Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (New York: Vintage, 2006). Craig Hogan ’ s research into discrete matter is certainly of interest. A general reader can turn to Michael Moyer, “ Is Space Digital? ” S cientific American (February 2012), http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-space -digital/. Reza Negarastani approaches this rather differently and has offered both incisive critiques of computationalism (see his “ Abducting the Outside, ” http://blog.urbanomic.com/ cyclon/archives/2012/11/abducting\_the\_o.html), as well as impassioned defenses of a Turing centric version (see his “ The Revolution Is Back (Turing, Functional Realization and Computational Description), ” http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/Turing-Revolution.pdf).
- Apparently there are something like 700 terabytes of potential storage in a gram of DNA. Be that as it may, the rush to collapse fragile metaphors between biological-machinic and computational-machinic processes is unnecessary. Sebastian Anthony, “ Harvard Cracks DNA Storage, Crams 700 Terabytes of Data into a Single Gram, ” ExtremeTech, August 17, 2012, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes -of-data-into-a-single-gram.
- The “ next machine ” after computation is a favorite motif of mathematician Giuseppe Longo. See, for example, Longo and Francis Baily, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (London: Imperial College Press, 2011).
- Again bioinformational systems (such as how bacteria encode messages) provide a rich source of speculation on the postsilicon future of artificial computation, but in the meantime, more prosaic (but still remarkable) engineering at the scale by which physical matter and information directly interface may prove more fruitful.
- This tendency can also lead toward unlikely speculative convergences between advanced science and technology and singularity-inflected “ God in/of the gaps. ” See Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson, Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Peter Watts, Echopraxia (New York: Tor Books, 2015), tinkers with this inflection quite effectively.
- Or consider instead Friedrich Kittler ’ s association of film, the gramophone, and the typewriter with three distinct modes of modern thought.
- The ideological position is made in Alexander Galloway, “ The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, ” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 347 – 366. Aesthetic suspicion of digital systems couched in political suspicion (perhaps also couched in professional anxiety) has also led to awkward schisms in art. See Clare Bishop, “ The Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media, ” Artforum (September 2012).
- Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
- See my editorial “ Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test, ” New York Times, February 23, 2015.
- To me this is the purchase of the Promethean accelerationism of Reza Negarastani and Ray Brassier. See Brassier ’ s “ Prometheanism and Real Abstraction ” in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford (Urbanomic Press: Falmouth, 2014), and Negarastani ’ “ Labor of the Inhuman, Part 1: Human, ” e-flux journal #52, 02/2014, and “ The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman, ” e-flux journal #53, 03/2014.
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