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...Manfred Macx from Accelerando!.

"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were."

Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead."

He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees."

Very offtopic . . . but this sentence instantly reminded me of Accelerando a genious Ebook I recently finished, on the future of technolgy told from the perspective of Mandred, an OSS advocate/Bondage submissive. Very Hilarious.

For those of you who enjoy fiction, Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the best fictional treatments of the Singularity I've had the pleasure of reading. In Accelerando one of the characters refers to the Singularity as the 'rapture of the nerds'. Great stuff.

Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'? I'm sure that a person from the 19th century, when confronted with the complexity of life today, would contend that the Singularity has already happened, but this time is still (largely) comprehensible to us. As time marches on, and things become steadily more complex, won't humans, augmented by increasing levels of technology, maintain at least a cursory connection?

I highly recommend reading this book (for free online, btw):

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

One of the ideas presented in there is that technology doesn't make us dumber...rather it expands our intellects beyond our physical bodies. If we stop defining intelligence as only what goes on in our biological brains, we can start considering our minds as the hub of a distributed network of computational apparatus.

BitTorrent in particular is good for huge legal files with huge demand peaks (e.g. new Linux distribution ISOs and it's good for large distributed bodies of files (like Furthur.net). [...] In your case, a website and HTTP distribution seems the best way to go, despite its unsexiness.

Another advantage of BitTorrent is that other people can easily join in to reduce your bandwidth costs.

When somebody recently a book via BitTorrent, I thought that was pretty cool, and wanted to help out. I joined all the torrents and have just left them running. If a favorite band were to release something this way, I'd do the same thing.

But its only chapter 1 of Accelerando the book. And in each subsequent chapter he's distilling things down, speeding things up. By the 2nd half of the book he's handing you pan galactic gargle blasters as his chapters. Never mind a brick wrapped in lemon: his book is a porcupine wrapped in velvet. Once you're done quite a lot is going to stick with you.

You get jealous of the lobsters and start worrying heavily for yourself. You remember that feeling of being a top-of-the-techworld Silicon Valley type going to Japan for the first time. Jetlagged in Akihabara, it hits you that you're a bit behind the curve: your portables are Model-T's and Japanese teenagers are choosing their Ferraris. And Charlie is telling you that the feeling is only going to get worse. And permanent. And your kids and grandkids'll have to deal with it too. Better hope your grandniece's "My First Pharma Lab" can make a nice TetraValium, you'll need it.

The technologists can tell you why the Singularity is Near- why today's technologies are leading towards it. But it takes a book like Stross's to remind you that we're not just contemplating a technologic switch equivalent to tool-making and upright walking, or even lungfish thinking about a permanent stay: we're the anaerobes wondering what happens if the atmosphere switches to oxygen, but we keep on producing oxygen by-products anyways.

...a few hours of slackjawed cartoon watching and the worry mostly fades away, but you never get all of the quills out. Or at any rate, its a very good read-- better be on the Nebula and Hugo shortlists. It isn't a perfect book, writing-wise, but he's got the Sensawunda: the rest comes with practice. That a great author is going to get better is cause for happiness.

Charles Stross has released a novel called "Accelerando",

http://www.accelerando.org/

under a license which says you may not create derivative works from it (an action defined by a judge) or use the work for commercial purposes.

The novel is not as easy to start as other Stross' books. (I have read "Singularity Sky", "Iron Sunrise", and the "Family Trade", all of which I consider `page turners'. Singularity Sky begins with the line `The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones ...'; it is about an `out of context problem', an adventure story about what happens when a sigularity-blind government tries to deal with Von Neumann replicators.)

As I said, I had troubles. Perhaps the beginning of Accelerando comes from an earlier period in the writer's life. In any event, my troubles went away. I could not set aside the middle and latter parts of the book; either I got more interested in it or by the time he wrote those section, Stross had learned to write more attractively. (With interruptions, he wrote the book over the period 1999 - 2004.)

Regardless of the beginning, several of the ideas in the book are wonderful and new to me.

One contemporary issue is the dropping cost of information reduplication. `Accelerando' takes the notion of copying a step further. What if you can inexpensively and safely copy people?

To quote Stross:

Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences?

I had not thought of this question. What if Stross copies himself 60 million times, and each copy registers to vote, and no one else makes copies of themselves?

(This book is an example of inexpensive copying, so inexpensive that I did not consider it a cost at all: I did not have to obtain `Accelerando' on paper, which is what economists call a `rivalrous' good. The novel contains a straightforward extrapolation of the lowering cost and integrity of copying...

(A `rivalrous' good is one in which your use `rivals' mine. Thus, we both cannot wear the same shirt at the same time. If I consume paper, you cannot consume that same paper. Non-rivalrous goods are those which we can both have at no or little extra cost. Laws are an example: my obeying a law does not prevent you from obeying it. Likewise, the information content of a book is an example. Your reading a book does not prevent me from reading it.)

Another question revolves around solar systems in which there is a great deal of rapid networking:

"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip.

Scarcity is felt to be even worse if the entities are electronic rather than biological. That is because their thinking speeds may be a million times faster than human. Then, in conversation with someone 100 light years away, instead of taking 200 years for each turn around, the subjective time from a human point of view is 200 million years. That duration is much longer than the time between the death of the dinosaurs and the present.

Stross' concept, by the way, provides one answer for David Brin's question in his paper

The `Great Silence': The Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Life http://skew.ot.com/three/random/silence.html

which, as it says, was written

... to catalogue the factors which would determine and/or predict the likelihood of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligent species ...

Suppose every civilization that could communicate be

No, Cory truly is as passionate as he claims to be. He's released every one of his books for download, and evidently intends to continue to do the same.

Speaking of which, Charlie, are you planning on releasing the results of your Accelerando-for-free experiment? Have you been able to infer any patterns yet? Is Cory on to something here?

On the topic of downloadable literature about rapidly-accelerating technology, Charlie Stross's newest novel is available for free download. Here's the relevant info (from another one of my slashdot submission attempts):

Programmer-novelist and Hugo nominee Charles Stross has gotten permission from his publishers to make his newest novel, Accelerando, available as a free download in several formats. As described by one reviewer: 'Accelerando fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity. As the novel can be somewhat dense in novel technical ideas, I've started a Technical Companion on wikibooks to help provide more information on the relevant concepts.

On the topic of downloadable literature about rapidly-accelerating technology, Charlie Stross's newest novel is available for free download. Here's the relevant info (from another one of my slashdot submission attempts):

Programmer-novelist and Hugo nominee Charles Stross has gotten permission from his publishers to make his newest novel, Accelerando, available as a free download in several formats. As described by one reviewer: 'Accelerando fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity. As the novel can be somewhat dense in novel technical ideas, I've started a Technical Companion on wikibooks to help provide more information on the relevant concepts.

This reminds me of the continuously hacked/upgraded robot cat, Aineko, in Charles Stross' science fiction novel Accelerando (available for free download).

It will be interesting to see how complex these customized Aibo become in the next 10-20 years.

The only SF author I know of who writes FTL stories and doesn't totally ignore what relativity says about the consequences of FTL is Charles Stross (see Singularity Sky).

Speaking of whom, check out his latest novel Accelerando, available free under a Creative Commons license. I'm about halfway through and am enjoying it quite a bit.