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Fred Saberhagan http://www.berserker.com/story-wolf01_06.htm I'm sure this is why.

I think Fred Saberhagen wrote the books about where we are headed, not ACC.

http://www.berserker.com/FredsBerserkers.html

Skynet was an amateur compared to these guys. :)

Reminds me of the Hammer's Slammers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer's_Slammers tanks which used 3cm power guns for artillery defense. Now all we need to do is setup a tank with the AI used in the DARPA challenge to navigate the battle field. In no time at all we could have a fully functional BOLO http://users.stargate.net/~whkeith/htm/bolo.htm. But then we need to be real careful not to create a BERSERKER http://www.berserker.com/about_berserkers.htm.

See http://www.berserker.com/

"Long ago, in a distant part of the galaxy, two alien races met--and fought a war of mutual extinction. The sole legacy of that war was the weapon that ended it: the death machines, the BERSERKERS. Guided by self-aware computers more intelligent than any human, these world-sized battlecraft carved a swath of death through the galaxy--until they arrived at the outskirts of the fledgling Empire of Man.

Fred Saberhagen has an uneasy feeling about this.

Seriously(?), is this one step closer to the 'smart pebbles' of 'star wars'? - Reagan's not Lucas's. Not passing any ideological judgement on the incoming tide of technology (like it or not, here it comes ...), but automated space replication would sure heat up the coming military space race in a higher ground sort of way.

the seamy side.

Note: BERSERKER is a registered trademark of Fred Saberhagen and can not be used without permission.

http://www.berserker.com/story-wolfcover.htm No one really knew who unleashed the machines.

When I read the article, I wasn't thinking berserker, I was thinking Skynet

"Long ago, in a distant part of the galaxy, two alien races met--and fought a war of mutual extinction. The sole legacy of that war was the weapon that ended it: the death machines, the BERSERKERS. Guided by self-aware computers more intelligent than any human, these world-sized battlecraft carved a swath of death through the galaxy--until they arrived at the outskirts of the fledgling Empire of Man."

http://www.berserker.com/bk_berserker.htm

If there is any book I'd like to see filmed, it would be "Veils of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen -- geometric landscapes, various groups of settlers divided by the weight of veils, rendering them more and more transparent to each new generation, spectacular effects of a neutron star...now that would be cool. Give me Liv Tyler as the not-really-dead beauty reanimated by the spores she was exposed to, and I'll even buy my own popcorn for once.

Haven't read it - but a quick google search brought up the title Love Conquers All? That was the only one with love in it.

Specifically, the story "Teardrop Falls" in the collaborative book "Berserker Base".

See this for an official image of the book's cover.

I wonder what Fred Saberhagen would think...

In my opinion, Kurweil's analysis of the evolutionary dynamics of a world wide web of downloaded humans is flawed because it ignores fundamental aspects of ecology and evolution. Specifically, here are two issues about his conclusion:
a) it assumes humans in a different environment will still act human with classical human motivations (as opposed to dissolve into an unrecognizable set of bits or simply locking in a pleasure loop) because to a large extent environment elicits behavior, and
b) it ignores evolution and its implications in the digital realm (especially the enhanced pace of evolution in such a network and the implications for survival).
Of these, the most important is (b).

Evolution is a powerful process. Humans have evolved to fit a niche in the world -- given a certain environment which includes a 3D reality and various other organisms (including humans). Humans have an immune systems (both mental and physical) capable of dealing with common intellectual and organismal pathogenic threats in their environment. There is no easy way to translate this to success in a digital environment, because the digital environment will imply different rewards and punishments for various behavior, and evolve predators and parasites which these immune systems have never been exposed to before. Human style intelligence is valuable in a human context for many reasons -- but sophisticated intelligence is not necessarily a key survival feature in other niches (say, smaller ones the size of roaches, hydra or bacteria). In short, the human way of thinking will be inadequate for survival in the digital realm. Even augmented minds that are connected to the network will face these threats and likely be unable to survive them. Kurzweil discusses the importance of anti-viral precautions in his book, but I think he is rosily optimistic about this particular aspect.

At best, one might in the short term construct digital environments for digital humans to live in, and defend these environments. However, both digitized human minds and immensely larger digitized human worlds will be huge compared to the smallest amount of code that can be self replicating. These digital "bacteria" will consume these digital human minds and worlds because the human minds and worlds will be constructed, not evolved. Human minds will be at a competitive disadvantage with smaller, quicker replicating code. Nor will there be any likelihood of a meaningful merger of human mind with these evolved and continually evolving patterns.

I could endlessly elaborate on this theme, but in short -- I find it highly unlikely that any mind designed to work well in meatspace will be optimal for cyberspace. It will be overwhelmed and quickly passed by in an evolutionary sense (and consumed for space and runtime). It is likely this will happen within years of digitization (but possibly minutes or hours or seconds). As an example experiment, create large programs (>10K) in Ray's Tierra and see how long they last! http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tier ra/tierra.html

Our best human attempts at designing digital carriers (even using evolutionary algorithms) will fail because of the inherent uncompetetiveness of clunky meatspace brain designs optimized for one environment and finding themselves in the digital realm. For a rough analog, consider how there is an upper limit of size to active creatures in 3D meatspace for a certain ecology. While something might survive somehow derived from pieces of a digitized person, it will not resemble that person to any significant degree. This network will be an alien environment and the creatures that live in it will be an alien life form. One might be able to negotiate with some of them at some point in their evolution citing the commonality of evolved intelligence as a bond -- but humanity may have ceased to exist by then.

In short, I agree with the exponential theme in Kurzweil's book and the growth of a smart network. We differ as to the implication of this. I think people (augmented or not) will be unable to survive in that digital world he predicts for any significant time period. Further, digital creatures inhabiting this network may be at odds or indifferent to human survival, yet human civilization will likely develop in such a way that it is dependent on this network. The best one can hope for in the digital realm is "mind children" with little or no connection to the parents -- but the link will be as tenuous as a person's relation to a well cultivated strain of Brewer's yeast, since the most competetive early digital organisms will be tiny.

Once you start working from that premise -- the impossibility of people surviving in the digital world of 2050, then Kurweil's book becomes a call to action, just like Bill Joy's comments. I don't think it is possible to stop this process for all the reasons both people mention. It is my goal to create a technological alternative to this failure scenario. That alternative is macroscopic self-replicating (space) habitats. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak However, they are no panacea. Occupants of such habitats will have to continually fight the self-replicating and self-extending network jungle for materials, space, and power. (Sounds like the making of a sci-fi thriller...) And they may well fail against the overwhelming odds of an expanding digital network without conscience or morality. Just look at Saberhagen's Beserker series http://www.berserker.com/ or the Terminator movies.

It will be difficult for Kurweil to change his opinion on this because he have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. He was making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in his book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.

Anything by Asimov is good, especially for a kid that is 13. I can't recall a single thing that I've read by Asimov that wouldn't be appropriate for someone that age.

Try to read Asimov's books in more-or-less this order:

• The End of Eternity
• the robot short stories (I, Robot, Bicentennial Man, etc.)
• the robot novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, etc.)
• the Empire novels (Pebble In The Sky, The Stars, Like Dust)
• the Foundation novels

Of course, Asimov's unrelated books and short stories (like The Gods Themselves, Azazel, etc.) are all quite good. Also, I highly recommend his non-fiction (especially Beginnings) if you enjoy his writing style and are interested in science, math, history, literature, or about anything else. :-)

My other favorite author is definitely Robert Heinlein. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much of his stuff is appropriate for a 13-year-old. Perhaps the best way to judge is to see when he wrote the book. Everything published after Stranger in a Strange Land gets more and more sex-oriented.

Off the top of my head (since most of my library is in boxes now), a few of the other authors I always liked are Poul Anderson (especially the Time Patrol books), Arthur C. Clarke, Fred Pohl, and Fred Saberhagen (good old-fashioned sci-fi in the Berserker series, weird sci-fi/fantasy mix in the Swords series).