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True Names
The history of this book is a little odd. It was supposed to be published several years ago, and was delayed for some reason, unknown to me. As a result, only the introduction to the book has been written recently - even the pieces that were intended to be extremely current are now rather painfully dated.
There's an old interview with Vinge where the interviewer draws out a number of Vinge's ideas about the modern internet and the Singularity. Vinge seems to have had it in hand when writing his introduction to True Names, and you can probably got a good idea of what he tried to convey in the anthology by reading the interview. If it sounds at all interesting, read on.
Vinge's central point is that cyberspace is extremely controllable, if and only if everyone's true names are known. That's the point brought out in the essay True Names, and it's a point that the other writers featured in the anthology agree upon. It's an incredibly insightful idea, one well worth spending some time pondering.
Let's look at some of the larger pieces included in the book. Timothy May, who is perhaps best known for his ranting posts about crypto anarchy, has a lengthy and astonishingly well-written essay titled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy". The essay reads as if an editor with a firm hand extracted most of May's characteristic wild-eyed prose and yet kept the insightful ideas behind it - if only all of his writing was like this essay. It's a great introduction to what May means by "crypto anarchy". May is one of the most optimistic writers in the book, and he, as well as the other writers, believe that we are at a fork: either we'll move toward a surveillance state, or toward what May calls an anarcho-capitalist state, but the middle ground is unstable - we'll end up at one extreme or the other. May believes we're already firmly on the road toward anarcho-crypto-utopia.
John M. Ford, who you may recognize as a science fiction writer, has a short story wondering what the machines will think of us.
Alex Wexelblat, computer scientist, has a powerful essay looking at the internet as a tool for surveillance and control. Written only a few years ago, many of his predictions are now fact.
Richard Stallman has his essay The Right to Read. Hopefully it will reach a larger audience on dead trees than in electronic form.
Leonard Foner has an essay covering the basics of the cryptography debate. It's geared to get newcomers up to speed and should do that adequately.
Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer have a couple of essays about Habitat, a very early MUD sponsored by Lucasfilm. The essays have been published online; here's one of them and there's been plenty written about Habitat if you look. Excellent reading, brings out the challenges faced by any online community and simultaneously reminds you of the "good" old days (who here is paying by the hour for internet access today?).
And finally we come to True Names itself. Should be required reading in high school, IMHO. I won't discuss it much, either you've read it or you haven't, and if you haven't I'd rather you learn about it by reading it. If you don't want to buy the book, there are unauthorized electronic versions of the text floating around, but one way or another, read it, it's worth your time.
I'm going to go back now to Vinge's introduction. It bears quoting:
"It seems to me that it's still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt freedom--but this is one place where the most extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the "Four Horsemen" that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the "Terrorist Horseman" is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It's not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described." -- Vernor Vinge, August 1999
Today the "Terrorist Horseman" is in full charge, whipping us toward ever-tighter controls. And Vinge's prediction is embodied in the countless initiatives to install Digital Rights Management and government surveillance in every computing device. And that is why, in the end, I gave the anthology less than a 10/10 rating. Although I know it was written before the most recent events which proved it so accurate, it feels dated, as if we've already run at top speed down the road to a Net filled with surveillance, where the government and the MPAA know everyone's True Name, and yet Vinge is behind the times in predicting it now.
You can purchase True Names at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.
but i can`t be seen buying/reading books with `cyberspace` in the title.
"I suppose when it gets to that point, we shan't know how it does it."
--- Alan Turing
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
gah, books like this dserve to be stolen from airport bookstores.
Was the first Vinge book I read, back when it was serialized in Analog. Bobbles, life after the infocalypse, and a mystery. Good read.
Best Slashdot Co
its because its a 20 year old book about computing.
n tc hiefs_010501.html
Oh, and that stuff about terrorists and horses - well, people have been going on about spooks and terrorists and civil rights for years, and they always will.
"Written before recent events"? Well, 1999 may be before September 11th, 2001, but what he`s describing (`Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion`) is old news to anyone who`s been paying attention to how governments (around the world) get the laws they want.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/joi
I wonder why this same mistake comes up time after time in sci-fi.
Having superior raw intelligence doesn't mean anything performancewise. Yeah, you might be able to carry out a perfect logical deduction in a nanosecond but that doesn't make you creative or give you the intuititive ability us humans have to skip over irrelevant facts.
At least the original Star Trek got it right when Spock uttered the most insightful line in the whole series: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end."
Stallman's piece has no place in a book like this. It is a poorly written fable, and while it may be somewhat instructive, it's nothing that I ever hoped would be published on paper. Compared to the other selections in this book that I'm familiar with it doesn't seem to warrant inclusion.
I should note that the Singularity refers not just to the creation of greater-than-human intelligence, but to what happens when such intelligence is let loose in the world and begins to enhance its own mind. From http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html:
... Singularity.
((begin quote))
If computing speeds double every two years, what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?
Computing speed doubles every two years.
Computing speed doubles every two years of work.
Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.
Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again.
Six months - three months - 1.5 months
((end quote; emphasis in original))
If you're still interested, check out http://www.singinst.org.
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
The best and most terrifying document about Artificial Intelligence that I have ever read is Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity.
Consequently when my independent-scholar Open Source AI project caused me to be interviewed about it by Nanomagazine, I made sure in my low-status interview to refer hero-worshippingly to on-high Vernor Vinge,whom I thank for lighting the path for all us AI geeks.
This is as complete and accurate an etext of the 1984
edition of True Names
True Names by Vernor Vinge
If you fear the singularity, why do you pursue AI? Do you think that by coding a 'love and peace' module that the AI won't turn out to be a bad seed?
shit, now this loon might actually be able to post to a story and appear to be on topic.
On another note, how many people that are spouting off about all these big ideas are familiar with actual literature and what some of the great thinkers of the 20th century have had to say about the philosophy of mind?
Science fiction was exploring "the Net" in print long before it became the subject of fiction in Hollywood movies and on television news. Indeed, the science fictional imagery of "cyberpunks" seem to have been a model for many online venues, as well as for a goodly portion of the online population. But very few SF writers accurately portrayed today's Internet--or even the virtual reality Net that seems to be looming on the horizon. Almost none showed the real, day-to-day concerns of inhabitants of their fictional Nets.
Most readers will be familiar with the early cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, by William Gibson. In it, as in many movies, the Net is portrayed as a sort-of monster video game populated by self-made superheroes. On a more realistic level, but still making dazzling use of virtual reality in cyberspace, is Vernor Vinge's novella, "True Names." First published in 1980 and thus predating the Gibson work and other cyberpunkia, "True Names" focuses in part on the obsession online hacker communities have with keeping their real names--their true names--a secret. In fact, the plot hinges on it; hence the title. In Vinge's world of hackers, for someone else to know your true name was to lose all, and to be at the mercy of those who knew your true name.
As you know if you've read Chapter 1, anonymity is every bit as vital a concern to contemporary hackers as it was to the hackers in "True Names." It should be a vital concern to you, too, in certain situations.
"True Names" is also a good starting-point for understanding a bit about the hacker culture and related Web communities. In short, it is a "must-read" for anyone who uses the Internet.
Custer's Revenge: The greatest video
the Singularity, the point in time when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are.
How exactly do you define intelligence?
If you define it in terms of capabilities, computers are already faster at calculations than any human could be. In the absence of a clearly defined standard of what constitues intelligence, how do we know what the Singularity IS much less when we get to that point?
The Turing test for Artificial Intelligences was once considered the benchmark as to whether the goal of creating an artificial intelligence had been achieved. Now, the test is considered insignificant because what it measured (the ability to understand and respond to human natural language) was merely one aspect of intelligence, and apparently not the most important indicator of intelligence.
There are literally hundreds of IQ tests out there, and they all measure something, but the question is, does it measure what it claims to, and is the thing being measured an appropriate indicator of what you are looking for? If the experts (psychologists) can't come to some sort of concensus, what hope to the rest of us have for figuring it out?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
This is how someone I've forgotten (perhaps someone here on Slashdot) summed up Vinge's notion of the Singularity. It's an accurate description.
I think it's all nonsense, anyway. Various technological revolutions have come and gone, and we humans are pretty much the same as we always were, as any student of history, ancient literature, or anthropology could tell you.
I just ordered this from my local Sci-Fi bookstore, "The Stars are Destination" as they sold out of their original order. I could of ordered from Amazon, but a physical space to browse for books is a great thing and I am happy to pay extra for it.
Of course, once we have true tele-presence, my attitude may change.
...when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are
"
Uh, how is that a common mistake? It hasn't exactly happened yet, has it?
Maybe it WOULD be common, like those questions in the FAQ that no one would think to ask in a million years but give you all sorts of useful information.
hasn't read Right to Read.
hmm the site is down here is
G o o g l e's cache of "True Names"
was "A deepness in the Sky". I remember noticing something funny with the book very soon. But it took me until the smart dust to recognise what it was: All the CompSci was correct! (I am a Computer Scientist.) And the book was still good.
Not often that you encounter that combination.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
How exactly do you define intelligence?
If you define it in terms of capabilities, computers are already faster at calculations than any human could be. In the absence of a clearly defined standard of what constitues intelligence, how do we know what the Singularity IS much less when we get to that point?
You can question whether or not it's truly "intelligent", but when Skynet sends the T1000 killbot after you, this argument will seem pretty academic.
A Troll with a cause? I thought not having a cause is part of what trolling is all about.
The link, http://isbn.nu/0312862075 listed in the main post attributes a novella titled "Neuromancer" to Mr. Vinge. I think they must be confused. William Gibson's novel by that name has been compared to Vernor Vinge's (earlier) work, "True Names" but is in no way related to Mr. Vinge.
Unless there's some other connection of which I'm unaware...
Having to read a book containing the rantings of both Vinge and RMS must be torture. Although the presence of alternate voices in the world must be seen as an advantage, Vinge in particular is truly paranoid. When my computer starts manufacturing robots with which to take over the world, I'll simply turn it off.
If it's smart, it'll keep it's mouth shut.
Probably right after it reads up on the Salem Witch Trials, or watches Terminator 2.
I think he's right in principle, but just guessing as far as the actual timing goes. While computer speeds will continue to improve and may improve to staggering levels (e.g. one gram of computer doing the raw calculations of all human brains on the planet), that won't be enough to get the singularity started.
That's the key. The computers themselves are not going to be able to begin to contribute to improving computers, until some human, somewhere, finally figures out how to build an AI. And no one, not even Vinge, knows when that is going to happen. None of the Moore's Law stuff matters until some Computer Scientist has a breakthrough and figures out a way to use all that power.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why would super human intellegent AIs, be
devoloped before the technology for Uploading
human minds into a computer?
Evolution has been working nearly a billion years
with a population count of billion upon billion, on producing integellence, only once at the
end of this time as produced integllence. Hopefully its just plain hard to produce an general purpose self aware intellegence and human uploads will be ones running a post singilarty world.
On the other hand, what would be the difference
between a human uploads and a constructed AI.
Humans have been knowned to think and do practicly
anything no matter how wacked out. Would an AI
be any different. In general bad ideas means bad
actions, and human programming comes from your
environment not genetics.
For fans of Vernor Vinge (as I am), you can pick up his new anthology, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, reviewed here and here. Amazon has both of these books for sale (though at a spurious "special low price").
"True Names" is one of two of his stories not included in the collection, sadly. I don't know what the other one is.
Jesus Christ, Michael, what the fuck were you thinking when you posted this story? I knew this asshole Mentifex would blow his load when he saw the perfect opportunity to spam us with his AI project. Maybe he's not offtopic this time, but he's sure as hell a troll.
What incredible foresight he must have had to visit his local university or research company and see how the Internet had been working for 15 years!
Hey, maybe I should write a book "predicting" the Mars Rover or Microsoft monopoly.
Hate trolls? Troll 'em back...at home!
Now imagine this... A Supercomputer with a superinteligence ... set to conquer the world.
:)
And after a while theres a blip and he vanishes. You then realise that he was Windows based.
The world rejoices and present eternal thanks to Bill Gates for it's wonderfull OS that helped to save the world...
What a nightmare...
Long live TUX!
the Singularity, the point in time when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are.
This is an inaccurate characterization of the singularity. The singularity refers more generally to that point in time where technological growth and change are happening so quickly (in other words, where the exponential curve steepens toward the vertical), that we don't know what happens.
It could be a superintelligent computer that wipes out or enslaves humankind. More likely, it will involve some sort of transformation of humanity into something else (presumably enhanced, perhaps godlike or simply so different as to be unrecognizable). Examples of such possibilities include the merger of human and machine intellect (e.g. wiring the cortex directly to a powerful computer, or perhaps the internet itself), the emergence of a group intelligence (we all become one mind as we wire ourselves together to the internet, perhaps like the borg, perhaps not), self-modification of our physical forms beyond our current recognition (or ability to imagine), ditto for our intellects, loading our minds onto machines directly and turning our back on the physical world in favor of an existence in some form of virtual reality, and so on.
"The Singularity" has many, many positive connotations as well as many negative connotations, the underlying factor is that what will happen is an unknown, what form it will take (or what forms, as it is quite possible, even probable, that we will diverge in many directions as the means and technologies to do so become available) is an unknown, and when exactly it will happen is an unknown. Assuming such stifling things as patents, Bill Joy-proposed types of restrictions on research, and other governmental or corporate restrictions on technological progress do not play a deciding role we can be certain of only one thing: the singularity will happen very rapidly, perhaps in a time period of days, hours, or even minutes.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One of the best ideas in this respect are the Focused from Vinge himself
Censorship on Slashdot
Well, this isn't so far from the truth.
There are some video games which have some pretty brain-dead AI - but you still lose in the end, to superior forces. Either they have more firepower, or are more maneuverable, or better armor, better "intelligence" (information), or numbers.
In any case - we're focussing on the wrong aspects of the "threat machine" - intelligence isn't really all that necessary. In fact, I think that the intelligence required to be a threat to humanity already exists.
Even the "power" aspect already exists. Automated warfare. ICBMs. Cruise Missiles.
What does not exist is self-sufficiency.
When someone can create the mechanical apparatus for current machine intelligence, that can build, repair, service, and power a suitable weapons platform, we (humanity) are toast.
Right now, it would definately take concerted deliberate innovation to develop a "threat" along these lines.
What the fear is - in the future, the intelligence will exist in the machine world, that can become self-sufficient in it's own right. THAT is where we'll need to start worrying.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
old school cyberpunk repackaged for the youngens.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here's the archived version at the Wayback Machine. It's superior to the Google cache - has the images cached, and no keywords highlighted.
My reading of Vinge's essay on the singularity and his book "Marooned in Realtime" was that he considered Intelligence Amplification (IA) a much more likely route to the post-human era than Aritficial Intelligence (AI).
I couldn't agree more. AI requires that we get to the bottom of how intelligence works then do a better job of it than evolution did. Not bloody likely any time soon. IA only requires that we stumble upon enough of the working principles of our brains to enhance them with machines/computers. FAR more likely. We have had some very interesting experiments in recent years decoding the signals a cat's eye sends to its brain, and interfacing neural networks with a lobster's nervous system to control the parts that move food particles along, just to name two.
What progress has been made in AI that can compare with that?
True Names cached on Google here
No matter how fast a computering speed is, it will never exist the speed of light. Instead of assuming an exponential growth (2^n), a better assumption is to assume an s-curve growth. As technology development approach the speed of light or whatever reference it is based on, the speed will slow down, like the same way it speeds up. At that point,
Computing speed halves every two years.
Computing speed halves every two years of work.
Computing speed halves every two subjective years of work.
Eventually, the technology will become common knowledge and stablized, perhap even abondoned for a better alternative.
Will AI approach human intelligent at that time could still be a question.
This CD is the world's first major eBook project with current fiction, and became famous because the novel "A Fire Upon the Deep," is in hypertext, linked to 400kb of the author's notes, written as the novel was being developed. You really get to see Vinge's mind at work.
Anyway, Vinge fans love these, so from time to time they show up for charity auction. In this case, the proceeds go to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which you can read about elsewehre on /. today.
To see the auctions go to my eBay page or to the CD's web page
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Having placed my order for this book about 2.5 years ago, I was totally surprised to recieve it last month (during finals week, damn!) and accordingly devoured it.
Vinge is visionary, but what's always struck me about the Singularity is not what it says about the future, but what it says about our world today.
I grew up reading every scrap of cyberpunk I could get my hands on (and now I read Pynchon, so don't get me started), and knowing, not just imagining or believing, but knowing that modern man is soon to become obsolete. Everything about us is on the verge of becoming mere history to offspring quite unlike ourselves. I don't mean it in a bad way, in fact I quite look forward to it and don't doubt that we'll make a leap of our own, but in the back of my mind it's always underscored a certain thread of dispair. We seem to be at that tricky point where we've outlived our usefulness, indeed we have quite literally won the game (evolution) that brought us here, but haven't yet been replaced or upgraded. It gives life a certain quaint feeling, and a curious urge to transform now or self destruct (yes, go watch Fight Club again).
This world isn't quite mine. I think we're waiting ours to arrive.
Sometimes I wonder why noone (other than Vinge) is writing post-Singlarity science fiction.
In the meantime, go read True Names, then read the essays and read it again.
I see many comments here (and in other related slashdot posts) that are doubtful of the probability of a singularity event emerging from the widespread networking of silicon computers.
Do we have some sort of permanent monopoly on intelligence? Consider whether or not alternative forms of intelligence (or, at the very least, operating successfully in modern human society) is possible - irregardless of whether the result behaves human.
Software engineered by humans running on networked silicon computers will some day be able to write new software that can perform more complex functions. While this will initially be a humble process at best, it will be improved upon, just as the silicon architectures that software runs on now have improved dramatically over the years.
Money and effort will be allocated toward the development of such a process, for more money and effort can be saved by it.
When this level of accomplishment is reached (i.e. human engineering has made this possible), it won't matter that this software behaves in a way unlike the input and output of a network of human neurons.
What will matter will be our interaction with and reaction to these process-beings which may (some day) surpass many capabilities of a single human. We had better think about how we may successfully operate along side such beings, for a world with them in it may be a much faster and more dangerous world than any we have previously built.
Most anything I can bring to this discussion has already been said. Many of the posts on Vinge's concept of the Singularity are especially good. Although one point - Vinge said 'orders of magnitude' smarter than us, not just smarter than us - an important difference.
But I do have an interesting tale about William Gibson and the origins of Gibson's 'Matrix' and Virtual Reality! Many people have noted that Vinge wrote 'True Names', with a complete description of an Internet and Virtual Reality, years before Gibson published Neuromancer. Often people wonder if Gibson had read 'True Names' and lifted the ideas wholesale from it.
I once had an opportunity bring this up with Gibson. A few years later I posted the story of this conversation to alt.cyberpunk as part of an on-going conversation there. Thanks to the wonders of Google you can read the original or you can read on here for an edited version:
Back in 1995 I had a girlfriend who was attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. One of her classes was a kind of on-going seminar thingy about 'cyberculture' and one of the seminar leaders was a teacher at that school named Tom Maddox who knew Gibson personally. Tom Maddox also wrote exactly one (not bad) cyberpunk novel, 'Halo', which is now available on the Internet.
Anyway, one of the seminars featured William Gibson as a speaker (and apparently this is something he never does). My girlfriend made sure I knew about it so I could attend (they were open to the public, but attendance was required for the students). It was a strange 'talk'. Rather than Gibson giving a speech, it was presented as the 'Tom and Bill Show' with the two of them sitting across a table from each other and having a straight ahead discussion on whatever they liked. Incredibly interesting; like being a fly on the wall at someone else's bullshit session.
During a break, right before the talk, Gibson was outside smoking a cigarette and looking about as out-of-place as you can get. I was probably the only one there that recognized him before he got on stage, because no-one was near him. So I took the opportunity to introduce myself and ask him a few questions. He was friendly enough, and didn't seem to take affront except for one question (which is why it sticks in my mind so well)... As you have probably already figured out, the question was whether he (Gibson) had read Vinge's story 'True Names'?
He replied - rather tartly - that, so far as could remember, he had not, but had read it since. He did acknowledge the several ways in which Vinge's story foreshadowed his own work (including the introduction of Virtual Reality among other things). He also said that lots of people ask him that question, but he did not (and he repeated "NOT" very forcefully) steal Vinge's ideas, but rather invented them in parallel.
Personally I believe him. I think the early eighties was 'Steam Engine Time' for Virtual Reality and for Cyberpunk in general.
Jack William Bell
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Similarly, when dealing with an intelligence that can meaningfully modify itself to its own improvement, academic questions over whether it's "ten times smarter then an unassisted human" or "elevent times smarter then an unassisted human" aren't even academic; they're just meaningless. The point is that that level of intelligence is entirely unlike anything experience we have in the past with which to judge the future.
If the Singularity occurs, the "common man's" (which will be in short supply by then) problem will not be figuring out whether the machine intelligence is a billion or a trillion times more intelligent then him; it will be trivially obvious that the intelligence is orders of magnitude greater by ANY measurement. The problem will be avoiding being left behind, or, alternatively, trying to be left behind. (Either way the choices could well be constrained.)
(I personally don't think it will happen, for multiple reasons not worth going into, but those who understand the concept and its proponents IMHO do have a clearer understanding of what the future implies then those of us who think that life will largely continue as it has; frankly, it hasn't been working THAT way for a couple hundred years already, so why we persist in that notion is beyond me. Well, actually it's not beyond me, I understand it well, but the rhetoric stands.)
Before empiricism and the scientific method, change was so slow and so random that most people never saw it during their lifetimes. Today, people take exponential progress in computer hardware performance as a given, and expect visible change in their surroundings multiple times during their lives.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I did not read "True Names" but this discussion reminds me of a story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Question" which I read on a book called "Nine Tomorrows". It deals with the use of a computer to find out how to avoid the end of the universe.
He imagined a world where all the computers would actually become one ( whether it came to him the idea of the Internet as a single processing unit or he just imagined bigger and more powerful mainframes, I cannot say ). The COMPUTER actually merges with mankind in order to gain the necessary knowledge to reply to the question. I will never forget the fringe on the spine I got when I finally read the answer...
This is actually a link to links where it can be purchased.
TechNoir
If you're a cheap SF-lovin' fanatic like me, another way to get "True Names" is by finding Dell Binary Star #5, a paperback that also has George R. R. Martin's super-fine SF horror story "Nightflyers."*
Binary Stars are modeled after the legendary Ace Doubles, which feature two novellas and introductions by both authors. Like the Doubles, the author introduce the other guy's work instead of their own.
Lucky & obsessive browsers might be able find this in a used store--I did!
*Yes, Virginia, Martin primarly wrote SF before he got around to the Big Fantasy genre. And he's done some great "intelligent space opera" a la Simak and Bester. Not as good as "Stars My Destination, but who is?|
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
> I grew up [...] knowing, not just imagining or believing, but knowing that modern man is soon to become obsolete.
That seems like an odd comment when praising Vinge's idea of the Singularity. By definition, the Singularity is the point past which all predictions and speculations fail, due to an epistemological--and possibly metaphysical--shift. I think that "believing" is a better word. "Just knowing" smacks of superstition.
But your point about what the concept says about today is well taken. We do seem to live in a better/faster/cheaper world, even when talking about people. Personally, I'd love to be able to upgrade my software.
Fans of Vinge (or the merely curious) may be interested to know that he will be the Pro Guest of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th annual World Science Fiction Convention, to be held this August (Aug 29 - Sep 2) in San José, CA, USA.
Memberships are a bit pricey at this point ($180 US), but include the right to nominate and vote for the Hugo awards (for those who were upset over Harry Potter's Hugo last year, this is your chance to help prevent a similar occurance this year).
Maybe I'll see some of you there. Cheers.
The singularity (http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html) is predicated on geometric progression gone wild. Computer speed doubles every x period of time forever. And when the brain doing the work is also doubled, then you have a runaway geometric progression. Pretty cool thought.
But.....as they say, if something can't go on forever, it won't. Population explosions burn themselves out for lack of food. If you double your bet in the casino until you win, you'll wind up broke because you eventually double beyond you money supply.
Intelligent articles about Moore's law speculate on how long the doubling can last not on whether it can go on forever. So yes, maybe we are heading toward a singularity where smart machines can make ever smarter machines. But this progression won't be a geometric singularity, at least not for long. It will become linear when some kind of limit we can't anticipate stops it. And if that limit hits sooner than we think, we might find that machines aren't getting smarter very quickly at all.
There are lots of IRCisms in the true names story.
One of my favorite parts of the story is when the cops say "An honest citizen is content with an ordinary data set..." to the guy because he has way more computing power than a normal citizen.
With the return of this book I soon expect to see IRC full of handles like DON.MAC, mailman, Mr Slipery, Erythrina.
Hey, I'm one of those people who bought it from you (ClariNet) originally... It is a great CD -- how come there never were ones for following years?
Making something like this is a ton of work, as much work as preparing all the items for publication in any other media, if not more, and eBook sales don't financially justify it, at least they did not back then. Perhaps in a few years.
Also, I doubt you could get the rights in the same way these days.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I can't believe how many people still make this mistake. The human brain has much more raw processing power than a computer. However, it is fantastically optimised for vision. When the human mind performs mathematical / logical calculations, it typically does so by transforming into word / though pictures, processing, then transforming back.
If the brain used the complexity of neurons required to actually calculate directly, we could easily thrash computers at maths / logic / chess / anything that doesn't require vision.
Computers as we have them have about the same raw processing power as an insect. Or possibly a small fish. Go and read some Hans Moravec. As complexity increases in th biological nervous system, so do higher order computational abilities.
This includes such factors as emotions, instincts, communication, vision, and of course consciousness.
Of course computers are still incapable of proper emotion / self awareness. In terms of raw power, they're a beetle.
On the other hand, we do know that evolution of nervous systems (either biological or silicon) does follow an exponential curve, jumping over ice ages, climate changes, predators, environmental disturbances, transistors, lithography, etc.
And the current calculations show that the evolution of the silicon nervous system is happening at about 100 million times faster than the one based on cells and adenosine tri-phosphate as a power source.
Moore's law is just an quantisation of what anyone who's studied the evolution of the biological nervous system already knows.
Honestly, do you really believe that the medium has anything to do with it? Consciousness et al come from the immense complexity of interactions, combined with an environment that encourages such abilities.
mick
I'm amazed at how many geeks buy into this without question! It's pure mythology that Vinge dreamed up. I love his novels, but the "Singularity" is indeed the Rapture for atheists. People who lack a belief in any form of supernatural transcendence still have a very human hunger for it...and so they create a version of it that superficially conforms to their worldview (science, or more accurately "scientism," the belief that science is the ultimate way to describe all reality).
:) ), and there's no evidence that they will start some sort of ever-accelerating self-improvement process, culminating in some kind of movement into a higher plane of existence.
No one has ever offered any shred of proof of the Singularity scenario. AI research has not gotten very far, and we can't even agree on what "intelligence" or "consciousness" are. There is NO evidence that we will create "AIs," whatever they are (here's hoping they look nothign like Haley Joel Osment
I haven't read any of Vinge's "non-fiction" writings on this subject, but I must say it sounds suspiciously like something that Stanislaw Lem dreamed up a few decades ago. He has some stuff (in a book called _Imaginary Magnitude_) about a series of self-aware computers called the GOLEMs. Each new GOLEM is capable of higher forms of thought, and creates new languages and metalanguages to convey its ideas. Finally the GOLEMs are communicating with each other on a level totally inaccessible to humans.
But again, none of this is SCIENCE. There is no hard basis for any of it, folks. It is FICTION. More accurately, it is MYTHOLOGY...mythology for our technological society, especially for a technologically-obsessed subculture of it. I enjoy it as such, in the same way I enjoy reading alt.conspiracy -- as a student of human nature and culture, not as a "true believer."
I think thats the first time I've seen the phrase "retired computer scientist" before. What kind of work did he start with? How old was he then? Did he do other work before that?
Vernor Vinge well deserves his reputation - the guy is a fantastic writer with bona-fide science knowledge and some Transcendent ideas.
For some reason, here in the UK, you're lucky to find even one book by him on the shelves of the major bookstores (Waterstones, Blackwells, etc). It's been the case for a while that several of his books have been either out of print or, in the case of the new True Names book, delayed somewhat. Publishers should be fighting each other off with big sticks for the right to sell Vinge, I can only assume that they're seeing low sales volumes and steering clear.
Just to verify Vinge's appeal, I've taken to occasionally buying his books for friends. One of my mates raved over it- seeing Marooned in Realtime as the best murder-mystery he'd ever read! My girlfriend, on the other hand, has yet to read hers... can't win 'em all I guess, hey ho.
Roberto
Well, all you have to do is wait for the authors to keel over and start pushing up daisies... Reprints of their complete works will soon appear. Happened for Heinlein, same for Asimov, Dick.
Hmmm... There's a whole series of authors that are long overdue:
- Clarke
- Voight
- Bester
- etc etc etc
We have a lot of good classic SF reprints to look forward to over the next few years!I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Yes, to an extent, that's true, but it's certainly an exageration to say that their complete works will be reprinted (I should know, I have a complete Heinlein collection, and a large percentage of it wasn't reprinted after his death). Same for Asimov, but then with over 400 books published, reprinting the whole lot was probably never going to happen anyway. But I guess at least the more important books will become available again, which should give younger readers a taster, and hopefully will trigger a few to go and hunt out the more obscure titles in second hand bookstores and the like.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I myself think True Names is one of the most breathtaking fictions I've read. But then again I am a futurist in training ;)
Now the reason I'm so interested in True Names suckage is to find out how to bridge the aspects I find awesome and worth propagating, and avoiding aspects of writing that are, um, contentious.
And I really want to know because once I'm done my futurist training, I'd really like to write scifi, or better yet, fictions that illustrate the changing nature of mankind and the technology we create.
Who hates True Names!?! Let me know.
The Big O
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
I don't know why so many people get this confused. The singularity refers to a point along an asymptotic technological advance curve where the rate of accumulation of knowledge exceeds the speed at which knowledge can actually be accumulated. In other words, it's at the point where information theory deforms and breaks down, somewhat (sort of, mildly) like how physical laws break down when you pass the event horizon of a black hole.
The singularity has nothing to do with AI. It has never had anything to do with AI. AI doesn't enter into the equation at all, other than in the fevered minds of some so-called futurists (read "X-Files-believing fruitcakes").
As for "Across Realtime", Vinge never once mentioned AI in "Marooned", where he talked about his take on the Singularity. He said, simply, that Something Happened; humanity disappeared and went someplace else. But that all of us left behind couldn't even begin to imagine what they'd become, much less where they'd gone. No AI written about or hinted at anywhere in the story.
So what does actually happen when the Singularity is reached? Probably nothing at all. In fact, the singularity is just a popular term for a concept in information theory where the theory isn't capable of predicting events beyond a certain point. That's all it is. No pseudo-scientific clap-trap required.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?