Week Ten: Writing Assignment

For this week, we are learning about Psci-fi. I read Accelerando by Charles Stross. It tells the story of the different generations of a family all connected by a specific technological point. In the beginning we follow Manfred Macx. He's in Amsterdam when he receives a phone call from some very distressed lobsters. The government has begun to upload lobster consciousness into the web. He then teams them up with an old colleague to try and fight for their artificial intelligence. As all of this is going on, his controlling ex-wife forces him to get back with her and they have a daughter together. A little while later, he is mugged and his memories are stolen. He is than forced to rediscover who he is. At this point my reading petered out and I wasn't able to continue. 

This book reads like 1984 with too many scientific descriptions that I really couldn't keep up.
However, I'm sensing that I'm supposed to be confused, somehow caught up in all of the jargon makes it easier to overwhelm me and push the technology down my throat somehow easier to change everything without me noticing because I am still three steps behind trying to figure out what "nanolithography" means.

Also, the realities that were shown in this book don't seem very far off from the future. It seems like the primary technologies that the book keeps referring to are metacortices and exocortices. Apparently, an exocortex is something that humans use to make themselves smarter, like a computer or the glasses that all of the people wore, or the A.I.s. A metacortex is a "superior brain" made from combining something else, so technically what the government was attempting to do with the lobsters. The exocortices are something we are living with today. Smart phones, google glass, etc. Metacortices are something that I haven't heard of yet, but that doesn't mean it doesn't loom on the horizon, especially with the cloud.

All of the technology mentioned in the book makes you think about your own reality. What we are doing and how it could all potentially go wrong. Books like this always seem like a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence. In some way or another is always surpasses human intelligence. And when you think about it, it seems like a no-brainer. How smart is a computer? Way smarter than me, for starters.