Seconded. Diaspora is one of the best sci if books I've read. Highly recommend it (and all of Egan's work) to the HN community.

Thirded. Before Diaspora, I first read "Wang's Carpets"[1] which is a short story of his. Then found out this story had later been incorporated as a chapter into the book. I remember basically immediately ordering said book that night.

fwiw, that "Webly-Supervised Visual Concept Learning" reminds me of the stuff that Hinton et al. do re: unsupervised (concept, etc.) learning (using restricted Boltzmann machines, and so on.) Good talk on the subject (of deep learning, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M

[1]: read online here: http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997

Umm.. fourthed? I just couldn't help but jump in and also recommend Greg Egan's "Permutation City". That book is just wonderful... think simulation, cellular automata as a model for computation, artificial life and all that other good stuff :).

Also, about the LEVAN thing... given the amount of data available online, both in various structured formats and unstructured formats, don't be surprised if deep learning will yield better and better results moving forward. To me though, they mostly seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I mean if you look back at the AI field, during the days before the "AI winter" came, huge amounts of data is one thing researchers back then didn't have available. This is not to say that there haven't been advances in learning algorithms at all recently. ..

As well as adding my own strong recommedatios for Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" I would also recommend "Quarantine" - which has a rather splendid idea for mobile apps - "neural mods" that actually augment the brains own congnitive capabilities (including augmenting sensory data for the ultimate in VR).

And there is what one group chooses to do with a very special neural mod...

This is happening now in deep learning. Deep autoencoders[1] are allowing for computer representations of "similar" concepts. I recently gave a talk on this very concept to assist in QA systems.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/ir-34811120