Rudy Rucker: cyberpunk ideas are embodied in the Internet

One of the classics of cyberpunk Rudi Rucker gave a lecture in Amsterdam, in which he spoke about his vision of the future of humanity, as well as how the cyberpunk movement influenced scientific and technical progress over the last quarter of a century ( video , text ).

Rudy Rucker in 1980 wrote the novel “Software”, which is considered one of the first cyberpunk works in world literature. In this, as well as subsequent novels, Rudi Rucker described several of his ideas, which are now considered to be the immutable foundations of the cyberpunk vision of the future: this is loading the mind into a computer and specific technologies, such as lifebox, a device that stores all human memory. Now it is clear that this is a kind of analogue of a blog or personal page on a social network on the Internet.

Unfortunately, Rudy Rucker did not foresee the appearance of the Net, which William Gibson predicted in Neuromante. It is on the Internet that cyberpunk ideas are now being implemented.

Rudy Rucker predicts that in the future, humanity will get rid of computers (this concept is called “psipunk”). Apparently, computing devices will be seamlessly integrated into surrounding objects, so that we can talk and interact with any of them, and telepathy will become real. This whole picture will be described in detail in the post-singularity novel, which is being prepared for release in 2008.