There's an interesting idea first proposed by the science fiction writer and computer science professor Vernor Vinge in a 1993 talk. Vinge pointed out that if we can make technological devices as intelligent as ourselves, then there seems to be no reason that these devices couldn't readily be made to run a bit faster and have a bit more memory so as to become more intelligent than people. And then — the real kicker — these superhuman machines might set to work designing still better machines, setting off a chain reaction of ever-more-powerful devices.

[Ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera. Transcendence.]

Contrarian that I am, I have some doubts about this. You need to get over two hurdles to make an AI Singularity of this kind. (a) Get programmable matter that thinks like we do, (b) Be able to speed up the computation. Usually people attack (a), but it occurs to me now that attacking (b) might be fun instead. In opposition to (b) is my new Wolframite belief that you can't actually speed up the computations that ordinary matter is doing. Nature is always and ever jamming at the max flop.

[Hiphoppers, 34th St. Subway stop. Friendly aliens.]

But suppose I get around this as follows: Imagine some new matter, doughy stuff in a super-entangled quantum synch with itself, some Silly Putty that “computes” much faster than at the standard rate.

[The secret machinery of the world, seen at a Pre-Dada art show in the Neu Galerie on Fifth Ave. at 86th.]

It's matter that “runs faster” than regular matter; it's, like, wattaflop matter as opposed to our normal petaflop matter.

[Veselka Ukranian restaurant 2nd Ave and ~9th St. Food lab.]

The other approach to singularitizing the mind is to wake up the hive-mind. Bring yourself into quantum synch by watching an opera together.

[Opera-goers: hive mind #17]

A related line of thought is is Seth Lloyd's article about black hole computers in the November, 2004, Scientific American, there's a similar article online. Throw some input in the form of physical garbage into a little black hole and watch the radiation come out — here's your encrypted output, mofo. Dzeent. “Ack, a hard rain of cosmic rays!”

Matter is computing itself at a very high rate. Is all of that going into “being intelligent”? Could we shift over some idle computation to be a thousand times smarter?

[Stop making sense.]

Tonight we saw our old friend Eddie Marritz. Eddie and us go way back, he helped inspire some of my stories and essays, see “Eddie” in, e.g. “Tales of Houdini,” “Drugs and Live Sex, NYC 1982” and Master of Space and Time.

Not that Eddie in real life is similar to the louche characters I depicted. It's more that I was hanging around with him when I had the ideas, and drew upon his physiognomy to help imagine the characters.

We’re in NYC for a few days, visiting Georgia and seeing my editors. I had an odd moment in the airport; there were un-turn-offable ceiling-mounted TVs irradiating every single seat in the waiting lounge with a Presidential Address. It reminded me so much of Half Life 2 where you keep passing these screens with the same talking face, endlessly lying, devoid of any compassion or information. Or like Big Brother in 1984. Odd that we actally live in a world as weirdly skewed as a videogame. And that we're passively letting it happen.

Anyway, today we went to the new MOMA NY to check it out. Lots of lines. I did a Lynndie.

Incredible all the modern masterpieces hanging around in the museum. Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is tiny, like a Robert Williams painting, very clear and reproducible — I was being jostled by a crowd of fellow worshippers. I’d like La Hampa to look like this. That jellyfish thing on the ground always reminds me of a line in William Burroughs The Soft Machine: “You win something rike jellyfish, mister. Or it win you.”

Then a bit of shopping. The Macy's store here has more clothes than most cities.

Aren't these beautiful boots?

So I got John Brockman to enshrine one of my science raps among the 177 answers to his EDGE Annual Question – 2005 , “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

Here's a graphical image of what I said.

I’m still looking through the other answers; there’s some good stuff.

Cabin fever. My mate and I went into the city to spend money at post-xmas sales. The amazing Inferno-like interior of Nordstrom’s on Market Street, SF, the souls migrating from level to level.

Tanking up for the return home, I’m struck by the beauty of my gas pump hose.

Where have I seen this image before? Ah, yes, very like the snout or proboscis of a cone shell devouring the flesh of a less-fortunate cousin. I learn from the Cone Shell / Conotoxins site in Melbourne that these little guys actually create disposible venom-filled “teeth” which they muscle out to the proboscis tip, thence to be fastened to the prey. And they have different conotoxins for different occasions.

The metaconeshells who hide beneath reality have sucked this San Franciscan’s mind away.

The gas pump is, in a very real sense, the Combine's control organ. [“Combine” in the sense of an evil controlling oligarchy, as used in Half Life 2.]

Speaking of odd ideas, I finished the latest round of revisions on my Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul so maybe now I can get back to writing science fiction.

The image of there being a cone shell tube running to each of our brains reminds me, come to think of it, of a passage in my novel Frek and the Elixir. Here’s the quote.

***

Much later a noise woke Frek, a thump and clatter as of something sliding across the building’s roof. The moaning sound of high wind filtered in.

All was still calm in the little room . The overlaid versions of Li’l Bulb were projecting, Frek’s companions were asleep, and Zed wasn’t around. Frek could feel the reassuring lump of the egg in his pants pocket. Lying quite still, he stared up at the mind worms.

For some reason he was seeing them and Li’l Bulb in a new way. The mind worms’ motion trails seemed to persist for longer than before, and he could make out some previously invisible loops of their bodies. It was as if, during his rest, Frek himself had become a little hyperdimensional.

Jiggling his eyes brought more and more of the gray lampreys into focus — revealing something dreadful. Slowly writhing tubes led to Wow, to Gibby, to Carb — and, yes, to Frek. Even though Frek had often felt like he was blocking out the watchers, the branecasters had a mind worm permanently attached to his head.

He slapped his hand against the spot where it seemed the gray tube must plug in. But his fingers felt nothing. The parasitic thought-suckers were hyperspatial; they came in from a direction he couldn’t touch or normally see — they were four or even five dimensional. The lampreys were like fingers poking down into the centers of gingerbread men.

Looking up at the mind worms, Frek’s vision grew yet more inclusive. There weren’t just a dozen or a hundred of the sluggishly coiling things. They numbered — Buddha help him — in the billions, each of the lampreys looping off through the fourth and fifth dimensions to plug into one particular person back in the plain brane. Each and every person on Earth had an individual mind worm siphoning off their thoughts. That’s what it meant to be a talent race.

***

The only way to beat the centrally controlled media is to roll your own. Hence I blog.