“Life tends toward greater complexity… From the beginning, Life has had the ability to adapt for survival via natural selection of heritable traits. That computational scheme brought Life a long way, resulting in creatures that could reason about survival problems. With the advent of humankind, Life had a means of solving many problems much faster than natural selection.”

Full article here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6306

I will be participating in two programme events at this year’s Eastercon. On the Saturday, I will be on the panel for a discussion of “Sex and The Singularity” and on Monday I will be taking part in a flash fiction workshop with the rest of the Friday Flash Fictioneers. If you are attending the convention, why not come along to both? (See the main programme for more details).

I returned home this evening from a two-day business meeting in Chepstow to find an email inviting me to participate in a panel discussion at Eastercon discussing:

“Sex and the Singularity – Will our posthuman future be a matter of living next-door to the god of love, or will the only wangs around be carpets? What will really happen to gender and identity if we upload—and who’s written about it?”

A lot can happen in the world in a day…

• Tony Blair stands down and Gordon Brown takes over as prime minister.
• IBM launches the world’s fastest commercial supercomputer.
• Scientists from Bologna University claim to have discovered an impact crater left by the biggest space impact in modern times – the Tunguska event.

And at the same time – on a more personal level – there’s a lot going on:

• I’ve been discussing cover art for my forthcoming novel with Christopher Teague of Pendragon Press, and cover art for my forthcoming short story collection with Andrew Hook of Elastic Press.
• The software company I work for have given me a company car – a Volvo V50.
• And tonight, I managed to swim thirty lengths of the local pool in thirty minutes – a total of 750 metres in 1,800 seconds – proving to myself that I’m not as unfit as I feared.

In this speech transcript, Charles Stross turns his attention to the way technology’s going to affect our lives over the next twenty years.