Fiction in Mindspace

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Dave Hutchinson

The stories in Hannu Rajaniemi’s forthcoming (May 2015) Collected Fiction, often start in full stream, looking both backward and forward. “The night after Kosonen shot the young elk, he tried to write a poem by the campfire” begins a tale of post-humanity, where squirrels pick locks, language animates matter, and a girl thinks in qubits. The timescape of a story may vary from millennia to microseconds, but always returns to the familiar metronome of a warm heartbeat, people dealing with circumstance, relationships made and broken, dreams shattered and rebuilt. Continue reading →

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The House Was Quiet

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Dave Hutchinson

“My mind is mostly quiet these days,” he says. “I don’t have much to say.” We are sitting on the front porch, sipping tea, while a Stellar Jay cackles at us from a sugar pine a few feet above our … Continue reading →

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The Slow Earthquake in Medicine

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Dave Hutchinson

In The Patient Will See You Now, Dr. Eric Topol describes a tsunami approaching health care, brought about by the convergence of smart phones, data, and predictive analytics. As the Director of Scripps Institute for Research, Editor in Chief of … Continue reading →

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Gawande on Aging, Mortality, and What Matters

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Dave Hutchinson

Atul Gawande’s father died a few years ago, and his book (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End) may have been an attempt to come to grips with the experience. He begins with The Death of Ivan Ilyich, … Continue reading →

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Ruminations on Consciousness

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Dave Hutchinson

Twenty-five years ago, in the latter part of the eighties, while the Reagan administration was adventuring in Central America and the field of AI was in its symbolic slump, I jotted the following ruminations on consciousness. At the time I … Continue reading →

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Education for all

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Dave Hutchinson

The online education site Coursera continues growing with amazing vigor, having recently added 90 new classes from 29 newly-joined universities. There are now courses in Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese. All the courses are free. The list of 62 universities … Continue reading →

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The Fractal Prince

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Dave Hutchinson

A journey with Hannu Rajaniemi’s second novel The Fractal Prince feels like surfing the boundary of incomprehensible quantum physics while sitting in the desert, warm dust blowing across the sparkling sky, the face of a djinn hovering before your eyes, … Continue reading →

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The Universe Within

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Dave Hutchinson

The Universe Within (book review) by Neil Shubin (2013) Camp Century was a city built beneath the ice in 1959 by the US military as the staging ground for ice tunnels on the scale of Arrakis to house giant missiles … Continue reading →

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Hello World

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Dave Hutchinson

In my recent review of Coding Freedom by E. Gabriella Coleman, published on io9, I describe the tension between the open-source movement in software and the tightening of copyright law. Coleman examines in anthropological detail the conflict between the open-source … Continue reading →

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How To Create A Mind (book review)

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Dave Hutchinson

In November Ray Kurzweil published a book titled How to Create A Mind, and five weeks later he was hired by Google as chief engineer. The book lays out a pattern-recognition theory of mind, arguing that this idea is reflected in advances in artificial intelligence, and can be inferred from developments in neuroscience. If true, the field of AI may leap forward with Kurzweil as the guiding hand of Google’s laboratory. In any case, the theory deserves close study. Here is my short (ten-page) summary of his book, and a few comments. Continue reading →

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