* This is very much not "Rucker vs. the Singularity." This is "Rucker vs. Some People's Ideas of the Singularity." I loved Postsingular, and the end of the book details a quite magical singularity indeed, based roughly on the same ideas that he talks about here. I don't see how anyone could deny that he's talking about a singularity in his fiction, at least.

* One single-celled eukaryote says to another single-celled eukaryote: "hey Larry, what if some of us started working together and then each of us specialized for certain jobs so that we could thrive as collective organisms instead of on our own?" "That's crazy talk, Bob. In fact, it's impossible. More importantly, I hate that idea." (It seems that I've stolen this kind of analogy from a couple of people, including Hofstadter and Kurzweil)

* A singularity isn't reliant on Kurzweil's accelerating returns or on anybody else's particular itinerary. A singularity also doesn't necessarily mean virtual-Earth scenarios like Rucker thinks are impossible; it would take a lot less than that to provide a global mindfuck worthy of the "s"-word.

* Maybe we will go through a another "dark ages" like Mr. Doctorow talked about here, but it wouldn't last forever. Maybe a singularity won't happen on Earth for another billion years, or maybe humanity is going to blow itself up too soon. But the fact is that there are compelling reasons to think it could happen in this century. That's no reason to bliss out on daydreamed apocalypse/rapture scenarios; it is reason to invest in some planning and risk assessment instead of sweeping the issue under the rug with all the other "crazy" ideas (like global warming has been for the past half-century or so).

* In answer to Triple McSlice's perhaps-rhetorical question about technology adoption rates: here's a graph (the bottom one).

I've spent a lot of time reading BB posts over the past year or so, and I recall some of this SFWA stuff that's referenced here. I decided to follow the link to Andrew Burt's site from one of the first comments on this page, and I ended up reading through a bit of "his side of things" (regarding, for instance, the scribd.com thing from a while back.)

Following that link reminded me how important it is to be sceptical about what I read. Maybe this guy is just as awful as everyone excerpted in this post makes him out to be, maybe not. It "goes without saying" that the shrewd reader should balance their intake with contrasting points of view...but really, with however-many-hundreds of items in that feed reader, how often do we do that?

Personally, I tend not to go beyond the blog post and its accompanying links. I usually take things at face value unless it "sounds fishy" or if there's a large and obvious potential for the writer's emotions to skew the language and misrepresent things. I think that's probably true for most of us.

I almost did the same thing with this post, and it resulted in a very particular image in my mind of Andrew Burt as a pompous, myopically-DRM-loving dinosaur (piled on the previous hazy-but-similar image I had from my memories of previous BB posts about him). According to Burt, however, he "hates" DRM, "loves" Creative Commons (but doesn't seem convinced of its long-term viability for authors wishing to make a living), and thinks that the current length of copyright term is too long:

Aburt on Copyright

Burt's side of the story regarding past issues is, of course, going to be biased, so it would be silly to take it at face value:

On Cory Doctorow

More to the point: through the cumulative readings of a handful of BB posts, I had formed an opinion of this guy without ever having sought out his side of things. I took someone else's opinion of him at face value because I knew nothing about him and had no particular reason to suspect anything else.

I don't have much personal interest finding out "the truth" about Andrew Burt, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time pouring over posts from Cory and other SFWA members and cross-referencing them with Burt's rebuttals, etc, etc. But this experience was a good reminder for me about the importance of paying critical attention to how and why I believe what I believe.

Reminds me of this rather humerous interpretation of how the universe works:

http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/digital-wheels.htm#Disk%20Drive

...and hey, just as I thought maybe I should submit the link to Boing Boing, it turns out they already covered it four years ago :P

My friend Brian Evinou (esteemed animator and comic book artist/aficionado) organized a gathering for 24HCD last weekend at the Hairy Tarantula in Toronto. I wasn't there to participate, but I'm rather proud of this 24HC that I did back in 2005:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmacaulay/sets/72057594075088455/

It is called "Heaps and Heaps," and is a growing-up story of friendship and loss (with robots).