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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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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 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 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?
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.
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
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?