Beyond Singularity

The future isnt through with you yet. Featuring stellar contributions from some of today's most masterful practitioners of speculative fiction, Beyond Singularity presents fourteen visions of a tomorrow where rapid technological and genetic breakthroughs have rendered humanity obsolete. _Old HundredthÓ by Brian W. Aldiss _Rogue FarmÓ by Charles Stross _NaturalsÓ by Gregory Benford _Osmund ConsidersÓ by Timons Esaias _CoelacanthsÓ by Robert Reed _The Dog Said Bow-WowÓ by Michael Swanwick _Barry Westphall Crashes the SingularityÓ by James Patrick Kelly _Flowers from AliceÓ by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross _TrackerÓ by Mary Rosenblum _Steps Along the WayÓ by Eric Brown _The Millennium PartyÓ by Walter Jon Williams _The Voluntary StateÓ by Christopher Rowe At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Featuring stories from some of today's masterful practitioners of speculative fiction--including Gregory Benford, Cory Doctorow, and Christopher Rowe--this collection envisions a tomorrow where rapid technological and genetic breakthroughs have rendered humanity obsolete. Original.

“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —Los Angeles Times “Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —The Boston Globe “A pleasure to read.” —The Wall Street Journal One of CBS News’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005 A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and The Singularity is Nearer who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence” For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

(Music Pro Guide Books & DVDs). In his first book, Desktop Mastering , Steve Turnidge unveiled his unique approach to mastering in the box, all the while providing glimpses of his mind-set and resulting workflow. Now, in Beyond Mastering , Turnidge pulls back the veil to give a tour of the physics and philosophy driving the mastering engineer, and the internal state required for happiness and success. By definition, universal truths can be expressed in any medium. In this book, these truths are revealed through the art of mastering, building on the step-by-step methods explained in Desktop Mastering , related in well-developed metaphor and analogy. Beyond Mastering is full of guiding principles gained from Turnidge's more than 25 years at the forefront of art and technology.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate.

Over the past decade ‘singularity’ has been a prominent term in a broad range of fields, ranging from philosophy to literary and cultural studies to science and technology studies. This volume intervenes in this broad discussion of singularity and its various implications, proposing to explore the term for its specific potential in the study of literature. Singularity and Transnational Poetics brings together scholars working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, translation studies, and transnational literatures. The volume’s central concern is to explore singularity as a conceptual tool for the comparative study of contemporary literatures beyond national frameworks, and by implication, as a tool to analyze human existence. Contributors explore how singularity might move our conceptions of cultural identity from prevailing frameworks of self/other toward the premises of being as ‘singular plural’. Through a close reading of transnational literatures from Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and South Africa, this collection offers a new approach to reading literature that will challenge a reader’s established notions of identity, individuality, communicability, and social cohesion.

Addressing the need for an up-to-date reference on silicon devices and heterostructures, Beyond the Desert 99 reviews the technology used to grow and characterize Goup IV alloy films. It covers the theory, device design, and simulation of heterojunction transistors, emphasizing their relevance in developing the technologies involving strained layer