Sunday, October 21, 2012

Profiling Anissimov's Blog


            The blog I have chosen to profile is called Accelerating Future and the blog focuses on near-future technologies and the implications that they might have upon the world.  Accelerating Future is written by Michael Anissimov, who I found out after further research, is the Media Director for the Singularity Institute and Co-Organizer of the Singularity Summit, which is “an annual conference that focuses on emerging technologies like nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence” (taken from Anissimov’s blog bio section).  Reading the rest of his bio, it seems like Anissimov is more of a writer about these issues than a scientist, but he seems very well versed in the academic discussions and theories.  Many of this articles have been featured in prominent science enthusiast magazines and he reportedly has a very large audience.  Michael does not post to his blog fairly often, but he has kept up his blog for many years now.  His top two posts are this post, in response to someone else’s thoughts on singularity, and this one where he presents what he considers to be a more accurate view of future AI singularity.

            This blog coincides beautifully with my own blog.  It’s almost as if Philip K. Dick wrote Accelerating Future instead of Michael Anissimov in terms of the subject matter.  My understanding is that Michael is a writer and that he is writing the blog professionally for a living, but I could be mistaken. The posts range from very detailed and long articles that explore the complexities and nuances of various scientific discoveries and theories to very short, humorous quips and lists.  The audience is targeted to whoever is equally enthusiastic about singularity and the other scientific realms that Michael writes about.  I feel that this blog would work very well as the source for my writing project, but I am concerned that it may be a little challenging to find articles that relate these scientific ideas directly to philosophy.  I think I’ll just have to do more searching on his blog.  It’s way too easy for me to get distracted while browsing his posts because they all sound very captivating and I end up reading those articles out of sheer interest.  He is definitely a very strong writer.  I’ve noticed that he always manages to capture my interest from the first few lines of any of his blog posts and his thoughts are organized in lists that make it easy to visually detect his points.  I searched for his blog’s audience and rankings and it seems that Michael’s audience is really made up of people that are just like me – male, in their twenties, and nerd junkies! 

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