Slashdot Mirror
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."
Also worth investigating is John C. Wright's The Golden Age Trilogy...I had bought the first book to read on my Vegas trip (honeymoon) next week. Already ripped through it. Set 10,000 years in the future, where the Singularity, if it hasn't already happened, is damned close.
The books (in order) are:
* The Golden Age
* The Phoenix Exultant
* The Golden Transcendence
That said, the first 50 pages of the first book are a little tough-going, given that Wright is painting a really alien picture and forcing you to catch up with his terminology, but in the end, it's worth it. Having just started the second book, I can tell you that one of the major themes is socialism vs. libertarianism, and as a subset of that personal responsibility to society.
blog |
because the vast majority of science fiction has always been "lets take present day concious and subconcious fears and talk about them in metaphors set into a future so that we can discuss them without censorship or fear"
On the other hand there is a minority of good, hard, scientific science fiction like Larry Niven.
In the year 3004 (assuming humans still exist) the vast majority of the human race will still be assholes, and if their personalities are downloaded into sugar cube sized computers they will be assholes with even less grip on reality that todays breed of assholes.
I think I am going to patent a method for inflicting virtual pain / beatings / torture / death on these future embedded personalities, because it will be the only way to keep the bastards in line.
A E Van Vogt wrote a great novel, The Anarchistic Colossus, which dealt with the issues of advancing technology vs human minds extremely well, thoroughly recommended, despite the fact that it is 20 or 30 years old there are many things in there that todays slashdot reasers will recognise as current actual concerns.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Read "Masks of the Universe" 1985 by Edward Harrison:
Harrison's thesis is that the universe is infinitely complex and that we are no more aware of the inner workings of the universe than the ancient greeks.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Since the 70s, scientists and sci-fi authors have been promising that a revolution, including real AI, is "just around the corner". But the elusive breakthroughs recede further into the distance the more progress is made.
There are plenty of contemporary sci-fi authors working in the near-future, the next few decades or centuries, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan and Neal Asher being among the most notable. Reynolds in particular is very good - his future humanity colonizes the stars using a mix of cryogenics and relativistic time, no warp drives here.
Also, he mistakes the point of pedandtry. No-one is bothered if the science is possible (yet) but any author worth his salt knows that the fictional technology must be CONSISTENT. A device can't act one way in one story and a completely different way in another, because if that happens, it's not sci-fi anymore but pure fantasy (and not even good fantasy). Sheer laziness and lack of talent on the part of the author.
Where it not for Microsoft, that may have very well been the case today. And in fact, that may still very well be the case in the future. Near future. I can tell you there are only 2 applications I need to be able to replace where I work before this can happen ( and when I replace those applications, it WILL happen, guaranteed ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
One definition of superhuman intelligence is almost upon us. This deffinition is that a single entity is capable of directing human beings as if the humans had no free will. This scenario can easily be envisioned as marketing which is capable of selling whatever the marketeer wishes to sell. Given that the feedback systems within large retailers are already capable of predicting the response of individual consumers with a high degree of accuracy. There would not need to be much of a shift in the effectiveness of such systems for us to perceive that the organisations selling us things were capable of telling us what to buy.
Would the symbiosis between the marketing system and its human management then qualify as a superhuman entity? It would certainly not have the perception of free will that democratic government gives us. The combination of the marketing system and its human directors will tend to get better at manipulating us over time unless a concious effort to restrict its power is made.
Is Microsoft an example of such a superhuman entity? Does Microsoft tell us what we need before we know it? and what of Wallmart, a business which can change local retailing to fit its own deffinition, destroying a characteristic way of life in the process? A system with many component parts can be described as a superhuman entity, there is no need for us to wait for a processor which contains more switching elements than the human brain to detect the rise of more than human machine mediated superintelligence. Its all a matter of how you want to define superintelligence.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The "singularity" is one of the favorite wet dreams of the "transhumanists", a group of spoiled adults who seemingly find it difficult to tell reality and science fiction apart. The "theory" is that human progress is going so "fast" (nevermind that progress is qualitative, and any supposed measurement is an arbitrary procedure), that before we know it we're going to reach the "singularity"-- the point where it accelerates beyond our capability to understand it. Typically thanks to our having built machines much more intelligent than us (these people naïvely believe in all the AI and IQ testing stuff), which wil in turn design machines more intelligent than them in a fraction of the time, and so on.
You can tell that I don't think very much of these people. Well, I really regard them as a segment of academia that's every bit as woolly-headed as the worst of the "postmodernist" crowd (but warning: I think the best of those people kick ass), but but which gets a free ride in comparison when it comes to institutional criticism. A number of them manage to get plenty of real money for their sillyness, they organize conferences at big name universities (Stanford had an "Accelerating Change" conference last year IIRC, I'm sure you'll understand the name).
Are you adequate?
Upload a mind to the computer, run it, pull the plug and you just killed someone. Perhaps this kind of research should be disallowed, it's sort of murder..
Excellent points. The best science fiction writers (IMNSHO) are the ones that extrapolate the future based on human behavior and motivations, rather than where we think our technology will take us. Good science fiction is not about predicting tehnological advances. It should read like non-fiction that hasn't occured yet. My four favorite science fiction writers are Dick, Gibson, Stephenson, and Bester. Their novels have aged well, and seem to portray a pretty accurate picture of humanity's future because they all realize one thing: people do not change. Technological advance and trends aside, we are not that different from people thousands of years ago. Books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, or The Demolished Man seem more and more likely, because the technological advance therorized on are secondary. We identify with the characters in books like these. These books address religion, corporate greed, politics, race relations, the military, etc. They seem plausible because the characters in these books act like we would. A good science fiction writer needs to make a few good extrapolations on where technology might be in the coming decades (nanotechnology, cloning, genetic modifications, interplanetary travel, worldwide computer networks, whatever), but the real value is addressing the human factor. A hundred (or a thousand) years from now, people will still be bitching about the government, religion, and corporations. We will still be greedy and giving, petty and generous, cruel and kind. Human beings do not change. When writing science fiction, it is important to retain that insight into human nature if you want accurately forecast where we are going.
However, the article is referring to a particular kind of science fiction (sometimes called "hard" SF) which is based upon realistically extrapolating current technology and trends into the future.
The problem is that reasonable extrapolation along a number of pathways leads to a future that is so alien that it is difficult to imagine, and even more difficult to think of anything to write about that would be entertaining to modern readers. The problem, is that humanity as we know it may not exist for much longer.
However, both Vinge and Stross have found literary ways around the singularity. Sort of the science fiction equivalent of "Left Behind." That is, even if the singularity occurs, it might not take everybody.
I don't think the architecture of the system that people were connecting to in Shockwave Rider was ever described in detail, but my impression was that it consisted of many systems networked together rather than one central system. In fact I think the idea of the "tapeworm" depends on there being multiple computing centers.
Also, computers small enough for individual to own must have existed. I get the impression from references in the book that there were legal restrictions on individuals owning computers that weren't part of the network: remember the scene where Kate is building a non-networked computer through the unlikely method of painting blown-up circuit diagrams with metallic paint.
In any case, regardless, I recognize the possibility of non-humanlike AI, but then we enter into the realm of unquantifiable BS. How do we measure modelling, problem-solving and creativity abilities (other than by something that ends up looking shockingly like a Turing test?). What do those words mean outside of the human context? As I pointed out in another post, outside of very limited, constrained problem domains, we don't have any idea how to wire something up that can do even sub-human "problem-solving" or "modelling". The field of AI has provided lots of great algorithms that turn out to do a decent job at doing near-human-quality work in very limited domains, or much-less-than-human-quality work in slightly less limited, but still very constrained domains. The field of consciousness research, which aims to understand and presumably, eventually, model the human brain is still nascent.
I trust the instinct of Francis Crick who spent the last years of his life working on this problem that it will be a huge problem that dogs science for years to come. Just like how Einstein spent his last years looking for a TOE - guess what, here we are decades later, and we are _slightly_ closer, but basically up against a brick wall.
I recognize the ability (in theory) to self-improve or evolve rapidly in software would make a "Singularity" type of scenario at least conceivable (assuming there are no other barriers to this sort of rapidly improving digital intelligence) if you can get past the humongous hurdles in getting there. I just don't think it's likely to happen in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. And beyond that, I prefer not to speculate, or at least not to pretend that my speculations are much more than pure science fiction themselves.
Yes, I should have included some kind of qualifier for speed. I do realize that properly designed human-emulation software can run on a computer from today, or 1970, or can be run by a guy with a pen and a sheet of a paper trained to mimic a general processor, at absurdly low rates of speed. That point is that you neeed a machine capable of running your program at a reasonable speed to be able to even develop the program. If a group of computer scientists from the 1970s were given detailed explanations of how modern processors and graphics cards work, and set out on the task of programming Doom 3 using the computers they had available in 1970, they were not be able to do it, even though theoretically, a pre-designed simulator of 32-bit processors and graphics cards and a copy of Doom 3 would run fine (just very, very slowly) on computers from the 1970s. A time traveller from the future could give us the answer and we could simulate the human brain very slowly, but the fact we can't run our software prohibits us from creating it. We can't run a simulation of the human mind in real-time, or at any reasonable speed. If computing power was somehow frozen at its current levels for the rest of time, we would never come up with human-equivalent AI. It is essential that we have increases in hardware performance to create human simulators, not just software.
Actually, a good number of science fiction writers are scientists. Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Alastair Reynolds are all currently employed as scientists, for example. Isaac Asimov was a scientist as well.
Furthermore, any novelist worth his/her salt does a lot of research to make sure they know what they're talking about. So when they get the future right, it's a well-informed guess, not so much a fluke.
I'll agree that they aren't necessarily brilliant geniuses, though.
"The singularity, in this context, is an event that will change our society beyond recognition, and probably almost overnight." More bluntly, it will make it a non-human society. SF has long history presenting that and some fictional solutions are dizzyingly gripping as both intellectual problem and successful fiction. The real problem is a bit different though not new: how does one create stories for and about beings with (functionally) infinite power and malleability? There are narrative cheats--Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is clearly a stab at this issue and the fundamental cheat is mainlined Sense of Wonder. More difficult is ramming the situation head on. Thomas Disch sallied forth in a valiant attack on a subset of this problem, describing and understanding a character far, far, far smarter than the writer or reader. Camp Concentration is quite the astonishing book for he mostly succeeded. What if these future whatsit postpeoples CAN do everything but DON'T? Not choosing to live in solipsistic high fantasy or 90's USA creations but in the full blare of possibilities and collectively choose to ignore most of them. I'm not novelist so I can not construct the explanation or write the story. Consider it a challenge. What that event could be, or even if we will ever see it, is of course subject to speculation, but it is not outside the realm of the possible and it may even be close (i.e. somewhere in the 21st century). Now, the very nature of the singularity makes it impossible to predict how our society will look like afterwards. For this reason SF cannot continue to extrapolate from current society to build a believable future society - it is blinded. As for what the singularity could be, there are plenty of options. Development of a working nano assembler might do it (manufacturing capabilities would instantly become meaningless, since we would be able to produce enough of _everything_ for _everyone_. Don't tell me that won't change things...). Development of an AI would probably also do it, since it could itself develop better, faster versions - faster than we could ever hope to keep up with. Or there is contact with an alien race. Perhaps even something as mundane as the FTL drive or anti-gravity... Anyway, the singularity is rather fascinating, even though it is itself SF for now ;-)
Feeling so good natured I could drool
Ack. Should'a previewed indeed. Phone rang and I clicked submit. :( Appologies to the person poster quoted without quotes.
Should have been:
"The singularity, in this context, is an event that will change our society beyond recognition, and probably almost overnight." More bluntly, it will make it a non-human society. SF has long history presenting that and some fictional solutions are dizzyingly gripping as both intellectual problem and successful fiction. The real problem is a bit different though not new: how does one create stories for and about beings with (functionally) infinite power and malleability? There are narrative cheats--Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is clearly a stab at this issue and the fundamental cheat is mainlined Sense of Wonder. More difficult is ramming the situation head on. Thomas Disch sallied forth in a valiant attack on a subset of this problem, describing and understanding a character far, far, far smarter than the writer or reader. Camp Concentration is quite the astonishing book for he mostly succeeded. What if these future whatsit postpeoples CAN do everything but DON'T? Not choosing to live in solipsistic high fantasy or 90's USA creations but in the full blare of possibilities and collectively choose to ignore most of them. I'm not novelist so I can not construct the explanation or write the story. Consider it a challenge.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
Therefore, if you were chatting with a person in a computer and said something that ticked them off and they refused to talk to you anymore, simply shut it down, resore from backup, and restart. Murder? Not really, there's no death. I think it's worse.
Yes, but would you have a real person running on the Linux box in your bedroom?
If this ever happens on a large scale, the uploaded "people" will live in a secure datacentre, probably buried under a mountain or something, and they will do work (i.e. creating intellectual property) which they will sell to fund it all. Maybe they'll have robots of a sort to perform basic maintenance (if you can run a mind in a computer, why not teleoperate a bipedal robot? You've already got all the motor skills you need). It will be protected by that physical security, and it will also have the protection of the law. Who would agree to be uploaded if they knew they could be as easily manipulated as you suggest?
It is called "cheap overseas labor". There are billions of untapped or undertapped brains around the world. They only have to be wired into the "grid" to do their thing.
In other words, our access to cheap brains is only limited by bandwidth, not smarts. It appears that bandwidth will become dirt cheap before true AI does because we are already seeing a bandwidth revolution*, but not an AI one.
* Or at least rapid evolution.
Table-ized A.I.
You people need to read more Greg Bear, he gets it partly right in Eon, I think. There are some rather straight-forward components of the mind, and then there are others that can be copied (though if I understood it correctly, it has been a few years, not copied indefinitely) but not understood, called the "mystery".
Me, as non-religious as I am, tend to think there's more going on in the old thick skull. I hate to call it a soul, but c'mon guys... what if there is something quantum going on? If so, then maybe you can be copied, but the process is destructive. (FYI: Quantum teleportation now allows the copying of a quantum state on particles as big as an atom, but it destroys the original).
Brain uploading may make good science fiction, but I don't see it happening at all. Ever.
>Who needs to manufacture a super-human machine intelligence, when you already have 6 billion Human beings that you can link into a cluster?
Has anyone else noticed how much Google works like a human mind? It has associative retrieval and makes its "memories" more accessible the more they are used. And its knowledge base is a non-microscopic fraction of what humanity knows.
>And aren't the rapid development of things like the wikipedia, GNU tools, the linux kernal, and so on, a result of this new cluster of people?
Yes. We've built, without planning it, a crude prototype of a group mind. It's made history unpredictable (did anyone predict wikipedia.org?). But then history was already getting outside the scope of rational extrapolation -- for example, the largest empire in world history evaporated like a soap bubble.
We haven't solved the strong AI problem (P=NP).
This is a problem that may not need solving. Our brains are seninent and exist. Once sufficient computing power - be it classical, quantum, or other - exists, then it is reasonable to assume that something comparable to our brain except artificial can be built. We even have a pretty good start on this one, the decoded genome. If you have enough computing power, you could just simulate the whole deal starting with DNA. Efficient no, but effective. People are starting down this road with projects like Blue Gene and the distributed cousins (folding @ home).
Based on the fact we and many thousands of sentient creatures exist of varying complexity already, this is only a matter of time. To think otherwise implies there is something magical about how we work - and there is no evidence for that.
Once an artificial AI has been created, it is free to improve upon both it's knowledge and architecture in real time. This feeds back on itself, and results in the "singularity" that people are talking about here. No other great achivements are needed; just an AI that is a little teeny bit smarter than your average human.
It is reasonable to assume once this AI has been created, then it can go to work on issues like Quantum Gravity and who knows what else. An AI doesn't have to die (Ever), and can propagate at the speed of light. Robots are much hardier space explorers than we are. In effect, it is the last invention man needs to make.
People thought the genome would take decades or longer to sequence. They were wrong. I suspect a lot of people are wrong about AI, too. Neural networks are very interesting things, and the hardware to experiment with them in real time (reconfigurable FPGAs and large computer memories) is just becoming available to low-budget and self-funded researchers. (yay!)
And, more fundamentally, we haven't solved the problem of our own
natures. Every time we have a technological breakthrough the first
thing we worry about is someone using it to blow us all up. The "Star
Trek" ideal that Earth will eventually be a unified planet is, well,
just turn on the news, folks...
I am not optimistic about the survival of humanity. This is independant of the singularity; one may have nothing to do with the other. In my eyes; it's a big race to see what happens first; some sort of singularity event that changes everything, or us running out of energy resources and lowering our populations to sustainable levels through global warfare. However, I'm a cynic. YMMV.
..don't panic
As others have pointed out, you've the wrong idea about the Halting Problem.
Note that there's a very large and important difference (especially from the point of view of a theoretical mathemetican, whence these results in the first place) between not being able to determine if all programs will halt, and being able to determine if some programs will halt. "Some", of course, might mean "all the interesting ones", or "all the ones that don't have Turing/Godel-esque twists". You may not be able to write a program that can debug theoretically all programs, but that doesn't mean that you can't write a program that does a lot of useful work debugging programs.
More importantly, humans are subject to exactly the same limitative results. Godel's Theorem isn't about computers. It's about the systems themselves. There's no magic quantum hornswaggle escape clause that gives humans magic powers to prove theorems that computers cannot. You can change the system by assuming some more axioms -- but then, so can a computer.
There's a fair amount of evidence that humans can't debug all programs, either. Heck, they can't even debug some of the ones in common use.
Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence?
Yes.
Or if not, it would be possible to hard-wire enough frequently-used subroutines, and use extensive parallelism, using contemporary manufacturing techniques, that it would approach or exceed human performance, and would occupy roughly the same volume as a human mind.
I'm simply not that impressed with the human brain in terms of sheer computational power. I think we greatly, greatly overestimate the amount of computational work our brains actually do.
I think that, for the most part, the human brain implements what we would call "weak AI."
Consider your eyes, for example. You only process in detail what you see in your focal area. That's a pretty small quantity of data. Considering the error rate at which people miss-identify objects, it seems unlikely that an exhaustive comparison is going on there, unless you make the concious decision to spend time studying the object. Peripheral vision is basically checked for sudden motion and tossed into the bit bucket. I don't think that the amount of work being done there exceeds the computational power of a modern day chip. Hearing and sensation would seem to require even less computational power, and smell and scent are pretty much nothing in comparison.
The next computationally intensive thing would seem to be linguistic processing. Reading and listening takes work that distracts you from other mental tasks, suggesting to me that it maxes out or comes close to maxing out your processing power. Furthermore, most of us in every day communication seem form and recognize sentences according to a small number of "template sentences," which are much easier to recognize than it is to parse each sentence as a logical structure.
Emotion, computationally speaking, is simply the result of a difference between what is and what you want to be, plus some compelling force to make us lessen that difference. If this doesn't involve some metaphysical component, I certainly don't think that it is by itself computationally expensive.
Although, if you want me to explain sensation, why you "see" a field of vision, for example, or what the perception of color "is", (there's a name for this that I don't have time to look up), I can't help you with that.
No time to proofread, family calls.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
I did some browsing and found a Wikipedia article that informs about this particular "singularity" term.
Also, here's some of Arthur C Clarke's predictions:
2002 Clean low-power fuel involving a new energy source, possibly based on cold fusion.
2003 The automobile industry is given five years to replace fossil fuels.
2004 First publicly admitted human clone.
2006 Last coal mine closed.
2009 A city in a third world country is devastated by an atomic bomb explosion.
2009 All nuclear weapons are destroyed.
2010 A new form of space-based energy is adopted.
2010 Despite protests against "big brother," ubiquitous monitoring eliminates many forms of criminal activity.
2011 Space flights become available for the public.
2013 Prince Harry flies in space.
2015 Complete control of matter at the atomic level is achieved.
2016 All existing currencies are abolished. A universal currency is adopted based on the "megawatt hour."
2017 Arthur C. Clarke, on his one hundredth birthday, is a guest on the space orbiter.
2019 There is a meteorite impact on Earth.
2020 Artificial Intelligence reaches human levels. There are now two intelligent species on Earth, one biological, and one nonbiological.
2021 The first human landing on Mars is achieved. There is an unpleasant surprise.
2023 Dinosaurs are cloned from fragments of DNA. A dinosaur zoo opens in Florida.
2025 Brain research leads to an understanding of all human senses. Full immersion virtual reality becomes available. The user puts on a metal helmet and is then able to enter "new universes."
2040 A universal replicator based on nanotechnology is now able to create any object from gourmet meals to diamonds. The only thing that has value is information.
2040 The concept of human "work" is phased out.
2061 Hunter gatherer societies are recreated.
2061 The return of Haley's comet is visited by humans.
2090 Large scale burning of fossil fuels is resumed to replace carbon dioxide.
2095 A true "space drive" is developed. The first humans are sent out to nearby star systems already visited by robots.
2100 History begins.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Take a look at Vinge's *Fire Upon the Deep* for some example SF Singularities (the process is called "Transcending"), and Lem's *Fiasco* for a kind of counter-Singularity.
Of course, he got plenty of things wrong, just as did others. But that's not the point. I would actually argue that most of the stuff we enjoy today was at some point predicted in sci-fi. Not as a whole picture, but as particular ideas.
Dune - set 10,000 years into our future
A very minor off-topic correction here - the timeline in the Dune Encyclopedia (a brilliant suplementary resource to the books themselves, and a work of art in itself) actually places the time of the events of Dune at around 30,000 years or so after the present. The year 10,191 we hear bandied about is 10,191 AG (or After Guild).
I mention this as it actually gives a whole new perspective to the stories, as the birth of Christ does not necessarily persist as the yardstick against which time is measured.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
1. It will devastate the foundation for our current economic system.
This is because it will eliminate any job related to production, whether it is assembly in a factory, or food production (farmers, fishers), or production of raw materials (since the nano-factories would of course reuse our waste). That's a _lot_ of people suddenly without jobs.
Indeed, there would only be jobs left in services, design, and energy production. And design jobs would be constantly under fire from nano-pirates.
2. It will force a re-think of how we structure society.
So half the country is suddenly out of a job, yet thanks to nano-assembly there is more than enough of everything (food, clothing, cars, ...) for everyone. Will the poor half sit back under their bridges and accept their fate? Or will they demand equal wealth, given the fact that wealth itself is now so common it has lost all value? One possibility is that this really depends on how well-armed each side is. A more enlightened possibility is that people will realize that the "old" structure where people work for money is now obsolete and that it is stupid and immoral to let half the country starve, even though the means are available for feed them all for essentially nothing. In any case, there will be either massive upheaval, or civil war. And the enlightened possibility may kill as all as surely as letting those people starve to death, because...
3. It will remove the impulse to do any work whatsoever for large numbers of people.
I'm not so idealistic to believe we would all be artists or poets after the raw _need_ to work for money disappears. Instead, significant parts of the population would fill their days doing absolutely nothing. This in itself could destroy us as a race. Why learn anything anymore? Why strive to achieve anything? There may not be enough people left that are willing to work to keep society running (plumbers, doctors, firemen, ...), let alone make any progress in science or art. Why would _you_ go to the office when your neighbour (who had a factory job before) sits on his lawn and plays with his kids every day?
Assuming we really do develop nano-assemblers, the one thing that could stop this future would be the cost of energy to run the assemblers (although our total energy usage will be much less, after all we will stop hauling goods and people around). But if you can run them from a solar panel we may be in real trouble.
It doesn't need fusion. If thinking at an amazing speed were important, then maybe.
I think "thinking at an amazing speed" is actually a fairly important part of what the singularity is about -- it's about machines (whether AI or augmented humans) that come up with new new ideas so rapidly that they completely change human culture. But you are right in one thing -- it isn't supposed to be difficult to achieve. In fact, if Vinge is right, it is almost unavoidable.
I think that the point, and the main question is, without a set physical vessel (emotions etc.), what would the point be?
I personally believe that emotions are a critical part of intelligence and that we're unlikely to ever produce or encounter an intelligence that does not have emotions (or at least some analogue to them). They are the control system that regulates behaviour in order to ensure the intelligence achieves productive things. In many senses, our emotions are trainers that supervise us to make sure we don't do anything stupid.
Reading the article on the singularity, i have one question: What is intelligence?
This question needs to be answered before other questions can be answered, like:
If entity A is intelligent, can entity A create or design an entity B that is at least as intelligent as entity A?
So far, it seems like "No" is the answer. I call this the intelligence barrier.
The border cases seem to support this: A being with intelligence zero cannot design another being of intelligence zero. And God can't create God.
Even if humans could design robots that are just as intelligent as them, it doesn't mean they could design robots that are more intelligent. Which also means these robots couldn't design other robots which would be more intelligent.
This is the basic fallacy in the singularity concept.
P.S.: I am also missing a debate about enlightenment: To be enlightened means to truly understand oneself, and in that, to truly understand life. Yet, most people are not enlightened. And how can you talk about understanding another intelligence if you can't even understand yourself?
This is really not about extrapolating from where we are today to create science fiction, but rather about finding some inspiration...
Its been said that the first Sci-Fi movie ever created had all the plots and themes incorporated in it - Metropolis by Fritz Lang
there are new generations of humans and just like other markets have realized much can be recycled as far as ideas go, simply because its "new" tio the new generations.
Oh no, I just inspired someone to write a science fiction about a master races that lives much longer than us humans and is fully aware of this mental limitation of ours that allows them to watch reruns of our antics...
Olaf Stapledon (Starmaker, Last and first men) and Edwin A. Abbott (Flatland) didn't even really care about SF at all, or consider their work SF. William Gibson have long been successfull because his knowledge of many of the subjects he wrote about was superficial and caused him to stay clear of technical details - books like Neuromancer are technologically naive, but that is their strength - technology is just a backdrop and facilitator.
Even of authors that do or did fit your list, many of the greatest SF writers often do great work despite NOT making use of much scientific knowledge or approaching cutting edge topics. Asimov is a prime example. While he's written hundreds of books about science, and many of his SF books ARE great examples of good use of science in SF, a large number of his SF books use science only as a backdrop and facilitator for short explorations of morality and what it means to be human.
His robot stories, for instance have very little science in them, and even less science that is actually relevant to the purpose of the story. Look at stories like "Bicentennial man". You can ignore any mention of technology - the only thing that is important is the question of what it means to be human. It has increased relevance the better we get at building robots and the better we get at putting mechanical parts in humans, but neither needs to happen for the story to make sence or be important. Would a human that lived forever still be human? Is everything that looks, acts, sounds like a living being actually alive? Before you rebut claiming it was a groundbreaking cutting edge theme: No it wasn't. It's a theme found countless times in older literature, including Pygmalion (or the play based on it, My fair lady) and Frankenstein, many of which borrow from various adaptations of the Jewish Golem legends.
A significant number of Asimovs other root stories are based on a very simple recipe: We have a robot. The robot has to follow rules. Robot is put in a situation where following the rules have unexpected and unintended results. The end.
Their success isn't that they're relying on groundbreaking science (they were not) or that the rules were particularly earth shattering (which I asume is why Asimov didn't explicitly formulate them himself) - both of it is just setting for an exploration of themes like what assumptions we make, how quick we are to ascribe human emotions or concepts to behaviour that have simple logical explanations, human rationality (or lack thereof)
Other of his robot stories, such as Naked Sun, while retaining some of the "robot has to follow rules - leads to unexpected results" bit, are essentially crime stories using robots as props.
Asimov isn't alone in this. "Hard SF" that focus on the science is just a very small part of the SF spectrum. Large parts of successfull SF is successful because it doesn't make the science the story, but use the science to tell stories they couldn't as easily tell otherwise. Star Trek fit into this latter category - If you look at the original series and TNG they are almost all short morality plays using the setting in the future to make Roddenberry's particular idea of morality and ethics palatable to the studios.
Another vein is the SF as modern day magic tradition, which is perhaps best exemplified with Stanislaw Lem. Look at the Cyberiad for the clearest example of what I mean - where technology is both ridiculed by combinding a medieval setting with robots and bizarre contraptions, and celebrated, creating what often looks more like fantasy than SF, but replacing spells and dragons with computers and robots.
Blah... Read Greg Bear, "Blood Music" I can't find my copy now... The basis was something on the lines of a genetic scientist is working on an organic supercell (ie, organic nanotech) and to take it out of the lab after being fired (presumebly to the next lab he'd be hired at...) He injects himself with it and when he gets home he plans on removing the sample from his normal blood and store it in the fridge/freezer... Chaos ensues when the supercell basically makes itself a complete copy of his inteligence, and works to "improve" his body...
:)
At first, no glasses anymore... then stronger... better sex, last longer, etc... not needing to eat much because of increased efficiency in food processing & energy use...
Eventually the little nanite cells realize the the ultimate modification of their host to optimize his life is to completely break him down to the individual supercell level (numerous copies of one's intelegence to each have their own expericences. All the same, but all different, on the multimillion of cells level... )
eventually his cells break down in a bathtub where he gets dumped into the water supply... Oh, his lover also "derodes?" into cells because she was "injected" with the cells during sex...
eventually, all of humanity breaks down into supercells trying to better the environment... Except for a select few that cannot be dismantled. (I guess like a immune thing...)
Eventually there is a point where there are millions times more concious individual super cells than there ever were of humans... and eventually they all get together and "THINK" themselves to a new plane of existance... the singularity if you will... Leaving only a select few humans on an abandoned earth to cary on.
Great book... I highly recommend it if you want a good read... Lots of creepy things before we ever thought about nanotech swarms ((c) by someone...) or even singularity... I think it was late 80's book. I had the paperback here someplace...
I think Greg Bear was well in advance of the idea of the Singularity... AND, if genetic engineering scares you, don't read this book while eating GM foods.
unfortunatly, this post will probibly never be read because the thread is too old now in slashdot years. (8 hours = 3 years = old news?) Hmmm... Ok, I claim that idea first, and it would be interesting to study that effect... except for the occasional recycled slashdot articles when the formula would be (8 hours = 3 years = old news - good news = new news.)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
No, we *don't* need AI. What my late wife and I came up with that we need is an Artificial Stupid (c, Roth-Whitworth, 1996, and I *mean* this): you *don't * want the M$ idea of "I know how to do this *so* much better than *you* do...."
Rather, what you want is for it to do a lot of what you want it to do, without tons of configuration and without needing expert advice to configure it, and do it neatly and efficiently...and when it finds something it doesn't know how to handle, it *knows* when to bother you, and when not to.
You want a *good* secretary in this case, not a Gentleman's gentleman....
mark
A scientific singularity is not the only possibility. We could just as well be approaching a spiritual singularity. The latter makes more sense.
Remember, the origins of science, at least in the west, were about discovering the physical reality behind "God's creation" (or the creation of the gods, as you prefer). It was a branch of philosophy. Only later did science become associated with technology.
Much of what "science" fiction has been concerned with is the technology side of things: those toys that were based on advances in scientific understanding--or even based on nothing more than wishful thinking. It should more correctly be called Technology Fiction.
It's normal, in a capitalist, materialist, product/sales-oriented culture, that our vision of the future would gravitate toward ever-better toys--even turning ourselves into toys as we imagine bionic selves or even silicon replacements. But to base our future on more and mind-boggling toys is just a cultural preference, not an inevitability. Not unless you abandon notions of free will, that is.
As one poster noted: a SF writer, unlike the scientific specialist, must look at more than one specialty to gain an overview large enough to inspire fiction. I would argue that, in thinking about the future, we must look well beyond "science" and see other parts of the human experience, most notably spirituality and the arts, areas where most SF literature is woefully weak.
If one looks into the current intellectual ferment in these areas, we see that there are other, quite different futures being imagined. In fact, it could be argued that the most important area of development today is the area of human consciousness. That is where the action is.
Humanity is attempting to make a leap from the modern to the postmodern era--which means, among other things, a leap from a modern, stateist mindset to a post-modern, planetary mindset. Indeed, some of us are already (in part at least) living in it. (The best post I've read mentions the desperation of Muslim fanatics to defend their medieval world from encroaching modernism. This is ironic given that the modernism they fear is already history and we are in a post-modern world!)
The traditional trappings of SF--from rocket ships to intergalactic soda cans, from robots to nanobots, and including the existentialist angst that sees colonizing the stars as the only alternative to the "meaninglessness" of earthly existence--are all rooted in the modernist mindset. But for those who can take their eyes off distant planets for a moment and look at the devastation around us, it should be obvious that the modern mentality is not leading us in a good direction here on earth. It has been estimated that nearly one-third of life on earth has died off since 1970. We are living through one of the greatest periods of extinction in the planet's history, and most of this die-off has been the result of runaway technology. Why should we get things any better when we reach alpha centauri?
To be fair, technology is the convenient whipping boy in this explanation. The more root cause of this die-off, which continues unabated, is our modern mindset, which sees the planet as a dead heap of resources to exploit at will. Combined with this Newtonian view of a lifeless, clockwork planet we also have the (primarily American) cult of the individual, with a seasoning of a greed-is-good rationalism. It's obvious that the modern mindset, some 500 years old at this point, has reached the limits of its ability to serve humanity.
Of course, in this chaos-dominated time of transition, there are many scientists who have moved far beyond the Newtonian view. Indeed, the far reaches of physics and mathematics is almost beyond SF to the point of magic and metaphysics. But the Newtonian viewpoint still dominates the popular imagination even as the reality in which we live already surpasses it.
The post-modern mindset I'm rooting for is a Gaian one which recognizes the planet as both living and sa