[username223]

Can M wade through phone support menus and cancel Comcast subscriptions? I look forward to a darkly-humorous future in which we pit poorly-paid third-world citizens against each other in wars of call center attrition. Better, once we equip them with those sound-board UIs that play pre-recorded answers in native English-speaking voices (can't find the link), English can become a transmission protocol that few people deal with directly.

[Hortinstein]

> I look forward to a darkly-humorous future in which we pit poorly-paid third-world citizens against each other in wars of call center attrition.

This sounds like a 10 page side story in a Neil Stephenson Book. I love it.

[JadeNB]

It's very nearly part of the strategy of one of the players in Stross's Accelerando (http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross...).

[templaedhel]

For what it's worth this book (which is excellent) is also published as a free ebook under a Creative Commons license (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...).

The author is also a relatively prolific HN poster (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross).

[nathancahill]

Such a great book.

[Scarblac]

In Greg Egan's Permutation City, they have interactive 3D video email, and interactive 3D video spam, and interactive 3D video spam filters.

The spam tries to act like a perfectly normal message as long as it is talking to the spam filter, and as soon as it thinks it is talking to a real person, it shows its spam message. The spam filter tries to impersonate the recipient as best as it can (in 3D video), meanwhile trying to figure out whether the message is spam.

The spam filters are unfortunately humstrung by the fact that they can only become close to real conscious AI and not further, because taking them all the way there would mean you'd be exposing a conscious being to spam all its life, which would be torture and thus criminal. Spammers don't care.

IIRC, this is just a side anecdote in some paragraphs somewhere, but I love it.

[Hortinstein]

I just finished this book. I loved it. Any other recommendations for books like this? I read Accelerando, and am reading Chasm City now (both highly recommended).

[Scarblac]

I loved _Diaspora_ as well. And the rest of his books, but those two stand out.

I don't know anybody like Egan, he takes the science part to such extremes... My favourite SF author is Iain M Banks, but you're probably already familiar with him.

[CPLX]

Was thinking Douglas Adams myself.

[andorov]

Perhaps a future where modern English has become archaic but still spoken only by computers to each other, because the upgrade is not cost effective

[envy2]

M can indeed cancel Comcast accounts. Use this knowledge wisely...

[gohrt]

HN hosted an article recently about someone's project that cancel's Comcast for you.

[nathancahill]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320509

[tonylucas]

I would hope in the future that more and more services are actually directly available to be interacted with over one or more messaging networks, enabling easy, asynchronous communication.

Whether Comcast would want to make it that easy for people to cancel is entirely a different issue though :)