In-Flux

Daniel Suarez: In-Flux ISBN:0525953183

== Excerpts ==

"Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him. And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources"

"Successful implementation of incubator sixty-three designs would result in a tier-one branch event"

"Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook? "

"Certain innovations serve as catalysts for each other—creating a positive feedback cycle. Eventually a technology becomes inevitable"

"Jon, the BTC predates me. It was founded in the years before the moon landings—as the pace of technological change threatened to overwhelm our social and political institutions"

"Our models suggest that mastery of gravitation is what’s known as a keystone. When combined with other advances—like fusion—gravity manipulation will catapult humanity to a much higher technological level. In this case, moving us for the first time into a Type One civilization—a society capable of moving entire planets. Of building warp drives. Capturing the entire energy output from our star"

"Very early on your mathematical solutions in online physics courses came to the attention of our AIs. You think very differently from others, Jon. Our AIs guided your path. They’re the ones who noted the unusual promise in the mathematics of your grant application"

"They had provided him with a slim leather-bound volume, its title etched on the spine in gold leaf: Omnia. The first time he flipped through the book’s vellum pages, they were entirely blank—except for one page on which the words “While I’m open, ask me anything” were written. He tried writing questions on the facing page but couldn’t mark the surface. In frustration he finally spoke aloud the first thing that came to mind"

"Grady couldn’t help but think that the church was, in a way, the BTC of the seventeenth century"

"The human mind has been determined to be a quantum device. Decoherence and perceived wave function collapse are held in abeyance by consciousness itself—which manifests from a network of subatomic microtubules at the synapses. These microtubules are in turn entangled with particles not contained within the four dimensions of Newtonian space-time"

"when we examined cross sections of Albert Einstein’s preserved brain tissue, we found no more neurons than the average person. However, we did find that Einstein had an abnormally high concentration of glia cells"

"Glia cells are, in fact, a second brain within the brain—one centered not on electrical signals but on chemical ones. An analog computer to accompany the digital neurons"

"But after the embryonic human brain completes its growth, radial glia transform into a new type of cell: astrocytes, named because of their resemblance to starlight. Their tendrils spread to connect hundreds of thousands of neural synapses. And they link with one another, building chemical networks—networks"

"BTC records showed that L-329 had originally grown out of a poker-playing algorithm that was expanded to game financial markets. It incorporated neural logic for adaptive human psychology—logic that had quickly evolved with the addition of massive processing power. Bluffing was one of its core skills"

"You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in Influx by visiting http://www.daniel-suarez.com or through the following books" *