Re: De-Anthropomorphizing SL3 to SL4.

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Wed Mar 17 2004 - 17:30:30 MST


>Robert Anton Wilson pointed toward this future event more than twenty
>years ago inbooks such as Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1 (The Final Secret of the
>Illuminati). He called it the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon because a
>statistician named Anderla had noted that recorded knowledge had doubled
>many times since the time of Jesus and that the doublings were
>asymptotically approaching a spike only a few decades away.

Cosmic Trigger came out in 1977, later than that in mass market paperback.
Marooned in Realtime was serialized in 1986, but Vinge had written prior to
that about intelligence amplification (if any of this matters).

>So when I read about Vinge a couple of years ago, I thought "The techies
>have finally caught up with RAW."

Maybe, but then when you read about Vinge a couple of years ago, you had
finally caught up with Vinge.

Of course, Vinge makes sense, whereas Wilson's witterings about the number
23 and other superstitious drivel makes paranoiac delusions, and some
amusing fiction (the kind that gets adolescents all churned up with its
daring antinomianism and naughtiness).

Damien Broderick



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