I just found out that Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City made the Amazon Top 10 Business Books of 2012.

I’m not a huge “made that list person” but as a writer this is a very cool thing, especially when I look at the other books, and writers, on the list. I’m downloading all of the other books right now and taking them on my two week vacation which is coming up.

I’m at Defrag this morning listing to Kevin Kelly explain how the global super organism already exists and why it is different than the Kurzweil defined Singularity. Awesome – and extremely consistent with how I think about how the machines have already taken over. Kevin’s intellectual approach is clearer and deeper – which I like, and will borrow heavily from. Kevin’s book, What Technology Wants, is also in a swag bag and I’ll be reading it next week.

One of the powerful concepts is that the “city is the node.” As I’ve been talking about Startup Communities, I’ve been explaining the power of “entrepreneurial density” and why everyone is congregating around cities again (intellectually referred to as the reurbanism of American). It’s really cool that he’s using the Degree Confluence Project to “show” (rather than simply “tell”) this.

A few of the books on the Amazon Top 10 Business Books of 2012 touch on this theme – I’ll be looking for it as I read a lot on the beach the next few weeks.

I gave a talk titled ”Resistance Is Futile” yesterday in Park City at the annual meeting for one of our LPs. This is a version of a talk I’ve given several times, starting at Defrag last fall. The slides don’t change, but I make up the talk each time and tune it to the audience.

When I got to the slide titled Science Fiction Is Becoming Science Fact I went off on a version of my rant about the importance of reading, watching, and thinking about science fiction. I always use Oblong and co-founder John Underkoffler’s work as an example here since they have created a company around the iconic science fiction future that John envisioned for the movie Minority Report.

But then I mentioned a book I’d just read called Avogadro Corp. While it’s obviously a play on words with Google, it’s a tremendous book that a number of friends had recommended to me. In the vein of Daniel Suarez’s great books Daemon and Freedom (TM), it is science fiction that has a five year aperture – describing issues, in solid technical detail, that we are dealing with today that will impact us by 2015, if not sooner.

There are very few people who appreciate how quickly this is accelerating. The combination of software, the Internet, and the machines is completely transforming society and the human experience as we know it. As I stood overlooking Park City from the patio of a magnificent hotel, I thought that we really don’t have any idea what things are going to be like in twenty years. And that excites me to no end while simultaneously blowing my mind.

I’m spending the day tomorrow at the Silicon Flatirons Digital Broadband Migration Conference. This year’s theme is “The Challenges of Internet Law and Governance.” And, as we recently discovered with SOPA, PIPA, and now ACTA there are huge disconnects between government, lawyers, incumbents, and innovators. I’m on one panel which I’ll make sure is spicy – I hope others really get into the issues this year. There will be a live stream of the event on UStream (which is awesome – imagine the effort to do that 20 years ago) so you can watch it in real time if you want.

Every single person there needs to read Avogadro Corp, Daemon, and Freedom (TM). My guess is very few have. And that’s a problem for them, but not for the machines.

I don’t care what your political orientation is, if you want an awesome two hour lesson in leadership watch the movie Thirteen Days.  It’s the story of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis based on the book by May and Zelikow titled The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Amy and I watched it last night.  I was exhausted from two weeks on the east coast and was having trouble speaking (Amy refers to it as “getting the dregs of Brad.”)  I think I was even out of dregs so I just laid on the coach and watched the movie.  I half watched it a few months ago while catching up on email and I saw it when it first came out so I knew the story.  But when I watched it a few months ago I didn’t give it my undivided attention.  This time I did because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else.

On Thursday and Friday I was in DC and had four significant experiences.  The first was a tour of the CIA which, while limited to very specific physical areas (including the CIA gift shop), included a 75 minute roundtable with the CIA’s CTO and his team about the future.  Later Thursday night I had a very quiet tour of the West Wing.  Friday morning I was on a panel on The Need for Net Neutrality with Brad Burnham (Union Square Ventures) and Santo Politi (Spark Capital) followed by a dynamite meeting at the White House with Phil Weiser and members of the National Economic Council team, Aneesh Chopra (CTO of the US), and Vivek Kundra (CIO of the US).  For two days I was immersed in government leadership.

Yesterday I woke up very late in the morning to Brad Burnham’s post titled Web Services as Governments.  It’s a must read post where he makes several very specific analogies for which web services act like which kinds of government.  He specifically breaks down which government he thinks Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist look like.  While you may not agree with his mappings, the general construct is incredibly powerful when you think about creating a company that operates on top of a web service (or platform company.)

And then – after sleeping most of the day – I watched Thirteen Days.  As I was immersed in it, I kept thinking about examples from Brad’s post as well as my experience dealing with web services that are powerful governments.  When I think about those examples, Thirteen Days is a movie that every CEO and every member of the management team in these companies (or any company for that matter) should watch.

As a bonus, in both my CIA meeting and the Net Neutrality panel I got to toss out my line that “in 40 years we will not be able to distinguish between biological machines and non-biological humans.  Basically the machines will take over and our goal should be that they are nice to us.”  After waking up this morning feeling much more rested, it was extra fun to see a huge NY Times titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday about the Singularity.

After spending the last seven hours in front of my computer, a phrase came to mind that my brother Daniel recently said to me in response to reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.  Daniel said:

“What if we we are already working for the computers?”

While The Matrix and Horton Hears a Who! come immediately to mind, his comment was subtler than that.  What if we turn the entire paradigm on its side?  In our biological realm we “evolve”; in our computing realm we “innovate.”  What if the computers are actually evolving and have figured out that the best way for them to evolve more quickly is to convince us to “innovate” for them.

I had to stop and scrunch my eyes together after typing that paragraph.  The first draft I wrote was way weirder and more out there – basically a rant about how computers were having a conversation in a parallel universe that we don’t actually understand and, as part of this, had figured out how to manipulate human beings. 

At Ted yesterday, my long time friend John Underkoffler, the co-founder of Oblong stated “Technology is capable of expressing generosity. And we need to demand that.”

While he meant something totally different, I think this is consistent with the parallel universe I’m pondering.  As humans (at least most Americans), we regularly envision ourselves at the top of the pyramid of existence, unless you are not an atheist, in which case god factors in somewhere on your hierarchy.  But – let’s leave god (or the lack of god) out and think about “humans as a species” vs. “computers as a species”.  I started with constructs like collective consciousness and communication hierarchy and was able to quickly come up with a straightforward analogy for each one between the human species and the computer species.

And yet, I still type.  All in the name of sharing and contributing my thoughts via this very interesting mechanism.  I’m going to run for three hours this afternoon.  I’ll have my Garmin 305 on my wrist (with its GPS) and my iPhone in my pack (listening to the end of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  I’ll be contributing a lot of data to both devices, which will then record them and upload them to “the computer”.  The amount of data I’m generating is enormous; I’m not quite sure what the computers are using all of this data for, but what if it was actually something specific?

Before you discard these thoughts as the ravings of a lunatic, just think about them for a minute.  This is a common construct in so much contemporary science fiction.  Maybe the “collective compute infrastructure” of the world has already passed us by and now have us working for them / it.  Wouldn’t that be something to discover 100 years from now.