Chicks Don’t Dig The Singularity
Thursday, March 22 at 8:35 PM
Found via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.
Why Chicks Don’t Dig The Singularity - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine).
I’m at Burning Man, and I’m riding my bike around. [. . . O]ver my left shoulder I hear the word “gene;” I hear the word “memes,” and I stop. And there’s this very unassuming white tent with a bunch of people sitting around on chairs as if they were at a lecture hall. And there’s this good-looking guy in a woman’s nightie. [. . .] I listened to the lecture and thought, “That’s a fascinating guy!” It turned out he was doing a lecture every day, so I kept coming back. The third time I came back, I was on a hallucinogen.
So Ray Kurzweil got up there and Moira Gunn was interviewing him, and everybody got to submit a question. And Moira would pick her three favorite questions. So there were all these technical questions about how will the singularity do this, how will the singularity do that. And my question was, “How will the Singularity get laid… err help me get laid?” So she picked my question as an extra one as a way of dismissing it. She said, “Somebody put a joke question in here, and can you believe that there are people here who would write something like this? It’s ‘how will the Singularity help me get laid?’” And then she throws it aside and tries to move on to another question. But Kurzweil says, “Hang on. Hang on. I want to answer that.” And then he goes into this long technical description…