Ask Neal Stephenson

Our latest Slashdot interview victim... err... guest... is Neal Stephenson, author of (among others) Snow Crash, CRYPTONOMICON, the much-discussed essay, In the Beginning was the Command Line, and more recently a series of books he calls The Baroque Cycle. (Last month Slashdot reviewed the series' third volume, The System of the World.) Now you can ask Neal whatever you want. As usual, we'll send him 10 -12 of the highest-moderated questions and post his answers verbatim when we get them back.

Re:Cryptonomicon

[stevesliva]

Questions like this are being answered at Neal's Metaweb [metaweb.com] site. Much more info there than you'll see in an interview response.

Re:In the beginning was the command line...

[Liza]

From Stephenson's web site: http://www.nealstephenson.com/content/author_juven ilia.htm [nealstephenson.com]

In the Beginning was the Command Line is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision. For the last couple of years I have been a Mac OS X user almost exclusively.

Liza

Re:Enoch

[bedford]

Someone at a book signing last week in Boulder asked Neal to explain Enoch. He reply was that to explain Enoch's purpose would be to destroy it. I'm not sure what impact this has on the question you're asking, but it seemed worth mentioning anyway.

Re:MOD PARENT UP: Re:Singularity

[mav[LAG]]

Gold *is* a particularly useful metal viz (shamelessly pasted from wikipedia):

Because of its superior electrical conductivity and resistance to corrosion and other desirable combinations of physical and chemical properties, gold also emerged in the late 20th century as an essential industrial metal. Other uses:

• 
  
• Gold performs critical functions in computers, communications equipment, spacecraft, jet aircraft engines, and a host of other products.
  
• The high electrical conductivity and resistance to oxidation of gold has led to its widespread use as thin layers electroplated on the surface of electrical connectors to ensure a good, low-resistance connection.
  
• Like silver, gold can form a hard amalgam with mercury, and is sometimes used for dental fillings.
  
• Colloidal gold (gold nanoparticles) is an intensely colored solution that is currently studied in many labs for medical, biological and other applications. It is also the form used as gold paint on ceramics prior to firing.
  
• Chlorauric acid is used in photography for toning the silver image.
  
• Disodium aurothiomalate is a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (administered intramuscularly).
  
• The gold isotope Au-198, (half-life: 2.7 days) is used in some cancer treatments and for treating other diseases.
  
• Gold is used as a coating enabling biological material to be viewed under a scanning electron microscope.
  
• Since it is a good reflector of both infrared and visible light, it is used for the protective coatings on many artificial satellites.
  

Re:Electric Till Corporation vs. Microsoft

[Boiling_point_]

RTFM [well.com] ;P

>Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by
> their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer
>to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux?

Since Finux was the principal operating system used by the characters in the book, I needed some creative leeway to have the fictitious operating system as used by the characters be different in minor ways from the real operating system called Linux. Otherwise I would receive many complaints from Linux users pointing out errors in my depiction of Linux. This is why Batman works in Gotham City, instead of New York--by putting him in Gotham City, the creators afforded themselves the creative license to put buildings in different places, etc.

Digital generations

[echo-e]

In the coming decades, it is a safe assumption that humans will continue their attempt to create artificial intelligence. Cool. Meanwhile, we will continue to store volumes of raw data in archives for generations to come. And of course, all the while, millions of songs will be traded.

As your cell phone conversation breaks up, you notice that distinct buffer-looping granular noise. It reminds you of a CD skipping or an old video game lock-up. It is a bit of a stretch, but you can see how it resembles the various block distortions on digital cable and dish TV.

And that is just the problem. Digital. It's all digital. When was the last time you heard radio or TV static? It is evident that the actual form of "noise" is changing for our cultures. How does this persistent presence of digital sampling butterfly into our cultural manner?

More importantly, how will the limitations of digital data influence our future? An immediate example is to see how the RIAA shot its self in the foot by convincing the world that a digitalization of an analog signal was the same as the real thing. Now they see just how worthless a hand-full of bits are when compared to a continuous physical fluctuation over the surface of a material.

A greater problem is the lack of resolution in data stored in archives. We create data records in our labs across the world and digitally sample them, fixing the resolution of the information forever. In ten years, a lot can be learned about how to filter broadband noise from an analog signal, but I'm afraid that there will be very little we can ever do to extract any data that was present between digital samples. So, in ten or twenty year, when we are sampling data ten or twenty times faster, isn't the stuff we're saving to disk today destined to be full of big gaping holes?

And the single most important question is what the moral implications will be if we proceed with our relentless effort to create artificial intelligence as finite state automata? How would you feel knowing you had to exist in a reality defined with a finite number of states? I realize that at approximately the atomic level, we too exist as states in a vast, but likely finite universe. Considering the orders of magnitude to which our digital creations would be restricted when compared to the resolution of the natural analog universe, how big of a god will we be?

Imagine for a moment, that a Lorenz attractor is an intelligent entity; consider how much better its quality of life would be, modeled in an analog computer as opposed to a digital one.

How many people out there, do you think, realize that there is a (astronomical) finite number of compact disks that can be made before you would have to repeat some pattern of 1s and 0s to make another?

But if you answer only one of the questions I pose, I believe that you are among the worlds most qualified to discuss whether digitalization will, can, and should increase its presence in our lives. How about Analog?