From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 18:51:51 MDT
[I apologize for sending the last couple of paragraphs like
this in a separate message -- it's my clumsiness with Netscape
Communicator].
Carnegie-Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec's non-fiction
_Mind Children_ came to my attention soon afterwards, and dared to
suggest seriously that something much like Vinge's technological
black hole was just around the corner, perhaps even within my
own lifetime. The most memorable item in _Mind Children_ was
Moravec's description of a technique to gradually move a human
mind from a biological to a non-biological substrate, without
duplication,
and without interrupting the consciousness of the mind being
transferred.
I had thus been steeped in transhuman speculative fiction (and
the very occasional non-fiction discussions such as those by
Clarke and Moravec) for most of my literate life when I stumbled
across the Extropians on the 'net in '97. The one really new thing
was encountering Yudkowsky's _Staring Into The Singularity_, in
which a seemingly rational, intelligent person was arguing quite
forcefully and plausibly for the occurrence of an **unavoidable**
(barring disaster) technological singularity with decades rather
than centuries or millenia. I haven't quite decided whether I really
believe this or not, but I have to admit that it's re-crystallized my
view of the world, so that when I see, for instance, a newspaper article
like the one in last Friday's New York Times about molecular
computing, I say to myself "here comes the Singularity".
Jim Fehlinger
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