By "intelligent" I mean a "human" level intelligence that is capable of thought and conversation with a human tester who can neither tell if he/she was talking to a machine or another human.

Such a test for the machine to pass is called a 'Turing Test', which was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing was a pioneer in computer science and was instrumental in breaking the Enigma Code during WWII.

However on October 12 this coming Sunday at the University of Reading, six artificial intelligence programs are to to examined via the Turing test to determine whether AI programs have progressed to the point where a human tester can't tell the difference between a conversation with a machine and a human:

In the Turing test a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be "thinking".

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be "conscious" - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off.

Professor Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist at the university, said: "I would say now that machines are conscious, but in a machine-like way, just as you see a bat or a rat is conscious like a bat or rat, which is different from a human. I think the reason Alan Turing set this game up was that maybe to him consciousness was not that important; it's more the appearance of it, and this test is an important aspect of appearance."

The six computer programs taking part in the test are called Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal. Their designers will be competing for an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000 offered by the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence.

The test will be carried out by human "interrogators", each sitting at a computer with a split screen: one half will be operated by an unseen human, the other by a program. The interrogators will then begin separate, simultaneous text-based conversations with both of them on any subjects they choose. After five minutes they will be asked to judge which is which. If they get it wrong, or are not sure, the program will have fooled them. According to Warwick, a program needs only to make 30 per cent or more of the interrogators unsure of its identity to be deemed as having passed the test, based on Turing's own criteria.

I like the analogy Professor Warwick uses in describing "consciousness" in the programs, "...conscious in a machine-like way, just as you see a bat or a rat is conscious like a bat or rat...".

There is wisdom in that, if an AI program did become sentient, would it be 'conscious' like a human, or would it act like its nature implies?

I suppose it would mean whether one believes consciousness requires sentience, or that sentience requires consciousness.

Here are some links to posts by various people who have opinions and possible answers to such questions.

As for yours truly, I think consciousness is overrated, but the death of my ego leaves me a little unnerved!

'Intelligent' computers put to the test

Dr. Michio Kaku interview at the Daily Grail

Physical Basis for Problems

________________________________________

From the left: Priest: "For God hath created the singularity beyond which there is no knowing"

Congregation: "It is  truly a turd in the punch bowl that stinketh to high heaven"

Priest: "It is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, from which he turneth away"

Congregation: "And there shall be no more science fiction"

From the right: Rabbi: "And the Lord said 'these words lacketh in style'"

Congregation "Truly, they are non-literary"

Rabbi: "And the Lord said 'these characters are flat and uninteresting"

Congreation "Truly, they are non-literary"

Rabbi: "And the Lord said 'Go ye forth and write literary works for they are a sweet smelling sacrifice. No longer shall ye write in a clunky pulp style"

Congregation "And on that day, science fiction was no more. Amen."

It seems like every day there is yet another reason why science fiction is no longer relevant, is dying or already finished but for the burial.

The post singularity future is unknowable, so we can't write about the future.  SF is not literary enough and will therefore die in the marketplace.  We're living in a science fiction world and therefore can't imagine a future sufficiently wonderous enough to engage the reader. SF is and always will be perceived as an adolescent affectation. Science Fiction is for geeky nerds. There aren't enough geeky nerds in the worlds to support the market. YA is stealing SF's thunder. SF is a literature of short stories and the short story is dead. Magazines are the foundation of SF and magazines are dead. The audience has dumbed down and can't handle thought-provoking literature of any genre. The society is falling apart and is too distressed and depressed to care about the future.  Genre's only have a 75 year life cycle and we're in year 100+.

My first thought is: you can't have it both ways. Liteature of any kind is supposed to be about character.  SF's contribution is a focus on the future, a vehicle for illuminating today through non-threatening speculative tropes, the home of the 'big idea'.  But all of those things are realized through the characters that inhabit the story, the people that things happen to. 

Maybe a lot of SF characterization is 'bad' when seen through some ivory tower literary prism, and maybe there is room for improvement but, if stories are really about character (or are supposed to be) then how can a concept like the singularity threaten the genre?

I don't think any of the aforementioned laments is accurate, nor are any of them the genre-killer they're sussed out to be. I think the real problem is some underlying dissatisfaction with where the genre is today.  But not even that.  I think it's dissatisfaction with where the genre is as opposed to some people's fevered imaginging of where it ought to be. It might be a pay-scale thing. It might be an earnings thing, it might be a marketing thing. Some authors look at their advances and royalties and think they ought to be doing better. Some publishers think they ought to get more notices, or a better distribution deal or more shelf space. A lot of people look at the enormous impact some SF films or televisions shows have had and wonder why the golden touch hasn't reached the book end of the business.

I'm not intimately familiar with the behind the scenes work that agents are doing for some of the more vocal authors (film options, etc), but of the authors who's intimates I am familiar with, none of them are amongst the complainers, because they're doing ok.  I don't draw any conclusions from that observation, merely pointing it out as a possible data point.

And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting more - better pay, more cultural recognition, bigger presence in the marketplace - but if that is what all of the complaining is about, I think the effort would be better spent on figuring out how to achieve those goals, rather than bemoaning the death of the genre.

Jason Stoddard was recently interviewed and covered a multi-part blog post he's got going on SF and marketing.  His mantra is self-promotion and social networking (and the relatively low cost of high-impact advertising available via internet resources).

In those pieces he correctly identifies most writers initial reactions - "ugh, barf".  And I agree that that is probably the standard reaction, except for a chosen few who seem to have a natural bent for it, such as Doctorow or Scalzi.  Not surprising, considering the relatively solitary nature of writing and world-building.  Most authors are, of course, happy to share the end product, but many are reluctant to let all but a few carefully hand-picked people in on the beta testing.

So, maybe the solution is to foist this activity off on the publishing companies? Maybe, as part of their marketing efforts, they need to not only host their own websites with lots of nifty content and quasi-social networking applets, but should, as a matter of course, automatically set up a blog, a youtube channel, a myspace page, add characters to virtual environments, generate appropriate widgets and etc.  Most authors have no problem writing, but many have a problem with the day-to-day maintenance of building a website, adding RSS feeds, finding the tributes and commentary, the reviews and such.

Instead of having each individual author try to do these things, there should be a department at a good publishing house that handles all the background crap.  Think of the traffic: if every single published author had at a minimum, myspace, youtube, flikr, website and blog, and all of those were linked in to the publishers main site AND cross-linked to each other (maybe a company logo at the top of the page), we're talking a huge amount of internet real estate.  Think of the cross-promotion when every single one of those websites becomes a billboard, not just for the author in question, but for every other author represented by that publisher. 

Then the writers can do what they do - write. Preferably non-singularity conflicted, non-literary, pulpy science fiction.

In response to a blog post about the singularity at Kevin Kelly's blog, I wrote the following:

I see this as a spiritual and philosophical issue, not a technological one.
I'd like to offer some ideas and questions that I've been contemplating:

1. Singularitans think that consciousness arises from the brain, while spiritualists believe that consciousness arises from the soul, and that the brain and body is just a physical manifestation of the soul.

2. The brain is just a machine - advanced, complex, evolved enough, to serve the soul on this physical plain.
The soul "downloads" itself into the brain, into the body.
It's the hardware without the software.
Without the soul, it's just meat.

3. Kurtzweil or others may transfer their brain structure to a computer, but the result will be what William Gibson calls a personality construct - a copy of the persons' character, persona, memories, etc., which can be programmed to appear self aware, but will not really be.

4. However, I also see it as possible that, as AI gets sufficiently strong, a soul can take residence in it, and for outside observers it would seem as tough the AI has reached self awareness by its own.

5. Which human abilities can _never_ be replicated or surpassed by a machine ?

6. Does high intelligence necessarily mean consciousness and/or self-awareness?

7. What about emotional intelligence ?

8. I see some of the hopes towards singularity and immortality as a simple fear of death and the denial of spirituality.

I do disagree slightly, however, with the seeming abject rejection of religion portrayed towards the end, myself having a psychedelic appreciation for the mysterious and the shamanic roots of Man's religions, but in the historical context of barriers to love and tools of oppression I totally understand his point.   Besides, the film's creator obviously has a deep spiritual streak, seen in the Krishnamurti, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Ralph Metzner & Bill Hicks quotes he chooses.

The film is mainly guided by interviews with John Perkins and Jacque Fresco.  John Perkins is the author of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," which has been regaled by many as a massively important and monumental book.  I never read it, despite it's many recommendations to me, so I was am very grateful for the crucial information he imparts in this film.   Jacque Fresco is delightful and ingenious architect, futurist and social engineer with a keen awareness of monetary systems.

I'm thrilled at the education and food-for-tought Zeitgeist Addendum will provide for the millions who will be watching it this coming year.

Large screen link.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912&ei=YsHqSLPwCJjUqAOqg-GZCw&q=zeitgeist+addendum]

Ralph Alpher in the Genesis of Big Bang:

To physicists it is just as bad to say that one can divide a finite number by zero and get away with it as it is to ascribe to a physical system the existence of a singularity.

Things must have changed a lot in physics since then. Singularity has long become a legal physical quantity.

Einstein's general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density.

Einstein's general theory of relativity says that, sure, but it also says "no, the universe did not start with a singularity." It all depends on physicists' taste. If they choose to remove the cosmological constant from Einstein Equations they will get a solution with a Big Bang singularity. Einstein equations have an infinity of solutions.

General relativity is a truly general theory.

General relativity predicts all possible generalities in all possible universes. You see now what a great physical theory general relativity is! What the string theory is trying to do now, general relativity has been doing since its discovery.

General relativity is infinitely general.

General relativity encompasses all multiverses of string theory, all backgrounds and vacuums and so on. But how come general relativity works so well if it predicts anything and everything? Initial boundary conditions! Initial conditions are also known in general relativity as authority gauge. A physicist, if he has enough rank and authority, can add and remove and pick and choose and define any solution to prove anything he wants. God's existence not excluded. In fact, statements such as "general relativity says . . ." or "general relativity predicts . . ." have no more scientific meaning than "God says . . ." or the "the Bible says. . ."

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ENDLICH IST ES DA

DAS HOCHWERTIGE SPREADSHIRT T-SHIRT

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SINGULARITÄT - wikipedia

ICH FINDE DEN AUSDRUCK "SCHWARZES LOCH"

LATENT RASSISTISCH

MAN KANN DIESES PHÄNOMEN AUCH

DIE "SINGULARITÄT" NENNEN

------------------------

stop cern

now

es gibt nämlich auch andere wege um

das das universum zu erklären

zum beispiel :

Proactor: Database Designers automate power and pleasure.

Reactor: DBAs automatically complain.

You may be wondering about the title of this post.  I've decided to reject John Zachman, a non-businessman completely, and name my discovery to honor someone I respect much more highly, an archetypical businessman, Peter Drucker.

The first thing to do is abandon the term "hierarchy".  You are working with networks.  You are also dealing with seven networks, not one.  This means you are dealing with not seven by seven (49) but seven to the power of seven (over 800,000) nodes in the business space. This is called a seven dimensional hypercube.  The main difference between the associative model and the relational model is that the associative (node-link) business area grows into the space while the relational (relation-inferred relationship) business area has to be completely defined.  When you are talking about almost one million cells in the schema alone the traditional relational model with all of its NULL values for unused space in tables becomes quite cumbersome.  The SQL is resource intensive in both models.

Another thing to abandon is your language.  Lay English is often imprecise and inconsistent.  I am creating a taxonomy as part of this work to provide a seven dimensional vocabulary.  Every one of the terms was thoroughly examined for its definition.

Finally, abandon preconceptions.  Look at the data and let it guide you.

There are key levels of abstraction:  The schema which are entities and entity associations and instance and instance association.  I highly recommend going to Simon William's site lazysoft.com and reading some of his short white papers on the architecture.

Associations and Entities

A chart of associations is below:

Let's look at these associations in the context of physics and business:

It is based on an associative (node and link) architecture not a relational (table and relationships) architecture.

Seven Nodes, Six Dimensions

After considerable struggle with the data it became clear to me that I was not dealing with a table in the normal sense.  I could not reconcile a data cube with the seven dimensions I had discovered.  Then it occurred to me that I was not dealing with a cube at all.  I was dealing with a simpler solid, the octahedron.  The octahedron has six dimensions (spokes) and seven vertexes.

This gives us a Hauy Construction (this figure is an eight degree):

Using my new taxonomy gives us the following views:

Front:

Side:

Top:

The age of the cube is over.  Welcome to the age of the Octahedral Hauy Construction.

Formula

In this context we can deduct the following equation:

In the Business Interpretation E can represent Everything (Monopoly) and M can represent Market.

Generic Table

First, we create the generic table:

Generic Schema

We are now ready to create the schema:

We can also look at the role of long tails (exponential curves) and tipping points (singularities, pluralarities).  Singularities occur when the taxonomy reaches it's cost/benefit optimum and plurality when the data utilizes the entire business space.  Benefit declines from that point.

What I am saying here is systems are not tabula rasas.  Systems have a hardwired architecture and schematic that obeys simple physical laws that are in many ways understood as well as softwired structure that is unique to the system.  We don't have to create a unique architecture and unique schema for each system.  Now they need only to be refined and applied across the spectrum of human endeavor.  We need only learn how to classify the data.

Liberal Conspiracy have a good article on why socialists should vote Lib Dem.

A Trout In The Milk has some thoughts on science fiction, 'the singularity' and techno-hubris.

Alan Moore explains again exactly why he hates the very idea of the Watchmen film, and why I for one won't ever watch it.

Jog has an excellent-as-always review of Eddie Campbell's The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard

And Cory Doctorow goes into great detail about Labour's plans for ID cards and their awful treatment of immigrants. As someone married to an immigrant, this alone would be enough to make me vote Lib Dem rather than ever vote for these scumbags again, and everyone should support no2id. (I'm afraid I'm too much of an armchair supporter of them, but it's one of the most important organisations in the UK today).

thich nhat hanh explains that Christ aimed to shake his disciples into awareness by saying to them "this is my body you eat. this is my blood you drink." what are Christ's words but a koan, begging those who receive the Eucharist to allow themselves to be overcome by the question: "what is a body?"

like haraway, and like Christ, i find it valuable to talk about the interbeing of individual bodies, and in effect, the non-existence of the individual body, by talking about the reality of the body.

...

what, i ask, is a heart?

...

we all know it is real enough

when i say the word

"heart"

alone...not de-contextualized, but without context...i invoke the multiple meanings of this word simultaneously--an internal organ that sustains and counts out life, an imagined organ of feeling or caring or loving, the center or "core" (from the French "coeur") of a thing--and the word is the heart of "heart." the word is more than a symbol. and it is even more than a concept. it is just..."heart."

...

when people touch my heart, i create.

over the years, i have made many beautiful things, with such care, for many people. for that reason i own almost none of the pieces of artwork i have crafted, labored over...called "done."

the feelings in my artwork are always honest and inviolable. i never regret laboring long over a piece or giving it to the person for whom i crafted it. but i have noticed that i become very tired and sad as i give away my heart, or pieces of it, again, and again. even as i think and write the word "heart" here, my chest becomes heavy and tight. these overlapping meanings of "heart" are not a coincidence...they describe the truth as they create the truth...bridges between an imagined core, an imagined source of feeling, an organ in the chest, and physical sensation...

this weekend i have the chance to display my artwork at western ave studios open studio, but i have nothing to show. because it is gone and i do not know when i will see any of it again. i made a ruby ring. the ruby was surrounded by flames of brass, covering a silver background. i gave it to a man eight years ago. i haven't seen it since. i've seen him once. i made a silver ring, a design inspired by a ring from the silmarillion, for my father...my masterpiece. lost in london seven years ago. three necklaces gone. three people gone. a staff, made with such love, i will never see again. i don't know how many drawings.

the journal i painted more recently is out there...and i am waiting for it to return.

i send pieces of my heart out in this way, because it is the purest me. the core of me. and it feels natural. it is a beautiful, naked, fragile act of faith. my art says: "will you be kind and thoughtful enough to cherish me, though it is easy to forget me?"

when i receive nothing to fill the empty spots i feel just a little weakened and betrayed.

my chest tightens and becomes heavy. as it is now.

thankfully, over the last ten years, i have learned to be my own strength, to cherish and appreciate myself, to replenish, calm and heal my heart.

when my heart to be filled by (an)other(s)...truly...not a mirage: it doesn't make life better, worse, or more interesting. but it does make me cry.

Looking back at developments in media over the lifespan of humanity it is easy to see a clear path from the advent of language to writing, art, music, radio, television, computers and the Internet. Each stage of this development signified a great leap forward in civilisation and quality of living. What is interesting to note is that it takes less and less time to progress to each stage as we move on. The jump from basic language to writing took thousands of years, and then thousands more to art and music. From the renaissance to the invention of radio was just a few hundred years, television arriving just decades afterwards. The world wide web reached global use within a decade of its inception.

Each of these technological leaps are notable for the fact that they would engulf the previous development. Remember the song Television Killed the Radio Star? Well it proved to be oddly prophetic as television replaced radio as the primary source of entertainment and news in the home, just as the Internet has done to both in the 2000s. The Internet is perhaps even more significant as it is looking like it will render all previous technologies obsolete, entirely engulfing them. It is possible to watch TV, listen to radio, read the news, do your shopping and almost everything in-between online. Anything that the Internet does not engulf it will become an intrinsic part of.

Given its almost certain all-pervasive nature it can be hard to see where the next leap forward may come from. What could supersede the Internet? It is foolish to think that nothing will, after all would renaissance painters have predicted the rise of television and radio? Would people in the 1940s have predicted the introduction of mobile phones and personal computers? Just because we cannot see the next step it does not mean it will not happen. At some stage the Internet will become consumed itself.

Currently all advances in technology have been made due to human intelligence. It is what separated us from animals to begin with, and it is what continues to drive us now. Ever more complex leaps have been possible as intelligence is pooled and people are able to collaborate on how to solve problems that will lead to the next advancement. Language allowed communication, and then writing allowed the storage of ideas and the passing of information to other tribes and individuals. Radio, television and Internet technology in the 20th Century has opened up human intelligence to everyone as communication becomes instantaneous world-wide. The global nature of communication in the 20th and 21st centuries are inevitably why our greatest achievements have come in the last hundred years. It is no accident that the industrial revolution occurred with the introduction of the telephone and long range communication.

So taking the fact that human intelligence and communication is guiding the development of civilisation it is reasonable to expect that we will reach the point where our own intellects are unable to take us further. I believe we are reaching the point where communication and the sharing of ideas will start to plateau. We already have instant communication to anywhere on the planet and future developments in this area will only be able to accelerate this process. Granted, faster and faster Internet access will help a great deal in sharing scientific data, but at some stage we will need greater-than-human intelligence. Some people, such as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believe that this will come from a form of artificial intelligence either through an AI software or augmentation of the human brain.

The birth of an artificial super intelligence is often referred to as the singularity in reference to the singularity of a black hole. Similar to the black hole where known laws of physics break down in the singularity at the centre so would our model of the world once it contained intelligences greater than our own. There are many technologies already combining to create an artificial intelligence and many scientists believe that the singularity will occur during our lifetimes. Certainly if Moore's Law and the accelerating rate of paradigm shifts are anything to go by then this prediction seems reasonable.

The creation of a truly super-human AI would completely change the world and our way of living extremely rapidly. It is thought that the invention of this AI would be the last thing that the human race ever needs to design. An AI with above human intelligence would then have above human capacity to improve itself. By improving itself once it would then become more intelligent than it was before, enabling it to improve itself further. This positive feedback loop would lead to the AI becoming massively intelligent and powerful very quickly, it is possible that civilisation would change overnight as the AI exponentially increases in intelligence.

By point of comparison human neurons can send signals at a speed of 150 metres per second and the speed of light is 300,000,000 metres per second, two million times faster than the human mind. The Singularity Institute states that an increase in speed of thought by a factor of one million would mean a subjective year would take only 31 seconds and the time from ancient Greece until now would take twenty two hours. The evolution from primates to humans needed an increase in brain capacity by a factor of three. The difference between us and chimpanzees is unarguably large, so it seems easy to agree that an intelligence many factors greater than ours and magnitudes faster would be capable of things far beyond our comprehension. We are as capable of guessing what it could do as chimps are of predicting the rise of human civilisation given that the gap between brain power would be similar.

Along with the theories of a singularity and the birth of intelligent machines there are always the inevitable doomsday scenarios thought to be possible such as those depicted in films such as the Matrix and the Terminator. It is hard to say what the AI would do, and eliminating the human race may well be in its best interests. However it is likely that considerable work will go into making the AI an ally of its creators and to build a system that we are capable of working alongside to accelerate our development and improve our living conditions and understanding of the world around us. There is already a lot of work being done to ensure this happens and that we avoid the doom that popular fiction predicts.

An interesting thought is to combine the theory of the singularity with that of natural selection. We already know that machines can do things that we are incapable of doing. Robotic probes are exploring places inaccessible to humans, countless examples are visible in space exploration programs. There are robotic vehicles on Mars exploring the terrain. The landscape is too harsh for a human visitor with our current technology but machines have already made the journey. Probes have been sent to every planet in the solar system and some have even left it entirely.

It may be that mechanical life is simply more suited than carbon-based life to the conditions of the universe. A machine does not need to eat or breathe and will be able to survive low and high atmospheric pressures, making them perfect for extra terrestrial exploration. The machines will need a power source, but provided that they develop a reliably powerful way of creating energy then in theory there is nothing to stop them from colonising the solar system relatively quickly.

Machines and artificial intelligences could simply be the next step in the evolution of life on Earth, it is hard to see any animal rising above humans now with the control that we exert over the planet. By the time the Earth is swallowed into the Sun it may be that it is inhabited solely by mechanical life forms, all of which are better suited to escaping the supernova from the death of the star. In terms of the eventual fate of the planet is is clear that machines and artificial intelligence is more suited to continued existence with its capability to migrate to different planets.

By Darwinian theory it may even be said that artificial intelligence is more suited to life on Earth and will replace the life that we know today. It is certainly an interesting concept and we may even find out whether it will come true within the next fifty years. With any luck the creation of a super-intelligent machine will bring a time of great advancement that solves a lot of the major problems that face humanity today and massively enhance the standard of living across the planet.

Immediately after the publication of this article, I received an invitation to join the scientific board of the Lifeboat Foundation. The invitation was informal in style, as if written by an old friend familiar with my day-to-day research, calling me by my first name, Raphaël (with the accent, well done!), and noting that "We just had Ray Kurzweil and Nobel Laureates Sir Clive W.J. Granger, Eric S. Maskin, and Wole Soyinka join our Board so you would have some good company!".

I suspect that anyone publishing a scientific paper receiving some media coverage in the area of nanotechnology may receive similar invitations. And some may have joined such a good company without noting the problematic nature of the foundation claims.

The Lifeboat Foundation promotes a set of ideas which can be summarized as follows:

1) a technological "singularity" is coming and humanity is facing existential risks, e.g. risks that non-friendly superintelligence or misuse of molecular nanotechnology "annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential";

2) to avoid this risk, the Foundation has assembled "some of the best minds on the planet working on programs to enable our survival" so please by our books and donate to fund our research;

Here is Richard Jones on the "singularity" in a post entitled "Our faith in technology"

"Belief in the singularity, then, as well as being a symptom of a particular moment of rapid technological change, should perhaps be placed in that tradition of millennial, utopian thinking that’s been a recurring feature in Western thought for many centuries."

Read the entire post here.

"An intelligent pulse of electricity is moving from house to house. It terrorizes the occupants by taking control of the appliances...", eh, you get the idea.

We need more of this!  With all of the talks of televisions that, somehow, have Netflix built directly into them, and computer-cum-stereos that access your intangilbe music library eliminating the need to organize your record collection into nice little stacks, so on so forth.  I mean, I still like to hold things: CDs, DVDs/Blu-Ray, fucking books...

(To qualify, I don't mean books about fucking)

Looking over this post, I'm amazed how quick this turned into a Ludditive rant, I was going to hold off a bit on that.

In summation: fuck iTunes.

Please go take a look and comment over there

Hang in there.

Scusteister