Soon I will put my dreaming in the hands of greater forces, and I’m sure there will be some surprises for both of us. That is one thing which never changes.
………….– Thomas Ligotti, The Chemyst
Kurzweil dreams of electric children, of meme machines extracting souls from cadavers, of augmented lives lived out in quantum hiveworlds. Listening to Kurzweil reminds me of Thomas Ligotti’s short story The Chemyst whose delicate dreams come alive in the metamorphic deliquescence of his beautiful victims. Like a mad scientist or prophet of the alchemical Great Art he seems to have conned his way into the minds of an empire of transhuman dreamworlds; an entrepreneur of the new Soulcraft, a maker of steel babies and hyperwired artifacts of desire. With Google and the military-industrial complex behind him he dips into the collective madness of robotics, AI, and the ultimate transformation of human kind into Nietzsche’s Übermensch…
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