Andrew Schwab recorded last night’s MAKERS launch in Toronto, a stellar event that was standing-room only, featuring free Ubuntu disks (thanks, John!), presentation of the Sunburst Award, a reading, and Q&A.
Here’s last night’s TVO Agenda interview on Makers — Steve Paikin and I had a fantastic talk.
A couple weeks back I travelled to Waterloo, ON, to appear at the Perimeter Institute’s Quantum 2 Cosmos science and technology festival. I gave a talk on copyright and did a panel on robotics and AI, both of which were lots of fun. The TVOntario people just sent me the video links for both, with a bonus: the live text-chat from my appearance last night on The Agenda:
Tonight, I’m launching my latest novel Makers in Canada, at the excellent Toronto sf reference library, the Merril Collection, at 239 College St. (3rd floor), east of Spadina. The event starts at 7PM, and I’ll be doing a reading, taking questions, and signing books.
Books are being sold by Bakka Phoenix, and if you can’t make it tonight, they’re happy to take your pre-orders for signed, personalized copies — I’ll sign them tonight and they’ll ship them out right away. They’re at +1 416 963 9993 or inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com.
Hope to see you there!
Tonight, I’m launching my latest novel Makers in Canada, at the excellent Toronto sf reference library, the Merril Collection, at 239 College St. (3rd floor), east of Spadina. The event starts at 7PM, and I’ll be doing a reading, taking questions, and signing books.
Books are being sold by Bakka Phoenix, and if you can’t make it tonight, they’re happy to take your pre-orders for signed, personalized copies — I’ll sign them tonight and they’ll ship them out right away. They’re at +1 416 963 9993 or inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com.
Hope to see you there!
I turned my Boing Boing post about Murdoch’s mad pronouncements on the Internet into a column for the Guardian, called “For whom the net tolls.”
What, exactly, is Rupert Murdoch thinking? First, he announces that all of Newscorp’s websites will erect paywalls like the one employed by the Wall Street Journal (however, Rupert managed to get the details of the WSJ’s wall wrong – no matter, he’s a “big picture” guy). Then, he announced that Google and other search engines were “plagiarists” who “rip off” Newscorp’s content, and that once the paywalls are up (a date that keeps slipping farther into the future, almost as though the best IT people work for someone who’s not Rupert “I Hate the Net” Murdoch!) he’ll be blocking Google and the other “parasites” from his sites, making all of Newscorp’s properties invisible to search engines. Then, as a kind of loonie cherry atop a banana split with extra crazy sauce, Rupert announces that “fair use is illegal” and he’ll be abolishing it shortly.
What is he thinking? We’ll never know, of course, but I have a theory.
As part of the audiobook for my forthcoming experimental short story collection With a Little Help I asked Spider Robinson to read my story “Human Readable” aloud. He did a smashing job, and now he’s serializing the story on his podcast feed.
I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, “Epoch,” which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It’s the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save — and it’s the story of the AI’s bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.
The podcast is in eight parts — I started reading it before I’d finished the story, so there’s some minor inconsistencies that’ll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I’ll be reading “Martian Chronicles,” my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.
The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in “I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet.” That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, “I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing.” Truth be told, I’d rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I’m smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.
Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity’s hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn’t a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren’t any killer apps for AI.
Here’s the eighth and final installment of a story-in-progress, Epoch, commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth for my forthcoming short story collection WITH A LITTLE HELP.
