To Dorkbot-SF at Chicken John's place, just around the corner from my house.
Highlight of the evening was meeting one of my heroes, Rudy Rucker. (A colleague of mine later asked me, "What do you say in a situation like that?" "Something stupid, in my case", I replied.)
Rudy was talking about some of the ideas he has explored in previous books and some which will appear in 'Postsingular
', the first novel of a new trilogy. Chief among these is the notion that computers as distinct entities will go away because everything will become a computer. Inspiration for this comes from Wolfram's observation that many natural processes are effectively performing class 4 computation and are therefore equivalent to Universal Turing Machines. A branch of a tree waving in the wind is doing a bunch of hard sums just to work out what it's going to do next. Rudy envisages a world where all this computation is put to better use - computing minds.
