… Within weeks-perhaps within hours-a being of truly God-like powers will emerge. … The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor. So is Nate Caplan inspired by me, by my famously libertarian colleague Bryan Caplan, or by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was my co-blogger back when Egan wrote this book?Ĭonsider that Egan’s book also contains a Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, clearly modeled on Eliezer’s Singularity Institute :

I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium. It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. Nate wants to pay so he can be the first em: And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. That is Nate Caplan, a self-centered arrogant rich American male nerd, who creepily stalks our Iranian female scientist hero Nasim Golestani, an expert in em (brain emulation) tech. “You can always reach me through my blog! Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future-”

Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and his latest novel Zendegi (Kindle version costs a penny) seems to refer to this blog:

Zendegi by greg egan