If you're reading (or have been reading) Mass Effect: All in the Details, you've probably figured out almost everything I would tell you here.

I'm an enormous proponent of Mankind having a positive Singularity, and consider the existential threat of a recursive AGI to be enormous...if solvable. My favorite organizations in this respect are currently MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute; ,) its sister organization CFAR (Center For Applied Rationality,) in Berkeley, California, and the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, U.K.

I used to be a theist, but I'm not anymore. I miss that a lot; the god I used to believe in was keeping all my dead friends and family safe until I got there, too. While the god of the bible is as self-contradictory, malevolent, vindictive...yes, all that and worse...that wasn't the god I believed in. But once I found the reasons to stop relying on unfounded belief, and start looking and understanding evidence, it became impossible to believe anymore...without good reasons. I don't want to believe; I want to know. Believing I'm going to win the lottery or that there is a refrigerator-sized diamond buried in my back yard does not make it so, and not believing in gravity does not make it stop. Even if I want to believe something for which I have no evidence, it's not my belief that will make it so. I'm a slave to the empirical world.

As catalyst of this change, I credit Sam Harris. Read everything Sam writes; it's golden. I would dearly love to find something he says that I disagree with just so I could not seem like a groupie, but to date, everything Sam has said or written, I wish I could have said first. I also regard ethics as an undeveloped science...and it may be our greatest hope in building a flourishing planetary civilization...and beyond. (If you haven't read The Moral Landscape, not only is that a great place to start, but you should read it - or listen to it being read - with all dispatch!) Alternatively, read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If I had have written that, I'd be proud enough to explode.

I write for therapy, and escape, and it's been fun to finally direct my energies to something others can read and respond to. (Though if we solve the problem of "How to build Friendly AGI," I would like to take a vacation where I can experience all the stuff I'm writing...or maybe something better, but related.) To all those who have posted reviews, I am greatly indebted. If you read a story you like, _tell_the_author_! It's like applause for actors, or power-ups for your video game characters.