Found this in the office. Turns out you can still buy it, too.
- New Google Court Doc: Open Web Is In Rapid Decline
- ‘Nuremberg’ Sparks Audience Buzz After Strong TIFF Premiere
Tag: book
Review: Buzzati’s ‘The Singularity’: The Sci-Fi Novella That Got AI (Mostly) Right
“A secret military project. A vast artificial mind. Questions of consciousness. These form the premise of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, originally published in 1960 at the dawn of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The novella follows Italian scientist Ermanno Ismani, summoned by the Ministry of Defense to work on a top-secret project, as he ventures with his wife, Elisa, to a sprawling machine hidden in the mountains of the Italian countryside. The machine’s intelligence far surpasses that of humans—and its creators claim that the machine has come alive.”
August 05, 2024 at 11:57AM
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Above: Kaspar Müller, Juan Antonio Olivares
From the introduction to Giorgio de Maria’s 1975 novel THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US):
Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.
The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar…
Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying…
“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”
Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”
And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.
- David Lynch says there will be a new project announcement on June 5
- new blu-ray of TERROR IN SPACE (aka PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) with screenshots
- on French-Canadian thriller RED ROOMS: “The phenomenon of serial-killer groupies—and specifically the condition of hybristophilia, a sexual attraction to those who commit violent crimes—is at the heart of Plante’s judiciously observed narrative.”
OPERATIONS: Should be a quiet day. Today is the day I get into the structural stuff in this tv thing document I want to have landed by Friday (because I foolishly said I would). Marked up the whiteboards just before bed, and thankfully I am starting to see some white space again.
COMMS: Inbox 68. Phone is up in the gooseneck holder so I can see notifications but I can’t touch them. This is good and useful. I have to lean over if I want to tap it – phone twitch is difficult to implement. In two minutes I will lean over and start my Zazen timer.
LISTENING: digging out my Eliane Radigue records so I can think. Here’s JETSUN MILA.
THINKING ABOUT: “…music floats around in the aether of the World Wide Web, waiting to be downloaded, hoping to talk to somebody.” OCEAN OF SOUND, David Toop
ORBITAL:
Comments closedComments closedParis in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au xxe siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne’s future, when society places value only on business and technology.
Written in 1863,[1] but first published in 1994, the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced but culturally backward world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological civilization.
Many of Verne’s predictions are remarkably on target. However, his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, did not accept the book because he thought that it was too unbelievable and that its sales prospects would be inferior to those of Verne’s previous work, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
The novel’s main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late.
Michel has been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.
The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th-century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores.