Re: What Makes An Idea Viral? (Seth Godin)

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Wed Sep 28 2005 - 16:25:42 MDT


At 04:47 PM 9/28/2005 -0400, Ralph wrote:

>"pdugan" <pdugan@vt.edu> wrote...
>
>>Maybe SIAI's volunteering effort should include a symposium for
>>novelists/scriptwriters/media artists ect. whose themes and aesthetics center
>>around Singularitiarian ideas.
>>
>> Patrick Dugan
>
>You know where this would really be effective? If you held a symposium on
>Singularity art and fiction at one of the big transhumanist conferences.
>You could probably get at least a couple well known SF novelists to
>participate if you paid their way, and maybe a couple other people active
>in genres where they'd experienced success in sharing these ideas --
>basically film, television, comics and of course journalism and
>non-fiction books.

Some of us are running as fast as we can. I suspect I posted this link only
to the extropian list and not here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Issues/09Broderick.html

The idea is out there; arguably, it's *the* idea in print sf right now...

http://www.analogsf.com/0511/reflib_11.shtml :

< Charles Stross does love the cornucopian vision of the future promised by
the nanotechnology enthusiasts and their dreams of assemblers, utility fog,
programmable matter, artificial intelligence, mental uploads and downloads,
and the Great Singularity or Spike looming in the perhaps-not-too-distant
future. The basic idea is a shift from an economy of scarcity (today’s
economy) to one of abundance. How will we make a living? No problem, for
living and a great many trimmings besides are free. How do we find value
for our lives? That will take some discovering, but some people have
already begun to search...

Those of us who read SF have heard of nanotechnology, artificial
intelligence, robots, silicon adjuncts to the brain that let people control
prosthetic limbs or machinery, mental up- and downloads, memory boosters,
life extension, post-humans, transhumanism, and the Singularity or Spike.
If we also read the science news (Technology Review, Scientific American,
New Scientist, and the like), we know that much of what we are accustomed
to seeing in fiction exists in embryo already. It’s in the lab, or even in
commercial prototype. But it’s not in a store near you­yet!

Most of the rest of the world hasn’t a clue, for the stuff that fascinates
us tends not to get into the daily news until it is a lot closer to the
store. These are the people who will pick up journalist and futurist Joel
Garreau’s
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0385509650/analogsciencefic>Radical
Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies­and
What It Means to Be Human and experience a major WOW! moment. >

Damien Broderick



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