New And Improved Singularity

A teaser from the book I'm writing..

Imagine this: a factory starts improving its products faster than it can ship them out. It started building washing machines, but somewhere along the line, new equipment got installed, and now it can build anything. Anything.
Naturally, a factory can't just swipe open source plans for a main battle tank and start spitting them out. There’s rules, there’s patents, there’s five year marketing spreads. Metal costs money, plastics need to be ordered, all this takes time.
But to take advantage of their production potential they start by installing a cheap microprocessor in their machines. And to make sure the microprocessor gives them a tangible edge, they install a simple machine mind. They load it up with clothes washing routines and fabric libraries, and before you know it the factory is mass producing the finest washing machines ever seen on the face of the planet. As are all their competitors.
The board meets, sells the whole damn thing to whomever answers their phone first, and eject themselves trough the windows in the traditional furry rat costumes. This ship is going down even as they gun their Lexuses off the grounds.

The new owner sees things on a grander scale: all ships are going down, and the patent enforcement goons are as likely to knock his door down as to develop redundant vascular systems. Suddenly the factory finds itself playing poker Taiwan style.
The R & D department is taken over by fourteen year old e-war veterans. They turn the whole factory in the single static node in a kriegspiel that is obliterating the competition at rates surpassing main battle tank production projections. Soon the washing machines leaving the factory are hyper intelligent machine minds linking into a distributed network, cleaning with soundwaves and nanobubbles and almost totally self-powered.
They are being loaded onto the trucks taking them to the various dealer networks- all of which have been receiving smart paper brochures and hastily printed recall briefs- while the factory machines receive another update.
These new washing machines are self-repairing and built from folding smart metal parts, the only moving parts, with redundant grid computing capacity. Even as they are being built they are linked up and put to work for R & D, designing even better washing machines. The emergent machine mind decides to scrap them as soon as they get off the line. At the beginning of the line, newer and better washing machines are already being assembled.
The now redundant human employees have stopped interfering. They are kicking back, playing some war games, old skool style, surfing for porn.
The new machines are smaller self-assembling plastic boxes, able to respond to the owners' taste by morphing to any shape. Back at the dealers, the smart paper brochures are being updated. In the factory the same smart paper has been reverse engineered, the concept improved: the next generation of washing machines can take any color.
Meanwhile trucks are being rerouted, back to the factory, to offload their now outdated cargo of washing machines at the reprocessing plant. The old machines contain enough bulk for a hundred times as many of the advanced models. The truck drivers need some convincing. And not only washing machines are being called back in. In fact, the industrial estate is now gridlocked. Designs are improving faster than they can get off the line, let alone be manhandled into trucks and shipped off.
The factory mind links out, testing the limits of it's brief, then forms a coalition with a factory next door, and another one across the street.
Soon helicopters are being produced by a company that used to make lawnmowers, clever little things that can carry one washing machine directly from the production line to the dealers. Some of the television channels are already being swamped by aggressive marketing for the new products. Most of them have ventured into newly emergent channels. None of these have strict rules on subliminal advertising, brainwashing or use of drugs.
In places, coalitions of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies are developing the next generation of humans, to be rolled out organ by organ. Changes to general society are so profound they can be tracked across the waking part of the planet much as tidal waves. In their wake, culture-shocked, jobless people try to figure out what is going on. Their brains are no longer fast enough to understand changes coming at them.

Dirtied Sneakz

Girls. Like the Buddha sed: Ouch.
So me getting serious about the dedicated drinking, real tough-like. At which point I noticed I was missing some good partying.. Hence, off the booze.
Leaving me sober enough to report, gods bless your pretty little doomed souls.

The trouble really started on friday, trying to get back into Brussels the trains were blocked due to an accident. Luckily I was equipped with my trusty mp3-player -which has been without a usb cable for three weeks yet I'm still not getting tired of the mixes on there - check them.
Took me a while to get cashed up and downtown, then went looking for a colleague I was supposed to meet at club Nostalgie. Avoid.
Headed over to Cafe Central where we stayed till dawn, dancin' and groovin' and missing the funky shit going down at Recyclart. Khaaan!
Still good show and all that, and blisters on my feet proving I didn't get on the train without my money's worth.
Got off, crashed, laundry run- slightly worse for wear- and a bit of re-hydrating in Leuven city park. Kitted up again. Headed for Brussels, where I'd arranged for drinks -water for me- and a first visit to Dirty Dancing.

A brisk walk to the Mirano, where I spewed some cash and was allowed to put my thumb on an ink pillow. worst. stamp. ever!
Entered 'the Hell'. Well, actually, my friends wanted to get down early, so the club was empty and we went and sat in the bar where the music was fine indeed- waltzed in to the tune of Spaced Invaders- kudos Stephen. After a drink or two, trying to make ourselves heard over the racket -the bar must have been louder than the main room - we finally got down to business. 'the Hell' was going fine, didn't recognize the dj but at that point -0.30h ?- everyone was grooving along. The main problem was on the other side of the counter. This is not a huge club, but substancial enough for me to skip the headcount. Yet serving the whole damn thing, including the bar, it had 4 (four) people. You can imagine the waiting time with that kind of staff.
The music however kept a decent level, and even a few highpoints before Sweatshop started. Was it the lack of booze? When they started I noticed Quality. They were good, they were very good, and they had something that had been missing from the previous set - decent vs. good.
After Sweatshop things went downhill musicwise, an inept dj fuckign up mixes and relying on obvious hits to score. He scored allright, but I was losing that Kansas feeling.
I walked my friends home around three-ish, and returned to find the same dj fucking up. A few times I got into the mood but he always managed to follow up with a record that was basically lame - cliched and obvious.
Back to the bar where the waiting times at the counter were just as bad - poor overworked guy - but the music was better. I managed to dance a little but in general was spinning down, and at four I walked out, handed my smallchange to the resident gorilla and crashed at my friends'.
Basically I'd been disappointed in the quality of the deejaying. Having seen Stephen at work in smaller venues, and with some nice electro being spun in the bar, finding commercial- read 'radio'- techno played in a room named 'the Hell' was rather crap.

They also have a spinning dancefloor.