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Charles Stross anticipated this in Accelerando: "Amber scans the READ ME quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is
by patrickmay 13y ago
Charles Stross anticipated this in Accelerando:
"Amber scans the READ ME quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards -- a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law -- the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her -- that's what her grammar engine is for -- or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP...."
Points off for capitalizing Lisp, but otherwise prescient.
- moomin 13y agoI don't remember that ending well...
- marcosdumay 13y agoWarning, this is a spoiler. If you want to read the book, don't read it. I simply can't get how the characters kept being human, even after not locked into a body anymore, and turning themselves into several different forms just for fun. In those circumstances, it could end in no other way... but it is a very bizarre set of circumstances. Also, the lack of ambition of post-singularity beings annoys me to no end.
- tlrobinson 13y agoInterestingly, he is a vocal critic of Bitcoin (as a currency, at least): http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-wa...
- wyager 13y agoHis criticism is unsurprising; he's a modern luddite. He thinks the tech he grew up with (and maybe a bit more advanced) is A-OK, but anything else is eeevil.
- jjarmusch 13y agoThere are plenty of intelligent people who believe that bitcoin is the myspace of digital money. And plenty of other intelligent people who believe that it can be made just fine by adding dozens of layers of technical complications, and then somehow creating an easily comprehensible interface across those layers. And plenty of other intelligent people who get hellbanned because they said something snarky but true about a yc moneymaker.