Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Michael Bruce Sterling the 58 year old American science fiction author best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology helping to define the cyberpunk genre has been featured by George Dvorsky in an article published on io9 titled ‘Bruce Sterling Thinks Artificial Intelligence Has Jumped the Shark’. Dvprsky states “…if his recent comments about the potential risks of greater-than-human artificial intelligence — or lack thereof — are any indication, he’s itching to start a giant fight among futurists. …Sterling penned a four paragraph article saying that we shouldn’t fear the onset of super AI because a “Singularity has no business model.” He writes: This aging sci-fi notion has lost its conceptual teeth. Plus, its chief evangelist, visionary Ray Kurzweil, just got a straight engineering job with Google. Despite its weird fondness for AR goggles and self-driving cars, Google is not going to finance any eschatological cataclysm in which superhuman intelligence abruptly ends the human era. Google is a firmly commercial enterprise. It’s just not happening. All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We’re no closer to “self-aware” machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s “minds on nonbiological substrates” that might allegedly have the “computational power of a human brain.” A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there’s no there there. So, as a Pope once remarked, “Be not afraid.” We’re getting what Vinge predicted would happen without a Singularity, which is “a glut of technical riches never properly absorbed.” There’s all kinds of mayhem in that junkyard, but the AI Rapture isn’t lurking in there. It’s no more to be fretted about than a landing of Martian tripods.”

Inspired by George Dvorsky, io9 ow.ly/gXH7O Image source Pablo Balbontin Arenas ow.ly/gXH9v

Vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism (May 16th 2012)

Jane Rogers the 59 year old UK novelist and teacher, best known for her novel ‘Mr Wroe’s Virgins and The Voyage Home’ has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, for her first novel  in the science fiction genre ‘The Testament of Jessie Lamb’, a narration by a fictional teenager. The award director Tom Hunter, stated “It wasn’t an obvious Arthur C Clarke winner – it’s not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press. But I don’t think anyone was surprised it was nominated. It really is a very good book and it has found a real audience in the science fiction readership, it offers a route into dealing with quite serious issues, about science, about maternity and about making choices.” Described by Alison Flood in The Guardian as a “vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism… Taking place in a world in which a deadly virus, Maternal Death Syndrome, affects all pregnant women, putting the future of the human race in jeopardy, The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the story of one 16-year-old who decides she wants to save humanity. She volunteers for a programme in which she will be injected with an immune embryo, but also put into a coma from which she will not recover.”

Inspired by Alison Flood http://ow.ly/aOQ6c image source United Agents http://ow.ly/aOPA9

Thomas Arthur Darvill the 29 year old English actor best known for his recurring role as a Doctor Who science fiction television series companion Rory Williams, is set to play Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus at the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, to be performed with giant puppets, stilt walkers and costumes of the Renaissance period. Mephistopheles is a Devil’s servant who takes human form to oversee the scholarly Doctor Faustus’ pact with the devil. In a BBC interview Darvill states “It’s been a play that I’ve loved since I was quite young … I find the relationship he has with Faustus and the people whose souls he collects quite fascinating.” Darvill is also a musician and composer having formed a band in his teen years named ‘Edmund’, playing guitar and keyboard.

Inspired by Tim Masters ow.ly/5wMIq image source FanPop ow.ly/5wMHJ