it means that civilizations that spread out and last longer than 1K years are exceedingly rare. Which would mean that our odds of achieving any meaningful interstellar travel are quite low. (We might make a space probe or two, but like how we got to the moon but haven't done anything with it, apparently nobody puts out space colonies.) There are other posible theories, though.

Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross is obviously written by someone who knows computers and most of all sysadms very well.

An interesting bit of trivia is that Charles Stross has a slashdot account with a 4-digit user number. I actually could've sworn that he had a 3-digit number, but I can't seem to find it. You can read one of his books Accelerando for free under a Creative Commons license. If anything some of his writing can be a little -too- geeky, and I imagine non-geeks have difficulty grokking it.

Charles Stross would be elated to hear that someone of power at IBM took his novel and made it real. The next step is their Cell Processor AI array (Sure it exists!) starts auto creating meta-corporations based on their new "whitespace" ventures.

Free downloadable book
http://www.accelerando.org/

I don't know if you count Creative Commons as 'open source or public domain' but I've read quite a few good books and short stories under various CC licenses recently. I'd definitely recommend that you read Accelerando.

I have a huge reliance on my PDA, which has had a huge effect on handling my organizational issues. So should I go back to being as disorganized as I used to be, instead of being the guy who does the organization? I'm just as dependent on my PDA as Steve Mann was on his Wearcam. If you use a cellphone or an addess book or a paper organizer, well, you have the same problem. This isn't a new problem, it's not a high tech problem, I'm sure Himuralabima of Babylon would have found himself just as lost without his clay tablets and stylus as I would without my PDA and stylus... heck, my PDA is almost exactly the same size and shape as his clay tablets.

In Charlie Stross's Accelerando, in Chapter 3, Manfred Manx loses his wearable and the result is, well, not good for a while. But all ends well...

Refusing to use a tool because you'll become dependent on it is only a problem if you plan on stopping using it. Steve Mann decided he was engaged in an experiment. For some of us, electronic memory aids from PDAs and Google on up are a lifestyle, not an experiment.

Reminds me of the software agents that Manfred Macx uses in the book accelerando. Excellent read, by the way, if you haven't already.

Why are we bothering with colonizing Venus? It's only about the same size as the Earth, which means if we've overrun the Earth exponential growth will mean we'll overrun Venus too shortly afterwards.

If we're going to be building floating cities, we should look at our friendly gas giants instead. Thousands of Earths worth of surface area means we'll have enough elbow room, at least for a while.

I'm not alone in this thinking, either; I got the idea from Charles Stross.

But there is still a lag between you abnd your avatar unless you can give your avatar autonomy

Charlie Stross's "Economy 2.0" in Accelerando is closer than I thought.

Good questions. I would imagine that an immune system would be built as an application service layer. In of itself, that doesn't pose too many challenges, and is fairly straight forward. Getting the operating system support and application programming support can be provided by the developers who program the immune system in the first place, by conforming to the standards that vendors provide. If you wanted the immune system to be an application framework, which other applications could build on top of, then you would need to publish standards, get them adopted by vendors and committees, and that would take a much longer time.

I agree that the it takes many years for one generation of software to replace it's predecessor. It's a rather steady march, however. And, while it may be 5 or 10 years away, I see it as only one or two upgrades away. Unlike, say, exocortex software agents, quantum computing coprocessors, visual-cortex neural-interface, or superconducting mag-lev monorails; which, while they exist in the laboratory, are many more years away, I believe.

It's one of the benefits of modular object-oriented design. People have already built a lot of infrastructure to include and distribute anti-virus solutions. They'll continue using the Norton and Symantec application branding; will continue using an anti-virus layer; etc. They'll just recode the internals of the current anti-virus software in the next couple of upgrades, and add more application behavioral standards. I'm not sure the interface will change all that much; and if it does, there will probably be incremental steps. I would bed that, yes, there will be pop ups that say "Application X has been port-switching and communicating to servers we cannot get a security certificate from; application X has been sandboxed and marked for deletion. Would you like to look at the sandbox or continue with deletion?" I'll admit that coherent workflow and a good user interface will be important to the success of this technology. That being said, I don't think this is revolutionary, as much as it is evolutionary. They will leverage a lot of the existing sales, marketing, distribution, and technology infrastructure.

But to answer your question: I think that the internet is becoming something of an ecosystem of sorts. A lot of software is like plants and grass and trees and stuff; but some of it is being developed to behave like herbivores, carnivores, viruses, and the like. I think that the computer immune systems are going to gobble up and eat virus infected software, without much regard for the end user. If the application was infected and gobbled up, download a fresh copy (hopefully, virus free). That will be the way of things. When people are sick and tired of constantly worrying about zombie-botnets, invisible rootkits, keylogging worms, and backdoor trojans, they're going to say 'hell with it... yes, if it looks like an infection, kill it'. And the computer immune system is simply an extension of that mindset.

If you're interested in a Hugo and Locust award-winning book, which discusses some of these topics (amongst many others), check out accelerando, by Charles Stross. You can get the creative commons version here. The main character, Manx, uses a number of advanced technologies, ranging from software agents and reputation markets, to computer immune systems and AI neural nets. Very interesting read.

You may be right about a decade time frame, although I think it will be sooner. Things are speeding up.

Check out the novel Accelerando.

Discusses this concept precisely...guy goes around dreaming up random ideas, then immediately patenting them and donating to Open Source organisations.

Fun singularity-related read. Creative commons too, so it's free.

I don't generally agree with the idea that advanced civilizations would travel across the galaxy in the first place, at least not in any recognizable biological form. That said, our society may very well reach a point where discrete beings are encapsulated in pure information, as opposed to being represented by self-aware sacks of bio-soup.

This mode of existence makes it much easier to travel long distances, as it drastically reduces the requirements for "life support" as it were. Charles Stross explores this idea in his book Accelerando, which is written in a Gibsonesque style in my opinion. If only for fun, give it a read.

It's all about the lobsters and their slow takeoff. Oh, by the way... why do you insist on attaching human failings to hypothetical alien intelligences? Dude, the Matrix has you.

It's science fiction, I know, but...

This is the Nerd Rapture, and heresy will not be tolerated!

Even the Heresy of the Shortened Name. That should be Rapture of the Nerds, not Nerd Rapture. :)

Here.

Most of them anyway - the Stross is a link to buy the ebook for a silly price, so why not try Accelerando instead, which is free, or any of a bunch of stories on his site.

Yep. I really wish the stuff Macx has in Accelerando comes along, and soon. We really need to upgrade our reptile brains.

Wake up, go and read Accelerando by Charles Stross, IP is already in SF, and it's freely available: http://www.accelerando.org/book/

Not to mention, with the amount of highly skilled people at their company they could probably even come up with some applications for automatic generation of depositions, interviews, and even legal briefs and motions. Kinda like those kids from MIT created an automatic paper generator a few years ago and actually got a couple of conference acceptances. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ How can you lawyer a company into submission that has, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of lawyers at their disposal for dollars a day? They could completely bog down the legal system if they wanted to.

Admit it, you took that idea from Accelerando

"Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!"

Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?"

"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years.

There's a spectrum here, and Moore's Law works at both ends (and points between): it can be formulated as predicting exponential growth in the computing power available for a given constant price (and/or device size, and/or energy consumption, etc.), or it can mean exponential decay in the price (size, energy, etc.) for a given constant level of computing power. One form of the equation is simply the logarithm of the other. And it's largely the same basic technological improvements that drive it at both ends.

So a series of ever-smaller/cheaper devices with roughly constant functionality isn't a threat to Moore's Law, it is Moore's Law! It's just that the industry has tended to ignore that end of the spectrum in favor of the "faster! faster! faster!" end, and that may be changing.

It could, however, be a (much-needed!) threat to Gates's Law, the observation that the efficiency of software seems to halve every 18 months or so, giving us roughly constant functionality for our exponentially-growing computing power. Your example of JavaScript driven productivity software illustrates this perfectly:
"But what'll we do with all those cycles/megs when computers are 1000 times more powerful than what we have today?"
"I know! We'll create a new software platform that's 1000 times slower than what we're using today, and rewrite all our existing applications in that!! Web!!!"

But there'll also be no shortage of uses for ever-increasing CPU power. You're right that future computing applications will be radically different from what we have today. Re-inventing the desktop in the browser doesn't qualify, and even the Gibson-esque cyberpunk vision of virtual reality is a bit quaint compared to the Singularity (and related) stuff currently going on in science fiction. (Lately, I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross -- I highly recommend Accelerando, which is free to download).

Greg Egan - best ideas ever. I'm currently re-re-reading Diaspora
Charles Stross - fun. I read Accelerando (free book!), then bought all his other stuff and wasn't disappointed.
Richard Morgan - really likes his Lone Genetically Modified Male protagonists, but luckily he does them well enough for it not to get old.
Alastair Reynolds - the Revelation Space universe is one of my favourites.
Iain (M.) Banks - The Culture novels are quite interesting, and his other books aren't bad either.

Honourable mentions:

Peter Watts - all his books appear to be online. Blindsight is very, very good, but I've not read much else from him yet.
Greg Bear - some of his older works are among my favourites. Queen of Angels, Slant (literally "/") and Moving Mars are one of my favourite trilogies. I'm behind on his newer stuff though, and his latest "terrorist thriller" makes me suspicious.

OMG I have to cry; Someone's just accused Charles Stross of not only looking through the world through a narrow straw, but ignorance in looking to future technology...

Seriously, give some respect, where respect is due: After Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross practically wrote the book on the Singularity.

The Singularity will hit us before any of the problems he describes would become tractable.

That's a fresh idea. Someone should tell that Stross guy that people have even written some really good books about it.

He needs to envision new technologies and sciences to free us from this solar system.

Have you by chance read any of Stross's work? Envisioning new technologies and sciences is pretty much what he's best at. He's written several novels based on the idea of technological singularities. The thing is, most of the technologies he envisions in his novels also tend to also involve such incredible changes that humans tend to be somewhat obsolete, and the phrase "human colonization" becomes antiquated.

For example, in a chapter in one of his novels, Accelerando, (freely available online), a bunch of the (originally human) characters want to visit a curious beacon in a nearby star system. Instead of climbing onto a starship, they instead have their consciousnesses digitized and run as subprocesses on a space probe the size of a soda can, and then have the processes re-uploaded into new bodies after returning from their mission.

Have you ever read Stross?

He's not exactly what we would call a stranger to the concept of the Singularity...

If I've skimmed TFA correctly, what he's saying is that it's Post-Humans that are going to go afield; Not what we today call "humans."

Accelerando

Charlie Stross

It's free as in beer.

Go get it RIGHT NOW!

http://www.accelerando.org/

What are you waiting for?

After reading Charles Stross's "Accelerando!", I was intrigued in particular by the potential to make a complete record of the human brain. Essentially, a .img of YOU. Leaving philosophy aside, taking a person's complete atomic picture (specifically, detailed neuron connections) and having it available would allow for some wild stuff!

But it also presents challenges easily on scale with the Human Genome project, if not harder. This is because the challenge isn't necessarily coming up with a way to gather the data, it's coming up with a way to *understand* the data. The big project will be deciphering the language that the human brain uses to store its information, or at least design an interface that lets one push the human brain to output expected information.

Once we can interface with the brains coded language, immortality and the Digital Heaven are mere steps away.

- DaftShadow

It seems to me that there is a 4th solution, assuming that it is possible to build a computer powerful enough to simulate a human mind, and that it is possible to upload a human consciousness into such a structure. Sending a machine across interstellar distances is likely going to be significantly more practical than trying to transport billions of tonnes of habitat. You don't have to worry about setting up complex biospheres; all you need is a computer significantly robust to survive in interstellar space, and we have more experience in this field than in self-supporting biospheres.

Likewise, it doesn't seem like it'll be too many decades before we have the technology construct a computer powerful enough to simulate (to a reasonable degree of accuracy) the trillions of parallel interactions that occur every second in our brains. Figuring out a way of mapping neurons to 1s and 0s is likely to be a far more difficult problem, but it seems to me that this would be a relatively simple problem compared to creating some manner of ark-ship. Research into this is likely to be relatively inexpensive by comparison as well, as we could start by mapping brain structures of simpler animals (such as Lobsters), and then work our way up.

I suspect that when humanity does visit the stars, it'll be as lumps of silicon (or some more exotic material) strapped onto a dirty great big rocket. Ships that lug their own biosphere around with them are just too costly and complex by comparison.

The reason UFOs are a crock isn't that they are fundamentally impossible in some absolute sense, it's that the line about "If there are aliens that powerful, they aren't going to just buzz us in UFOs" is far, far more true than 1950s scientists could ever have dreamed of.

Read Accelerando (free eBook available), and consider that nothing in that book is particularly physically implausible.

It is exceedingly unlikely that aliens that are just like we are now, only with spaceships, would come by and buzz us. At this point it seems far more likely that if any aliens ever do make "contact", it'll be in the form of a fully-automated colony ship that stops somewhere, maybe in the rings of Saturn or the asteroid belt, and proceeds turning our entire Solar System into computronium. All we could do is hope and pray the probe is programmed to do something nice for us, because we sure as hell couldn't stop it.

Any civilization that has the resources to cross the stars is extremely unlikely to use those resources to build a tin can capable of holding meat-bodies in it, with mass that could instead be made into enough computronium to perform mind-blowing amounts of computation, and blow unspeakable numbers of human-lifetimes worth of energy moving that across the stars, just to buzz humans for no apparently reason. (Yes; in a world of computronium, one standardized human life can be used as measurement of energy.)

The putative aliens of the UFOs are a product of a very peculiar sort of shortsightedness about the ultimate limits of technology that dates from a relatively narrow understanding of science, and are as out-of-date as the idea that the world only needs five computers. Interestingly, both ideas are out-of-date for the same basic reason...

But it looks like the real "innovation" these guys are pushing toward is fully automated filing of lawsuits. I think that was in Accelerando, which is fantastic, and which you can download it free.

In the novel "Accelerando" by Charles Stross (available as a free download if you're cheap) the protagonist's ex-wife is actually an IRS employee charged with reclaiming the "lost" tax revenue that the IRS percieves the protagonist owes due to him managing to live (and prosper) without earning any taxable income. It's a good read, buy it and enjoy.

In the novel "Accelerando" by Charles Stross (available as a free download if you're cheap) the protagonist's ex-wife is actually an IRS employee charged with reclaiming the "lost" tax revenue that the IRS percieves the protagonist owes due to him managing to live (and prosper) without earning any taxable income. It's a good read, buy it and enjoy.

Here's a novel someone is releasing online piece by piece; http://www.complexity.org/linear/In Roads; and he himself links to a artist who has placed works online for free download.

http://www.accelerando.org/Here is Charles Stross' site, a published author who recently made the text for his novel Accelerando available online for free download.

http://www.freeonlinereading.com/links.htmHere is a list of dozens of online novels, many of which are contemporary.

I would imagine that in replies to this thread, if Slashdotters put their minds to it, we could compile a huge list of free writing, art, animation, film etc.

For the investment philistines among us (like me!), why is it illegal?

Anyone else thinking of accellerando?

Rather, I would suggest that once cognitive science has duplicated a cat, tacked on a logic unit and a speech unit, and gotten it down to mobile size, it will have created one scary smart and dangerous robot.

Particularly if it starts hunting down and extracting the neural maps of additional cats to merge into its own consciousness in order to grow more intelligent.

"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick."

Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea."

Sounds like the main character from Accelerando! by Charles Stross. Manfred Macx makes his original nestegg by coming up with ideas then helping others implement them...the book is pretty awesome (and I think reviewed here on /. before)

Agreed. Interestingly enough, the evidence towards the Singularity lays in accelerating growth of technological change. So, it's pretty nifty to see not just a linear or geometic change in technology, but a change which appears to be networked, neural, and therefore, exponential in nature.

If you're looking for a good book that deals with cyberpunk, the Singularity, and transhumanism, I highly recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross. Note: It's a very post-modern, post-millennial, post-cyber kind of book (it seems to aim to be post-homosapien, if possible). It comes off as strange reading, unless you're familiar with the basic primise of the Singularity Conjecture.

Vernor Vinge is a sci-fiction author who was the first to coin up the term singularity, and uses the idea in some of his novels. Linkie: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

If you would like to read one of his books I would suggest Across Realtime, which touches on this subject lightly. Although his other stories are somewhat less palatable for me (but I've only read three).

Other authors who delve more deeply into singularity issues are Greg Egan (hard going, but definatly worth reading) http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/, Charles Stross's Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.htm l, and .

Science fiction is odd as a genre since the authors minds are affected by the technology they see possible at the time of writing. Science fiction writers in the past depicted a future with minimal use of networked computers for instance. So the theme seems to change over time, whereas other genres remain pretty static.

Computer screens are at a good angle for reading. and easy to minimize the book and come back to it later. I was using a pdf and had to write down what page I was on if I had to close the program, but other than that it worked pretty good.

The book I read was Accelerando by Charles Stross. The price was right for the electronic version (Free). Feel free to get both the electronic and paper version and decide which one you like better.

Accelerando

I haven't read The Singularity is Near, but I will now it's been pointed out. I am currently reading the SciFi books of Charles Stross who seems obsessed with the ideas of the singularity. Currently reading Accelerando which gives a very good account of post humanism and the journey to it.

Why wouldn't you have to pay for your e-books?

Here's a good one Also any web page is a HTML document, and is thus content for a e-book reader. And then there's P2Piracy.

These patent troll companies remind me a lot of what LLCs and other corporations evolved into in Charles Stross's Accelerando. You can read it for free, but I encourage you to buy a copy.

It's a very good read. Easily his best work yet. I got quite a kick out of the infovore idea from his "The Atrocity Archives".