Comments on: Focus Group Query: What Do You Want in Postsingular?

By: Steve H

Steve H — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:39:44 +0000

Rudy, the ‘Nektar’ excerpt seems to show you’re on the right path - much clearer to demonstrate popup brain spam in a paragraph then to spend a page describing it. Better as jhn says to show what they have for breakfast.
It seems privacy concerns would increase with orphids - everybody’s up in yo’ grill all the time, honkin’ they horns. I’d definitely want my bedroom insulated.
I suspect you could use the Big Pig to check huge calculations like chaotic hurricanes and where every dime in the world goes, but you could just remember the answer and not much of the process that got you that answer. (Would orphid spam contain much pig, or just McPork?) Why does the Big Pig talk to us? Is it bored, benevolent, baneful?
Also you could use it to level the corporate/financial field: you have the same access to info that corporations have, and given budget, the same ability to hire subcontractors.
Culture would explode - everyone would ‘get’ everyone else’s references. I’d expect a lot of ‘rediscoveries,’ where some artform or image or novel that was overlooked in its day would become ubiquitous for a week (Beany and Cecil everywhere!). Possibly there would be artforms that required an IQ of 1000 to understand, or an orphidnet connection to see. What if you were a Picasso at one of these forms, until you logged off and became ordinary?

By: BrianB

BrianB — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:35:38 +0000

It makes me think that any sort of celebrity status would be something to avoid at all costs - the current culture in reverse. Kinda like in Frek & the Elixer with all the aliens wanting to watch you, except now it’s your friends and neighbors and everyone around you. It would drive everyone into a hole, I think - move on, nothing to see here.

By: emilio

emilio — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:50:38 +0000

sex! Sex is going to be the thing that keeps me connected to my humaness. Since all of my other needs are going to be met sex becomes the one thing that I can only have so much of. It is also what is going to set me apart from the AI. Likewise the AI will want to understand this thing. Sex asks an ultimately spirtual question. What am I? The struggle will be over identity. I think the even would over through almost all existing philosophical and religious ideas, but it won’t answer the untimate questions.

By: Rogue

Rogue — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 12:28:36 +0000

For what its worth, the very concept that there is a cyber god/goddess would make a huge upriseing in the various religous sects. Christians , Wiccans, jewish etc all would deny it and its exsistance, this will most definatly cause a major clash. Considering the histories on religous war, how should this be any different. Know the Subtle abilities of the churches, i wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to “make there own god” to compete with the big pig.Not to mention that a bunch of open source and freeware coder kids would want to make there own personal god/goddess. and not to mention that the compition between this emergent pantheon would bring about conflicts that effects real world. and the whole net would also effect the subconsious, and vice versa. I’m thinking the apperance of a greek type sociaty that conflicts with more modern system. johnscott.weddington@gmail.com

By: european reader

european reader — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:50:47 +0000

“Getting high by contacting the Big Pig is similar to the experience of a devout person becoming ecstatic through prayer.”
Hmm devout persons do not get high through prayer. Prayer or meditation should calm you down normally. Ecstasy, loss of clear thinking should be evil religion, like born-agains. Zombified morons who get fed conspiracy theories that the world is flat and anti-pig is out to get them or something.
Plus, I keep asking myself what is the DRIVE behind this orphid-thing. How is it different from good old cyberspace? What’s it for?
Did you read Light by MJ Harrison. He actually used these clicheed SF-plots to create a story about people, their troubles and ideals, roads not taken and triumph and all that.
I so dug your moon boppers and their vedic/buddhist cosmology cast in metal - contacting the Big One thats just a random-noise generator, collecting ‘karma metal’ for another rebirth. Now that was cool. But nowadays we’re all a bit jaded with the technology. There will realistically be a pocket device that holds all human knowledge plus a non-stop video of your life in about 25 years… what do people make of it? Will it bring about an end to fear and paranoia or just unlimited knowledge that will inevitably be used for evil purposes?

By: Marshall Bolton

Marshall Bolton — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 17:52:13 +0000

What I would like from Postsingular is some answers. I imagine the blurb saying: THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.
Numbers have been crunched - answers have to be given.
I imagine a scene in the book where all the connected heads sit down at an appointed time and try to answer a koan eg. “What’s it all about, Harry?” Or some such thing.
The Big Pig gives a hint or remains stubbornly silent….
The actual physical book should contain a battery-driven sound generator (little piglet grunts perhaps) and a satchel of “synthetic
dandruff”. The Big Pig would like the readers to repeat this collective experiment. The seventh of July 2007 @ 7 AM (some standard time) everyone should put this stfuff in their hair, sit down by their computer and ask themselves the self same question with answers routed to Rudy’s blog.

By: lanny

lanny — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:51:11 +0000

hio Rudy,
you’ve read the stross of course
which has a few of these scenarios played with,
but i’d say as to the feel, you might include
the “squirt” as in spam blocking itself might use an inset conceit.. if you had access to a random set of software-objects as in object based programming,
maybe the spam would be seen then as a matching geometry, you see the spam, match its api morphology
zip track to a range of morph and load the squirt
from a libary, sort of like shot-gun troubleshooting
but the nifty think, in the squirt is perhaps some hybrid modulating, the patterns are rough and something non-intelligent is writing the code like a toaster, in other words, you’ve got micro-selves or amybe like slave broca’s in there with you, and maybe they do talk or accept commonads and modulate commands, something like that, loved lifebox,
and course the cannibal brain eating robots, cool to see your blog!

By: gamma

gamma — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 22:54:35 +0000

the big pig with enlarged curly tail & snout growing larger thinx “what if the winter olympigs was held in a real kool place like Pluto - what a frozen gas that could be” .- while they were assembling mt.kilimanjaro next 2 the depot near the port central - mt.fuji - they opened the games with a spectacular gala & painted the stars like a dot to dot think fer the kidz 2 do

By: gamma

gamma — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:42:08 +0000

the big pig goes to Mount Kilimanjaro 2 organise the winter olympigs like is just a lot of sport on ice & snow but they have cloud seeding signals which make Mt.Fuji look like a dot on a large mass of space called Gnowhereiam? they get there snow boarids 2 compete withinn it.

By: jhn

jhn — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:17:23 +0000

I am interested in the day-to-day, routine, and boring activities of foreign cultures generally than I am in special things. I think that knowing what people of a certain culture eat for breakfast tells you more about them than their religious festivals and national holidays. I think that a novel on what it’s like in some transreal posthuman world ought to focus on small, trivial things.