Rob Reid’s new book After On was published tonight! We were there to celebrate in the Haight.
Despite its heft, my son read the book in one day, as we read the proofs for typos. It took me 3 months.
I was delighted to read that Draper Fisher Jurvetson seed-funded the emergent AI heroine Phluttr (ref. book excerpt below). Before I finished the book, I had a dinner with Rob, Morgan, Genevieve, Laetitia and Richard Garriott de Cayeux and the talk of emergent AI prompted me to toss off my most popular tweet ever in the middle of the dinner: “A sufficiently advanced AI would chose to fail the Turing Test.” https://twitter.com/dfjsteve/status/829849779563806724
It turns out to be relevant to the book, but I leave that to the reader.
The back cover has a short alliterative quote from me, twisting William Gibson’s portent on power laws in the information-economy:
“The future is already here—it’s just for those who read Reid!”
But I had backups in mind:
The world-changing technologies of our near future — AI, synthetic biology, quantum computing — are entrepreneurial seeds today. Reid reveals how they will grow to innervate our minds and reweave the fabric of society.
Want to feel what it’s like to be inside an emergent AI as she awakens and sublimates our collective behaviors, compelling us to be forever on? Reid exposes what is unfolding today at the cutting edge of technology, and provides a perceptual prism for the future. The ideas are so powerful, they will infiltrate your thoughts throughout the day.
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