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The Singularity Blinds Sci-Fi
foobsr writes "Popular Science has an article discussing the growing difficulties that Sci-Fi writers encounter when it comes to extrapolating current trends. Doctorow and
Stross , both former computer programmers, are rated to be prototypes of a new breed of guides to a future which due to
Vinge's Singularity might not happen for humanity once a proper super-intelligence - maybe as a Matrioshka Brain - has been created."
I'm sorry if this is too off-topic, but that story summary made absolutely no sense to me. I'm not a scientist, but I've got a decent education in science. I'm also a fan of sci-fi books, short stories, television, and movies... what am I missing? Or, what should I be reading/watching so that this stuff isn't so far over my head?
When reading through the article's talk of the Singularity ushering in a posthuman era of genetic modifications, human implants, and computer brains that exceed people's own abilities, I remembered a hugely popular story from 1999 that dealt with all of these issues and more. What book did the story appear in? It didn't appear in any book. Was it at the multiplex? No, you didn't watch it in theatres (neither live nor screened) or on television.
You played it on your computer. That game was Deus Ex.
I think the article was narrowminded in that it was expecting modern science fiction to surface in the same medium as it had in its heyday. (Remember too that except in the U.S., most of the world had a serious paper shortage in the late 40s and early 50s following the war, so the print industry today isn't necessarily equipped to be the proper breeding ground). But Science Fiction comes in the form of computer games (single player or MMORG), little Flash animations, and the like. The "authors" of Deus Ex imagined a future world that had much of what the article was yearning for, and maybe the authors of the article just need to accept that storytelling can take differing forms.
I'm a writer and a programmer and I didn't understand the description either.
One thing I can say, though, is that fiction doesn't have to be true. Hence the name! Basing what science fiction authors can or cannot do in terms of what is likely to happen in the future, is absurd. I know someone will say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that fiction must hew close to the truth. Anyone who actually takes that pap seriously should not be reading sci-fi (hard or otherwise) or any other form of fiction, for that matter, since it is speculative. (Blah, blah blah, probability, spare me. Prove to me that Genghis Khan did not come from a distant galaxy.)
The real assumption is that there is macro-truth (background, history, physics, etc.) and micro-truth (characters behaving, their interactions, etc). If the term fiction can apply, authors should be given the liberty to fake whatever they please. (And again, spare me any argument involving economics and who is going to read a book about talking toasters from the 35th century, etc..)
The article claims that suddenly technology is too hard to predict. I just don't see how that's new. The article mentions Clarke's idea of geosynchronous satellites, but that has to be one of the few technologies actually predicted by SF. In general, SF is pretty laughable when it comes to prediction. 1950's SF regularly had FTL travel and intelligent robots -- but people used slide rules -- computer technology was completely ignored. Even visionary 1960's writers like John Brunner, who predicted a sort of Internet, assumed that computers would be centralized and what everyone would have would just be terminals.
The basic point I suspect the article is trying to make is thus: the field of speculative science fiction is no longer what it once was. Look back at the middle of the century, and you'll see that the predictive writings of science fiction authors all contained major assumptions about the social and cultural settings of the future. Even the ones that realized that fact, and tried to compensate, still failed for a lack of ability to predict. Absolutely no one in 1950 had an inkling of what the computer would do to society in fifty years. Looking at the history of science fiction, you see that while on occasion a few skilled authors make an accurate prediction or two, the vast majority of speculative sci fi fails dramatically to come close to reality. In the last two or three decades, it is generally considered that this situation has been growing steadily worse. Cultural changes are effectively impossible to predict long-term, because of their very nature (many small meme introductions over a long period of time), but now it becomes increasingly difficult to predict scientific and social changes. If the WWW had such an incredible impact on global economy within a span of nine or ten years, how can anyone hope to guess what will happen in eighty or ninety years?
I mean, you use your terminal (aka "web browser") to connect to the master server that holds the content and responds to your queries (aka the "web site") all the time, don't you? None of that stuff is actually on your home machine, you're just accessing it remotely...
There is no reason to assume that bipedal intelligent life will be rare. Consider the evolutionary trail we followed. Four legged creatures walk and run very well, but six legged creatures are problematic--they tend to stumble and jerk a lot. Not a problem if you're a small light animal like an ant, but military research into six legged miltary ATV's was aborted because of this problem. The bigger the creature, the more pronounced the problem.
Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehnensile appendages. Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs, you end up with a creature that walks upright, with two limbs for manipulation, sense organs located high up for good vantage, close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
It is possible to start with eight legs and end up with six, or six and end up with four on the floor, and high gravity species may well take this route. But there is still that problematic number six before or after, and there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
The singularity is a possibility, but the increasing ignorance of science, not to mention growing political naivety, threatens this. It is hard to build a vast distributed intelligence when ignorance seems to be growing more common. The singularity also threatens more archaic world views, which will become more militant as this threat becomes apparent to them. The singularity would either eradicate religion entirely, or become the dominant religion itself. This is the real root of the conflicts in the middle east--an attempt to preserve what is essentially a medieval world view against the assault of modernity itself. The singularity is also partially dependent on the availability of energy. If we can make fusion work as a safe, cheap, energy supply, we're home free. Otherwise the singularity may recede even if the science and technology is available to make it possible.
There is one last problem with any vision of the future: if the prophet can understand the messiah, then the prophet is the messiah. The messiah here is any radical, Copernican revolution which changes the entire world view. You could not predict the theory of general relativity unless you already had it, that is, unless you had already worked it out yourself. Nearly all hard science fiction works upon the technological consequences of existing science. Science fiction fills in the blanks for things we know we should be able to do but cannot do yet. That target moves with each advance in science.
Finally, most works of science fiction work by extrapolating current social and political trends, which can change suddenly and without notice. Cold War science fiction often extrapolated the Cold war into the far future; William Gibson's Neuromancer, written at the height of Japan's rise as an economic dynamo, had Japanese culture permeating all things western. This aspect of it has become somewhat dated. I suspect that a lot of science fiction writers might be tempted to extrapolate the current religious tensions into the far future. But I suspect that a lot of Muslims may be getting tired of being medieval peasants and having their neighbourhoods blown up by fanatics and the armies sent to fight them. This too could change, and the change may be very swift when it comes.
The internet did not cause a "massive transformation of human culture". It has made hardly any difference at all to human culture.
Some of the unexpected changes:
1) The free press no longer belongs to "the man who can afford one." Everybody has the equivalent of their own printing press. Individual bloggers, unaffiliated with major news organizations, are now a significant influence on political races.
2) Distribution of music has been transformed, and the control of traditional studios of media distribution is eroding.
3) Virtually everybody worldwide has access to research capabilities that were previously available only to the wealthy and those who had access to a major library are now available worldwide.
4) Government control of information distribution has become enormously more difficult. Interdiction of taboo political or cultural information (e.g. pornography) is much weaker.
5) There is now a market available to the average citizen worldwide in almost any product you can identify, new or used.
Computers have changed hardly at all in the last thirty years, even. The sort of software running on your desktop at a kernel level is not exactly revolutionary, it is just the same sort of thing as 30 years ago.
However, applications and interfaces have changed enormously. Almost everybody now has access to music, photo, typesetting, and video editing facilities that were available only to professionals 30 years ago.
It is sad that the most revolutionary and transforming effects could be acheived with the simple technologies we have already developed, like anti-malarial drugs, vitamin supplements, fertilisers, and so on, than can possibly be acheived by any future development that is remotely likely.
Yes, if only we could make more rational, more humanistic use of the resources we already have, the world would be transformed. But practically speaking, this is as much fantasy as orcs and wizards. While the technology of doing more with computers is rapidly advancing, the "social technology" of achieving in practice the sort of "revolutionary and transforming effects" that you envision seems to have stalled decades ago.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I can't get past the fact that we haven't had any real breakthroughs since the birth of the Atomic and Computer ages 40-50 years ago.
It is not a "fact", it is an illusion which you have due to, I guess, insufficient education and/or knowledge.
Okay -- I'll go out on a limb and say they'll be no smarter-than-human intelligence in, say, the next 1000 years.
Of course, a definition of intelligence would be helpful, and we don't have a very good one yet. The Turing test, which I like for recognizing intelligence, doesn't help much determining how intelligent something is.
I think we can all agree that number crunching isn't intelligence. I think of intelligence as the ability to find similarities between things that are different, and differences between things that are similary. Basically an ambiguity processing engine. Needs to be terribly adaptable, too.
Anyways, I think the human brain stopped developing a long time ago because it already contains all the processing power needed for such actions. In fact, it's overkill. The proof is that while our hardware is all very similar, our "intelligence" varies greatly. Our current limitations on intelligence are limitations on learning, not on processing. Even if we built a better brain, we wouldn't have any idea what to feed it. We don't have any idea how to feed ourselves. Most geniuses arise by chance.
Also, I think we strive for the elimination of all ambiguity, and concoct ideas of super-intelligence, or God, to represent this ideal. But I also think that we're fooling ourselves if we think there is a "right" answer to every question. If we were really intelligent we might realize the limits on intelligence are inherent, and not a lack of.
So I think people can be smarter than they are today, and that a super-brain could be built. But i think the technology would be in education and environment. And I think that it would still be confused most of the time, kind of like us.
Cheers.
One of the problems with the type of extrapolation which the SF writers are talking about is that they can't or don't account for the plateau, it's been mentioned in the thread already but trends simply cannot continue increasing to the point where they reach singularity in the real world, some limit always kicks in to form a plateau. We simply can't see what it is at the moment.
In many cases, physical limits intervene. Exponential increase in speed of travel does not imply that we'll find a way to break the light speed barrier (but we might). But the singularity being spoken of here is not a physical singularity, but a singularity of extrapolation--a kind of discontinuity or state transition beyond which simple extrapolation is impossible, because what lies on the other side is qualitatively different from what came before. And those are actually rather common in the real world.