I think that basing the anti-war-on-terror argument on the supposed difficulty or rarity of terrorist action is a poor tactic. While, in the US, to date, deaths due to terrorism have been astronomically low-frequency, a cursory examination of potential avenues or tactics for terrorist action and mass murder in the present and near future suggests that it is the exact opposite of difficult - that in fact, mass murder or economic disruption or whatever is horrifically easy.

Take, for example, foot and mouth disease. A relatively recent outbreak in North Carolina spread to 6 other states in

The point is, there is *nothing* we can realistically do to stop this, or events like it. It takes cursory research to come up with the idea, a bit of savvy to get a live sample, and zero effort or risk to implement the actual infection.

This is the power and promise and terror of the age: the power of the individual. To create and produce, by means of new technology, and to cause mass destruction, by the same paths. And there is nothing we can do about it - genie is out of bottle, as it were.

So, the issue is, do we lower the quality and signal-to-noise ratio of our lives and restrict our freedom in order to put on a production of Security Theatre, hoping that it will make us feel better about the awful, inevitable, sublime possibility of annihilation hanging over us, or do we embrace the empowered individual, accept the threat of uncontrollable, unpredictable disaster, and try to live our lives as freely and tolerantly and meaningfully as we can?

In the face of death, we should be impelled to live better and brighter and faster, not to cower in fear and submit our society further to mechanistic, corporatized, intrusive control.

I received an advance copy so I could write a review for my high school's newspaper - now I'm donating the book to the town's local library. Thanks for the great idea, Cory!

MightyMouse1584...it sounds so much like the name of a Disney plant that it's too obvious to be real - I think the term flamebait should be abjured in favor of false flag.

Counterpropaganda is fun, but not as fun as counter-counter-propaganda.

I agree that much of the obsession and fetishism associated with the computer-centrism of Singularitarian belief is just a new face on the old Judaic/Neoplatonic meme - denial of the flesh, ascent to a better and purer state of being, the transcendent end of history, etc. - basically the Rapture recycled for nerds. It's helped along by the social rejection and poor body image common in the early developmental periods of most so-called "nerds", especially in the US.

However, I think it is without doubt an immediate ad logicam fallacy to dismiss the entire idea of discursive intelligence expansion based on the cultural roots of some of its proponents' motivations.

There are two different, very separate views that are both independently justifiable, though not to the same degree: first, that the information density of space is unstable and subject to discursive fractal recomplication - the formation and spread of life, then intelligence, and intelligence's continuous, expanding transformation of natural/dumb matter into more of itself across deep time.

This process may experience multiple inflationary periods of varying magnitudes, purely because of material preconditions...one such I would agree is currently upon us, given the computational revolution as well as the prospects of biotech and nanotech. Whether there has been a single, smoothly continuous inflationary period throughout human history so far is up for debate, and not really relevant.

Second, that we are approaching a uniquely (up til now) asymptotic event in the human state and in history. This is a much more difficult-to-justify and potentially "faith-based" claim. I find the idea that a strange or acausal physics could give birth to a local computational Eschaton or uplift a segment of the human population into a radically different form, rate, and substrate of consciousness in a short period of time, with radical and massive accompanying changes to the structure of local space or human society, to be immensely interesting. Sort of a mesh of Clarkeian inexplicability, Kurzweil's singularity, and a near-term, localized Tiplerite scenario.

But while it's interesting, it isn't provable, and attention is better spent on reading or writing good transcendental scifi about the topic, or doing the physics which might lead to it - not debating seriously about whether it's going to happen.