everyone loves the singularity

one of the key issues in my book and in an article to be published in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science this december is the public significance of ideas like the Singularity and mind uploading. these days, it seems like i cannot turn around without having that thesis confirmed.

for example:

giulio prisco just pointed me at a Forbes magazine article which, rather surprisingly, concludes with the statement: "Now if other venture capitalists would only adopt the firm’s willingness to back wild new startups, we’d soon be commuting to work with jet-packs, uploading our consciousness to the internet and cloning dinosaurs from DNA." obviously, this is a bit tongue in cheek but it is still fundamentally encouraging transhumanist technologies.

and

Singularity University sent me an e-mail last week announcing that NASA's chief technologist came to SU to tout the University's work in the local community and that SU's director was invited to a conference hosted by the U.S. State Department's USAID development arm. the policy groups' love of SU is something that the Singularity folks will continue to push for and appreciate.

the only thing that pains me about the persistent emergence of these things is that i cannot put them back into work that's already published. someday, when all the books are electronic, i suppose i'll be able to do that. perhaps that will help mollify me when i cannot hold paper books anymore.