Computer Science Department Colloquium
San Jose State University


Speculations on Future Computations

Rudy Rucker
Emeritus Professor,
Computer Science, SJSU

Nov. 14, 2013, 3pm.
MacQuarrie Hall 225
(Refreshments, MH229 at 2:30pm)

Abstract

Any natural process can be regarded as a computation. I’ll say a bit about this notion, and discuss some of the questions that it raises. And then I'll talk about some areas in which we can expect to see nontraditional forms of computation taking hold: Ultimately humanity may arrive at a future in which there are no manufactured goods at all, and where universal telepathy replaces the internet.

About the Speaker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a former computer science professor at San Jose State. He received two Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels. He recently published his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. His talk will draw on the ideas in his nonfiction tome The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul, and in science-fiction series The Ware Tetralogy and in his novel Postsingular . You can read these books for free online. More info at www.rudyrucker.com.