Nudge Quotes
Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold-one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity-a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ...
Charles Stross