video

anime

Serial Experiments Lain

The Wired, something like our Internet, "wakes up." The Wired seems more like an alternate reality than like a superintelligent being, but it's not very clear.

Ghost in the Shell

A cyborg government agent and her partner try to track down a malicious hacker only to discover a cyborg containing a sentient program that wants to merge with her to create a superbeing.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A small, secretive group of powerful people have devised the human instrumentality project. The goal of this project is to advance humanity to the next stage of evolution, paradoxically returning it to "a state of beginning ... a return to the primal womb that we lost so long ago ... souls and minds will become one, attaining eternal balance." The idea is to merge all life on the planet into one global superbeing.

Boogiepop Phantom [?]

text

non-fiction

Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

The definitive essay explaining the Singularity concept.

Turing's Prophecy Machine Intelligence: The First 100 Years

A partly-factual, partly-fictional account of the rise of intelligent machines as an invisible species, written from the perspective of an observer in the year 2030.

Towards a Global Brain

The evolution of human society toward a planetary nervous system.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

I'm listening to the audio version of this book which is only tangentially related to the Singularity concept. The author examines the broadest patterns in history, the reasons various (geographic) segments of society have turned out as they have.

fiction

A Fire Upon the Deep

The galaxy, at some point in the distant past, split into regions with different physics; near the galactic center, computers are slower and beings seem less intelligent; as one travels outward from the center, things seem to be faster and smarter. The periphery, or Transcend, is the region where the most sophisticated automation and the most intelligent, powerful beings are possible. As races in the middle region evolve, they can progress to the point where they transcend—i.e., become vastly more intelligent and potent, moving to the outermost regions of the galaxy.

A Deepness in the Sky

miscellaneous

fields: artificial intelligence, transhumanism, futurism, cognitive science

The Church of Virus has a pretty homepage but its mailing list is an off-topic flamefest.