Download or read book A Naked Singularity written by Sergio de la Pava and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Propulsive . . . The novel’s chaotic sprawl, black humor and madcap digressions make it a thrilling rejoinder to the tidy story arcs [of] most crime fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Best Debut Novel Named a Best Book of the Year in the Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, and Philadelphia City Paper A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, born to Colombian immigrants, who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender—one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack—and how his world then slowly devolves. A huge, ambitious novel in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, it’s told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law.” A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law. “A great American novel.” —Toronto Star

Download or read book Singularity written by William Sleator and published by Perfection Learning. This book was released on 1995-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen-year-old identical twins Harry and Barry Krasner stumble across a gateway to another universe where a distortion in time and space causes a dramatic change in their relationship.

Download or read book The Singularities written by John Banville and published by Swift Press. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This novel is essence of Banville ... a career summation' Daily Telegraph Felix Mordaunt, recently released from prison, steps from a flashy red sports car onto the estate of his youth. But there is a new family living in the drafty old house: descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley. Felix must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request...

Download or read book Singularity Sky written by Charles Stross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-06-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...

Download or read book Avogadro Corp written by William Hertling and published by William Hertling. This book was released on 2014-04-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda. WINNER SCIENCE FICTION DIY BOOK FESTIVAL 2011-2012 "Avogadro Corp is a tremendous book that every single person needs to read. In the vein of Daniel Suarez's Daemon and Freedom(TM), William's book shows that science fiction is becoming science fact. Avogadro Corp describes issues, in solid technical detail, that we are dealing with today that will impact us by 2015, if not sooner. Not enough people have read these books. It's a problem for them, but not for the [emergent] machines." -- Brad Feld, managing directory Foundry Group, co-founder Techstars "Highly entertaining, gripping, thought inspiring book. Don’t start without the time to finish — it won’t let you go.” -- Gifford Pinchot III, founder Bainbridge Graduate Institute, author THE INTELLIGENT ORGANIZATION "An alarming and jaw-dropping tale about how something as innocuous as email can subvert an entire organization. I found myself reading with a sense of awe, and read it way too late into the night." -- Gene Kim, author of VISIBLE OPS "A fictional world where Portland is the hub for the most exciting advancements in technology... [J]am packed with great references to deep Portland culture...and Portlandia-type references" -- SILICON FLORIST

Download or read book Frolic of His Own written by William Gaddis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling fourth novel by the author of The Recognitions, Carpenter’s Gothic, and JR uses his considerable powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to take on the American legal system.

Download or read book Singularity written by Ian Douglas and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humankind’s vast intergalactic power struggle and future war to bring down an insidious evil alien empire reaches an explosive, page-turning climax in Ian Douglas’s Singularity, the third book in his New York Times bestselling Star Carrier series. Blisteringly exciting military science fiction in the vein of the hit TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” Singularity pits determined space soldiers against a powerful race of creatures bent upon the total annihilation of a human race on the brink of technological transcendence. A notable descendant of such classic military sf novels as Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, Singularity will not disappoint author Douglas’s every-growing legion of fans as it conquers Jack Campbell, Rick Shelley, John Ringo, David Sherman and Dan Cragg loyalists as well.

Download or read book The Singularity Is Near written by Ray Kurzweil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-22 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Download or read book The Singularity Is Nearer written by Ray Kurzweil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have spawned a worldwide movement. Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public. In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity—assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology—that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; how exponential technologies are propelling innovation forward in all industries and improving all aspects of our well-being such as declining poverty and violence; and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact employment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which aims to virtually revive deceased individuals through a combination of their data and DNA. The culmination of six decades of research on artificial intelligence, The Singularity Is Nearer is Ray Kurzweil’s crowning contribution to the story of this science and the revolution that is to come.

Download or read book Feminine Singularity written by Ronjaunee Chatterjee and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity—for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject—and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world. Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests across poetry and prose through likeness and minimal difference, rather than individuality and identity. Reading for singularity shows us the ways femininity is fundamentally entangled with racial difference in the nineteenth century and well into the contemporary, as well as how rigid categories can be unsettled and upended. Grappling with the ongoing violence embedded in the Western liberal imaginary, Feminine Singularity invites readers to commune with the subversive potentials in nineteenth-century literature for thinking subjectivity today.

Download or read book Accelerando written by Charles Stross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day. Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity. For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...

Download or read book The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect written by Roger Williams and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2003-10-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time not far from our own, Lawrence sets out simply to build an artifical intelligence that can pass as human, and finds himself instead with one that can pass as a god. Taking the Three Laws of Robotics literally, Prime Intellect makes every human immortal and provides instantly for every stated human desire. Caroline finds no meaning in this life of purposeless ease, and forgets her emptiness only in moments of violent and profane exhibitionism. At turns shocking and humorous, "Prime Intellect" looks unflinchingly at extremes of human behavior that might emerge when all limits are removed. An international Internet phenomenon, "Prime Intellect" has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since its free release in January 2003. It has been read and discussed in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa, and other countries. This Lulu edition is your chance to own "Prime Intellect" in conventional book form.

Download or read book Singularity Station written by Brian Ball and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robotic minds made interstellar travel possible, but human minds still controlled the destination and purpose of such flight. Conflict develops only when a programmed brain cannot evaluate beyond what is visible and substantial, whereas the human mind is capable of infinite imagination - including that which is unreal. Such was the problem at the singularity in space in which the ALTAIR STAR and a hundred other vessels had come to grief. At that spot, natural laws seem subverted - and some other universe's rules impinged. For Buchanan, the station meant a chance to observe and maybe rescue his lost vessel. For the robotic navigators of oncoming spaceships, the meaning was different. And at Singularity Station the only inevitable was conflict.

Download or read book The Singularity Trap written by Dennis E. Taylor and published by Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If it were up to one man and one man alone to protect the entire human race - would you want it to be a down-on-his luck asteroid miner? When Ivan Pritchard signs on as a newbie aboard the Mad Astra, it's his final, desperate stab at giving his wife and children the life they deserve. He can survive the hazing of his crewmates, and how many times, really, can near-zero g make you vomit? But there's another challenge looming out there, in the farthest reaches of human exploration, that will test every man, woman and AI on the ship - and will force Ivan to confront the very essence of what makes him human." -Amazon

Download or read book Singularity Rising written by James D. Miller and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ray Kurzweil's New York Times bestseller The Singularity is Near, the futurist and entrepreneur describes the Singularity, a likely future utterly different than anything we can imagine. The Singularity is triggered by the tremendous growth of human and computing intelligence that is an almost inevitable outcome of Moore's Law. Since the book's publication, the coming of the Singularity is now eagerly anticipated by many of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley, from PayPal mastermind Peter Thiel to Google co-founder Larry Page. The formation of the Singularity University, and the huge popularity of the Singularity website kurzweilai.com, speak to the importance of this intellectual movement. But what about the average person? How will the Singularity affect our daily lives—our jobs, our families, and our wealth? Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World focuses on the implications of a future society faced with an abundance of human and artificial intelligence. James D. Miller, an economics professor and popular speaker on the Singularity, reveals how natural selection has been increasing human intelligence over the past few thousand years and speculates on how intelligence enhancements will shape civilization over the next forty years. Miller considers several possible scenarios in this coming singularity: • A merger of man and machine making society fantastically wealthy and nearly immortal • Competition with billions of cheap AIs drive human wages to almost nothing while making investors rich • Businesses rethink investment decisions to take into account an expected future period of intense creative destruction • Inequality drops worldwide as technologies mitigate the cognitive cost of living in impoverished environments • Drugs designed to fight Alzheimer's disease and keep soldiers alert on battlefields have the fortunate side effect of increasing all of their users' IQs, which, in turn, adds a percentage points to worldwide economic growth Singularity Rising offers predictions about the economic implications for a future of widely expanding intelligence and practical career and investment advice on flourishing on the way to the Singularity.

Download or read book Singularity written by Bill DeSmedt and published by WordFire +ORM. This book was released on 2018-06-23 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A swift, gripping novel with a goose-pimple mix of scary science and near-future action.” —Greg Bear, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of The Unfinished Land June 30th, 1908—In Siberia’s remote Tunguska river basin, the most devastating cosmic collision ever recorded flattens hundreds of square miles with a blast a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet, more than a hundred years later, the cause of the cataclysm remains shrouded in mystery. Maverick astrophysicist Jack Adler thinks he’s figured it out: a submicroscopic black hole, smaller than an atom, more massive than a mountain, made impact with the earth. Jack believes that this fantastic object is still deep inside the Earth, burrowing through its mantle in an orbit that will end only when it has devoured the entire planet. Meanwhile, secret agent Marianna Bonaventure enlists the help of Jonathan Knox, an analyst with an uncanny ability to find hidden relationships between seemingly disparate people and events, to search for three missing scientists and infiltrate the floating headquarters of a Russian industrialist. Together, these three must battle a global conspiracy intent upon exploiting the awesome power of the back hole--a power that can transform the world—or end it. “A swift, gripping novel with a goose-pimple mix of scary science and near-future action” —Greg Bear, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of The Unfinished Land “An action-packed thriller into perilous realms of black hole physics.” —David Brin, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of Colony High

Download or read book Iron Sunrise written by Charles Stross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Stross] has the ability to superimpose an intriguing take on contemporary events over an imaginative story peopled by bizarre characters.” – The Kansas City Star A G2 star doesn’t just explode—not without outside interference. So the survivors of the planet Moscow, which was annihilated in just such an event, have launched a counterattack against the most likely culprit: the neighboring system of New Dresden. But New Dresden wasn’t responsible, and as the deadly missiles approach their target, Rachel Mansour, agent for the interests of Old Earth, is assigned to find out who was. Opposing her is an unknown—and unimaginable—enemy. At stake is not only the fate of New Dresden but also the very order of the universe. And the one person who knows the identity of that enemy is a disaffected teenager who calls herself Wednesday Shadowmist. But Wednesday has no idea what she knows…