I'm glad you enjoyed Musk's book. I was quite impressed by his determination and the complete absence of subtlety in many situations throughout the book. As for the Literary Thing, I forgot to bring it along on the trip here to Sweden. I'm currently sitting at a beach near Malmo with a book from one of my friends - Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Minds. Its 600 pages is not a summer / light read by any account and it is much more math-heavy than I was expecting, but it's also much more interesting than I'd expected. His argument (which takes him forever to build, starting with freakin' Plato and ending with Hawking) is that we have not yet developed (or will never develop) an intelligent AI because we don't understand the actual physics of the mind and of consciousness. I'm at chapter 8. bfv or mike, have either of you read it? Anyway, once I'm back home I'll start with Zero Days, a book on Stuxnet.