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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.
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"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
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."
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
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't "the singularity" simply refer to the point in time where something happens which changes things so fundamentally that we can't accurately predict what things will be like beyond that point? What that something is doesn't necessarily have to be AI, though at this moment it appears to be one of the most likely occurences.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
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.
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
old school cyberpunk repackaged for the youngens.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.