Yesterday I finished my new friend Stefan's book, Jame5. It's a read I recommend to pretty much anyone, but in particular intelligent people interested in the future. It deals with a concept that has been a hot topic in the last few years, the "technical singularity": an AI that's intelligent enough to improve itself.

There are a number of reasons why this concept is called a "singularity", a word borrowed from astrophysics (where it means black holes). Once it exists, it grows spontaneously, and at exponential speed. And no less importantly, we're unable to fully understand and predict what's happening in there, because all laws we know and live by are challenged.

It's the last thing humanity has to invent, because if done right, once it's there, it will invent everything else, at a pace that will seem instantaneous for us. And if done wrong, we won't be around to invent anything else.

The book is available online, on Stefan's site, and can be bought in dead tree form (links can also be found on Stefan's site). If you're in Beijing, you can also get one directly from Stefan.