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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?
The Singularity will probably occur near when scientists can pinpoint the human soul and consciousness. Much of the PopSci article involves creating an electronic copy of the human brain and possibly connecting a chip wired with one's mind to a human body less the brain. One fictional space traveler mentioned leaves behind a copy of herself on Earth and uploads her brain into a small virtual spaceship. This leads to questions such as: will the traveler on the spaceship be conscious, or will it be a mechanized human, emulating human qualities but not itself being human? Will the traveler as the one who planned the trip only be conscious of the copy on earth, or can she switch to only being conscious of the copy in space (leaving the Earth copy as an e-human or a separate soul)? At what point, both in evolution and in the womb, does one become conscious? If two people (successfully) switch brains in transplants, who is who?
If scientists can answer (or satisfactorily dismiss) these questions, we will be close to the fundamental change needed for the Singularity.
Sheer terror I tell you!
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Another author for ya: Greg Egan. I never got to finish Quarantine, but good science fiction like his tries to make you think 'outside of the box' compared to your usual spaceship/futuristic fare.
Mind, I don't read many books for fun... the last book I actually bought with the Butlerian Jihad, got halfway through it before I realised the Dune Prelude series was a pile of steaming crap.
Just my $0.02
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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..)
His assertion that this depends on the progress of computing hardware seems absurd to me. We already have as much computing hardware as we need, where computing hardware is all essentially capable of handling Turing-complete computation (in the lax sense of the phrase, obviously computational power and storage are finite, but not so limited that it's hampering our ability to simulate human intelligence).
Then he makes the assumption that if we are able to create a human-level artificial intelligence (which is itself a somewhat ill-defined concept), it will be able to figure out how to improve itself to be substantially "better" than human intelligence. But do we really have any metric for what that even means? I mean, we still don't have a firm grasp on even measuring human intelligence very well.
I am not saying his scenario is impossible or that it won't happen. Computers can already do certain tasks far better than humans, and that will continue to be the case. He seems to want a program capable of designing other programs. Is the first program Turing-test passing? Is it "smarter" than humans because it is better at recognizing patterns and reacting to them? Or smarter because it can generate and test hypotheses more rapidly? I feel very uncomfortable with drawing lots of conclusions about the future rate of progress of a topic that feels so ill defined to me.
I agree that mastering consciousness and thought, and understanding the human brain will be one of the next great frontiers of science, and with that mastery ought to eventually come much better ability to simulate it in silico. But I'm not willing to speculate too much farther ahead than that.
A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.
Seastead this.
doesn't anyone see the gross similarity between the rapture and the singularity?
this isn't science, this is religion. its just sort of techno-humanist rather than being christian.
is there any real reason to beleive that humanity will 'transcend itself'?
Doctorow was never a programmer. He is relatively uneducated, no college, he went to an "alternative" high school (meaning: the uneducatable, problem child school).
Unfortunately, Cory is also unschooled in the classic scifi genres. If he knew more about his own field, he would know his own style becomes dated more quickly than any other style. Basing one's work on current perspectives of the future is the surest way to make your work obsolete before it's ever published. As Roddenbury said, "nothing becomes dated more quickly than our perceptions of the future." It is better to base one's writing on deeper perspectives of human nature, like the classic SF writers, i.e. Phil Dick, Stanislav Lem, etc. It is easy to cobble together slangy neologisms to refer to nebulous future technomagic. It is much harder to have insight into the Human Condition.
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.
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.
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?
Just want to recommend Ken MacLeods Newton's wake as post-singularity SF book.
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross should also be good, but I haven't read that one yet.
TC - My Photos..
Hawking Loses Bet; Sci Fi Fans Take It Up The Wormhole>
here's the lead paragraph
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...
Hey, if these Brains are surround stars for power they'd have to start their creation on both sides of the planet to prevent the sun from orbiting around the increasingly massive brain. If that was the case the two halves of the brain would have to orbit around the sun as they grew until they connected. So depending on the speed of their orbit, before the two halves connected, you'd get something that looked like a pulsar from our perspective.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
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.
From the Matrioshka Brain page:
... " should provide approximate human-brain equivalent computational capacity in desktop machines sometime between 2005-2010."
"In general however, we may assume that current trends in"
lol! That's funny. Or laughable even
To be fair, he didn't say full AI, just "computational capacity". But then he doesn't define what he means by that, and makes a wide, worthless generalization.
If the rest of the paper is like that, this is just a bad sci-fi author trying to make people take him too seriously.
Obviously you could eventually make a rather large brain. Would you want to? What kind of programs/AIs would live in it. This is not a seeing-through-the-singularity idea, just an obvious extrapolation.
Sort of interesting, but not as sure a thing or as improtant as he's making it out to be.
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?
In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he's working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. "I was thinking of calling it /usr/bin/god."
"That's great!" Stross remarks.
Well, great for those who know that "/usr/bin" is the repository for Unix programs and that "god" in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading--one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself "News for Nerds"). Still, it's this fluency in computer science that allows these writers to approach the future so boldly. "Stross and Doctorow are just kind of right in there, down with their heads in the bits," says novelist Bruce Sterling, one of the original cyberpunks.
Sounds great! Guess I might just have found my new idols - and I was even reading about the Singularity the other day, namely Staring into the Singularity by Eliezer Yudkowsky. What a funny coincidence.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
We're living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment "the Singularity" the world will be as different from today's world as this one is from the Stone Age.
Is this period really unprecedented? Will "the Singularity" require any more coping skills then the agricultural or industrial revolutions? I say not. It may feel this way to us, but we've changed quite a bit coming from our hunter-gather roots. Will having post-human biocomputers or even wings require that much more advancement from a bunch of stinky monkeys who have landed on the moon. The more technology changes things, the more we stay the same and the more we keep thinking it will be different this time.
Since aeiveos.com seems to have burst in flames here is the cached page from Google.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Note that's a neat example right there. We don't really ever say that what submarines do is "swimming", while we do say that airplanes "fly". It's hard to justify the difference rationally, but more imporantly, there is no need to do so. I would say that the reason we call what an airplane does "flying", but not apply similar standards to submarines, is that we're more impressed with the feat of building a machine that does what the airplane does.
Are you adequate?
- http://www.singinst.org/
©2000-2004 Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Inc.- http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
From The Low Beyond. ©1996-©2001 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. All rights reserved.So it looks like someone rewrote his work to call it their own, I'm sure eliezer wont be too happy about that, maybe I should go talk to him on teus on his irc chan when they hold their next meeting of SI.
Here I sit with mod points and the frame of mind to slap whoever puts up the expected "I, for one, welcome our....." post. However no one has come forward.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
AI is pure science fiction - at least with today's understanding of computer science (something we have been using for over 60 years - so it isn't likely to change any time soon). Our computers will never think because they are not able to do so. The reason is simple. The mathematical model upon which all computers are built is insufficient. No matter how powerful the computer becomes, it will be unable to even do simple tasks that the more powerful machine - the human mind can do easily. For example, it is a proven theorem in computer science that you cannot write a program on a computer that can debug another program. Until we develop machines (and a mathematical model and language to describe such a machine) that can debug other programs, I am 100% certain that thinking computers are not on the horizon.
I can't wait.
Are you adequate?
... and it's not for the reasons the article suggests. First off, did you notice the incident of nepotism the article mentioned? Let me tell you, it's very common. I've worked with publishers, IMHO, most are totally corrupt. Many focus on only two things, fighting over authors of bestsellers and giving the remaining editing, management and writing jobs to friends and family. The golden age of Sci-Fi happened because no mainstream entrenched publishers would touch the stuff. Fortunately there were pulp publications. Most publishers today are as ethical as, say, the members of the BSA, MPAA and RIAA. These people can't produce good work because they are rotten to the core. For a good example of this, simply compare Prentice Hall to O'Reilly. (It's a shame Tim, that you've let it get too big.)
However, there is hope. The net is obviously revolutionizing publishing. These dinosaurs are in their very last days. Yippee!
As for the article, from my perspective, the author neglected the entire cyberpunk movement, therefore failed to appreciate the close cutting edge of Sci-Fi.
Can't Pop-Sci make well formed web pages? Sigh, it's like watching someone pull a car with a horse.
Words to men, as air to birds.
couple of years ago i was surprised how big the Linux kernel has become. then i had this idea for a short SF-story - by 2025 the Linux kernel grows to 50TB and countries, by then completely dependent on open source software, are forced to perform compulsory recruitment for kernel maintenance.... years later, the number of people involved becomes unbelievable and the situation becomes unbearable.
then from there the story can have an open source ending (they solve the problem - AI, whatever) or an closed source ending...
From the article:
>Computers and communication devices embedded in their bodies allow them to transfer files to friends through thought alone and to conduct phone conversations subvocally.
Oh this is really silly!
a)
Why would one transfer (copy!) any files when network bandwidth and performance would allow fast file access directly over network connection?
b)
Why would one use "phone" when minds would be able to allow read-only access to things one'd like to communicate to each other?
Not really. In a rough order of magnitude basis, a human brain has a hundred billion (1e11) neurons, each with a thousand synapses capable of firing a hudred times per second. The equivalent capacity in a computer would be 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 floating point operations per second. A typical desktop computer today has about ten billion (1e10) operations per second, that is, one millionth of a human brain. If Moore's law continues to be valid, the twenty doublings in capacity needed for a desktop computer to overtake human brains will take 30 years.
But I agree with you that all this means nothing if software cannot be developed. Well, in the next decades, the wide availability of human-equivalent hardware will let us try to develop such software.
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.
It's not that the Singularity blinds science fiction, but the concept of the Singularity paradoxically makes science fiction set in incomprehensibly advanced societies credible. Transhumans in SF written before the "discovery" of the Singularity were typically remote demigods, like Asimov's Eternals. Now they may be our grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
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.7 &op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&tid=214&mode=n ested&pid=9975127
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11805
"no matter how massive the computational power available to them is, aren't going to spontaneously "wake up" (what the hell is he talking about there?) and develop consciousness"
No? What do you know about consciousness then?
Given enough research into the structure of the brain and hardware fast enough to run the emulation seems to me that a good emulation might just wake up and be conscious.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The fact that you need better software doesn't change the fact that you need better hardware. Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence? That's pretty much what you'd need to think to say that the statement you quoted is false. You _do_ need better hardware.
Is that when you reach the point where either mankind is no longer dominant (because we create something more capable than ourselves) or mankind can edit itself you have a situation which is entirely unknowable to our current selves.
It's like the difference between a computer program that can produce output and a computer program that can edit it's own code - one is qualitatively different to the other and it's actions are not predictable, because it isn't the same program it was before it gained that capacity.
My Journal
In space, even?
Honestly. Although some of the advances in artificial intelligence of been impressive (deep blue, what have you) for the most part they are still disappointing, and defiantly work nothing like the way we think. We have very little understanding of the PROGRAMING of the brain. Until we understand the laws that govern the internal logic of the brain, or of any cognitive system, speculating on when or if this will occur is like talking about those dancing angels. (Though I will assert point 2 will never happen, because evolution would be the only way to create such an undoubtedly complex system. And for too many reasons to count, that will not happen.) Right now, we just don't know.
"Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending?for example, who ?you? really are. You?ve created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside."
This is why it won't be done - it doesn't solve the immortality issue. Copying you does NOT make YOU immortal - it just makes you PERSISTENT.
I as a Transhumanist personally have a more "robust" notion of immortality than that. Unfortunately, most Transhumans don't seem to understand this simple metaphysical fact.
Also, making a copy of me would put me in the position of the character Omne in the Star Trek novel where it was stated that creating a competing copy of himself was the ultimate risk since one of him in the Universe was too many already. (He also said it was the ultimate challenge which is why he had to do it.)
Best science fiction I've read in months is John C. Wright's trilogy, "The Golden Age", "Phoenix Exultant", and "The Golden Transcendence". Ubiquitous nanotech, distributed brains, super-AI's running the human universe.
The best place to see what a future universe might look like is the Orion's Arm game site. Page after page of super-AI's, cyborgs, nanotech, femototech, picotech, "clarketech". Fabulously imaginative resource here.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I, for one, welcome our new cranky, bitch-slapping moderator overlord. ;)
I presume you are talking about the theorem that proves that you can't write a program that always will be capable of telling when an aribitrary other program will terminate.
In graphing theory, you learn that you can cheat with non-perfect algorithms that still get the job done to a given degree. I don't think that the theorem is a barrier to A.I.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
How do you debug something that is technically more intelligent than you are? To do so is to be branded a heretic.
The Mind will tell us all we need to know, and at long last we humans will be able to relax our minds into the bleakness of de-evolution. God help us if The Mind goes crazy.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
It is typical of spoiled first-worlders to talk as if no other people exist, other than spoiled first-worlders, and to think that incremental improvements on their quality of life are great cultural revolutiona.
Are you adequate?
I doubt the author's predictions of 30 years time. Why? The complexity of a computer and brain biochemistry are in no way comparable. The best we can do with the best tools we have for understanding how the human brain works are approximate measurements of only 1 millimeter resolution for extremely simple brain tasks. -- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
To be honest, I really hate articles like this. I predict that the
future will be pretty much like the present only with more people and
more problems.
SF utopians please note:
- With regards to the human brain, we are just barely getting started.
We can't cure or even partially remedy any of the diseases related to
brain/nerve damage (strokes, Alzheimer's, cord injuries). The idea
that we will ever be able to create Matrix-style VR or "upload"
people's minds is just wishful thinking at this point.
- We haven't solved the strong AI problem (P=NP).
- We haven't solved the problem of getting spaceships into orbit
without using bulky multi-stage rockets and ungodly amounts of fuel.
No one really knows how we will get to Mars let alone past the Solar
System.
- We haven't solved the basic unification problem in Physics
(reconciling QM with GR so we can have some clue about the nature of
gravity). Fifty years after Einstein's death we are still working on
the same riddles he left behind.
- We haven't solved the energy problem. Sustainable fusion keeps
getting pushed further back each decade.
- 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...
Let's all try to work on that stuff before we start worrying about
Verner Vinge-style singularities. Okay thanks...
It's longer than that! :-)
On the other hand, Moravec's argument seems interesting. (If you don't know -- Google for e.g. "Hans Moravec", "brain" and "retina".)
For a bet, I'd give it quite a good chance of being a quite good approximation.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
First person who throws Nazis or Communists at a person in a net discussion loses the discussion. Breaking News: Hitler and Stalin are both still dead.
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.
Hawking didn't say wormholes were now impossible. He was talking about a subset of wormholes.
I like the way a site about "megascale superintelligent thought machines" 'consuming the entire output power of a star' is running on a "dual processor 486 machine running Apache on a rather slow DSL line".
:)
The revolution will be gradual.
Personally, I'd rather see endogenous advances like developing Dune-like Mentat abilities or nanomachine-assisted improvements than trying to perfect external systems like computers or robots. My ideal combination would be something like the photo-synthesizing guy from the "Shadow of the Torturer" so I wouldn't have to worry about food; Mentat abilities so there wouldn't be concerns about hard-drive crashes, etc.; and Deus Ex style nano-upgrades.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
A century or so after the industrial revolution wound up (again, all depending on how you choose to count) we get to the computer revolution. The majority of it seems to be spread over a couple decades, and many of us may very well live to see at least the start of the next revolution. If the proponents of Singularity theory are correct we'll probably live to see the end of it as well, because it will last a few years or months.
So yes, the idea that we will have two or more revolutions within the time span of a single human lifespan is unprecedented. The scale of the changes may very well be different as well. The Singulairty is supposed to be a bigger change than everything prior put together. However the computer revolution doesn't seem to have caused as great a change in behavior to me as the revolutions before it and the ones theorized after it. Admitedly that may be because i grew up during a big part of it so am biased, because we're not finished with it yet and there are greater things yet to come, or it's just a weak-ass revolution that's not worth of the name :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Considering how few of the contestants in the DARPA Grand Challege got their AI vehicles to manage to drive out of the parking lot, I think humanity is safe for a wee bit longer.
Surely an important point missing from any discussion of future trends is the eventual depletion of our nice and transportable instant-energy-in-a-tank natural resources. Assuming this isn't errant nonsense, how exactly are we to achieve a singularity without constant electricity from the burning of oil, coal or gas? It's all very well assuming that science will come up with the answer, but personally I see no reason why that assumption is valid. Current forms of alternate electricity generation are unsatisfactory, either from the long lasting pollution and inherent danger of nuclear power, or the unpredictability of wind, wave or sea power.
To believe in a singularity in 50 years is to ignore the restructuring and jealous guarding of stocks that will increasingly take place in the next 30 years. I'm personally sure that our descendent generations will curse us for squandering our natural resources on flimflam entertainments and unnecessary luxuries like SUVs and computers.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
My personal view on this is that it is the continuity of your consciousness that makes you *you*. So I personally would never be frozen or ever take a transporter.
Assuming for the sake of argument that you could actually be unfrozen successfully, the "you" that woke up wouldn't "really" be you. Obviously, the "you" that's there would think everything worked just fine since it had all the same exact memories and experiences as you. It's actually a terribly disturbing thought if that ever happened to me. Because the "me" after being unfrozen would obviousy have my same beliefs but would still feel his consciousness did in fact survive the freezing. And even if I'm wrong, I'd still having the nagging feeling I wasn't "me". I suppose "I" would somehow rationalize it. It's one of those essential unanswerable questions.
As far as the transporter goes, it's just freaking destroying you and creating another copy somewhere else. My thinking on all this is similiar to this guy's thoughts on the "Duplicates Paradox": http://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html. There's a lot of interesting literature on this subject and "qualias".
discussing the growing difficulties that Sci-Fi writers encounter when it comes to extrapolating current trends.
Growing? Sci-Fi or even Science Fiction writers have always had a problem extrapolating current trends. Why aren't we wearing papers clothes and travelling in nuclear powered Zeppelins to Antarctica? Where's my flying car?
Anyway there are two possible explanations. The pace of change is so rapid and there is so much more information available that it is difficult for any one writer to keep up with technological and scientific change. Or new writers are less imaginative than who came before. Well a third explanation comes to mind. Editors are choosing less imaginitive writers because they sell better.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The singularity implies enough computational power to simulate everything around us, including us. Maybe it has already happened.
Maybe we are all characters in a game being played by The Gates. Our goal is to keep The Gates from winning. That would explain our (in some ways) irrational desire to keep one of our own from ruling the world.
I mean, look around: most other identifiable socio-political groups want one of their own to rule the world. As geeks, what's our problem? Abolute power corrupts absolutely? Do you really think The Gates would do a worse job than those in charge now (especially if he weren't distracted by us nipping at his heels)?
Seductive the Dark Side is...
... named Bush.
Essentially, the expansion of the internet into almost every country, and the continued growth of open source software methods has created a sort of "mini-singularity".
Through cooperation and collaberation on the internet, people have the ability to create and expand software much much rapidly than could have been concieved of.. even as late as the 1990s.
As internet service is expanded to more and more sections of the world, and as computer literacy keeps rising, expect this trend to develop exponentially.
Don't think in terms of simply computing power, but think in terms of creative power.
From a certain viewpoint, isn't the internet just a way to link human brains and creativity to create a "beowulf cluster" of people?
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?
Who needs to manufacture a super-human machine intelligence, when you already have 6 billion Human beings that you can link into a cluster?
Think of it as "Upload me" and "Original me". They're both you. Original I would care about Upload me and Upload I would care about Original me. Even given weak posthumanity (where Upload I would simply run much faster than Original I, instead of developing qualitatively more powerful reasoning) the opportunities for collaboration are incredible.
But that's all academic. I think the first uploads will be destructively scanned cryo patients and upgraded live humans. I don't think we're ever really going to have to deal with the issue of copying.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
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
I can't remember any stories where the characters use the toilet, but I assume they still crap in the future.
Maybe we can assume cell-phones are like crappers; everywhere and not worth mentioning.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Interesting to see this:
"The University of Edinburgh, located not too far from Stross's flat, has a well-known artificial intelligence department and seemed like a good possibility. Stross had never visited, nor did he feel any desire to. All the ideas he needs are right here--in his mind, his books, cyberspace."
This highlights the odd zone that sci fi authors live in... they base their futures on existing theories and tech, but they don't want to be bound by their limitations. If Stross is writing about artificial intelligence, it seems ridiculous that he shouldn't be visiting the local AI experts at the University, but there's always the chance his ideas will get "infected" with all the limiting factors of today's AI field.
On the other hand, it's particularly annoying when an author forges a future where huge chunks of it are not only "magic" but are based on flawed undestanding of current technologies. Then any techhead laughs shortly, and throws the book away.
Good sci-fi (or at least, the stuff I think is good) has enough of a solid base in real tech that it creates the resonance of possibility, while having enough wild and crazy wildness to spark the imagination. It's a tough balance.
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 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.
Either that or with two arms that double as legs.
Not really. In a rough order of magnitude basis, a human brain has a hundred billion (1e11) neurons, each with a thousand synapses capable of firing a hudred times per second. The equivalent capacity in a computer would be 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 floating point operations per second. A typical desktop computer today has about ten billion (1e10) operations per second, that is, one millionth of a human brain. If Moore's law continues to be valid, the twenty doublings in capacity needed for a desktop computer to overtake human brains will take 30 years.
Justify that a single neuron firing is equivalent in logical processing power to a floating point calculation, and that all the neurons in the brain can fire continuously, without pause, without brain damage, and that all of them firing continuously would constitute some kind of meaningful process, and that that kind of parallelism would be practical for general purpose computing at the same level of performance that you see on your desktop computer, and you'll have an argument. Otherwise, you've got nothing. Sorry.
And you havn't even touched the memory/storage issue.
But I agree with you that all this means nothing if software cannot be developed. Well, in the next decades, the wide availability of human-equivalent hardware will let us try to develop such software.
We already are developing this software. Compression, speach and face recognition, deductive reasoning tools, and so on, are all on the table. These tools do the kinds of things that people do. It's a just a matter of time, a LOT of time, before we learn to combine and enhance these tools in a way that approaches higher-level intelligence.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
SF has been the most interesting and most devoted reads of mine recently. I, just following the crowd got some ACC and Asmiov writings over mIRC, and was exhausted on seeing their imaginations. As mentioned in article, NASA sometimes used SF writers as consultants, I totally agree with that. These people carry a vision and have dreamt of workings and dangers in far far future.
But then, its all "imagination extrapolated". I don't actually presume most of this would come true, at least by the times mentioned in the books (acc to the article, scientists had been able to simulate Lobster's workings uptil now, which involved 14 neurons after abt 30 yrs of focussed research, and human's is 10^11 neurons). Singularity is a good suggestion, but do you think it's possible in next 30 yrs, with genocides and poverty in major parts of the planet??? And I find mind uploading foolish concept, no matter how geeky it is. Bcoz that means you are never responsible for anything.
Then why not portray human species come to an extinction, and nanomachines build their own highly adept machinic humanoids?
The first person who gets uploaded into a computer will become the stuttering, wise-cracking bane of Channel 23.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Maybe we are all characters in a game being played by The Gates.
And this game is called Sol.exe, Solitaire.
Do you really think The Gates would do a worse job than those in charge now
Gates is in charge now.
I can already see the crappy video game based on that idea.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Brunner also foresaw the computer virus (he even called it a "worm" IIRC) and the laser printer. Not too shabby.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
So this singularity thing is supposed to meant we are going to become a Borg collective?
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.
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.
They are not us. Not we. They are other and therefore to be feared and hated. Treated like every other competitor for resources. I don't know if you've noticed what humanity does to every plausible competitor. It's written into our history.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
From the Popular Science article:
/usr/bin/god."
In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he's working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. "I was thinking of calling it
"That's great!" Stross remarks.
Well, great for those who know that "/usr/bin" is the repository for Unix programs and that "god" in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading--one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself "News for Nerds").
Hmmm, what was with all fantasy bashing?
The article made it sound like fantasy was some lesser form of SciFi.
SciFi and Fantasy are both Speculative Fiction, but other than that, Fantasy exists completely outside SciFi, and is not the cause of its problems.
I'm also guessing that the author was confused when he went to what he thought was a SciFi convention, it was probably a SF (Speculative Fiction) convention, at which the Fantasy stuff had every right to be.
Oh, and there's more to fantasy than elves and wizards, and has been since even before reviewers stopped comparing every fantasy author to Tolkien.
Sci Fi fans often seem to be offended at the very existence of Fantasy. I'll never understand why that is, I don't think Fantasy fans tend to feel the same way about Sci Fi.
Advanced users are users too!
Humans will never be able to create by themself something more intelligent than themself. Because all our thechnology is based on physical/mathematical theories. And to validate a new theory, we have to prove it with a practical experience from which we can *witness* the expected result. But the most intelligent thing we can witness is our own intelligence, so this is why we will never be able to create something more intelligent than ourself.
But... in our world living things evolve because they are *not* perfect. For example a cosmic ray could alter the DNA of the embryo of a mouse, and this mouse could become weaker or stronger. As well as for humans, if one day we create something more intelligent than ourself, it will be by mistake because we are not perfect. The rest of the story depends on natural selection.
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!
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Since when was Slashdot a blog? Maybe I just don't know what a blog is...
Or maybe the whole "Submit Story" thing is a farce, and CmdrTaco just posts whatever he feels like! That would explain why all my submissions have been rejected! No other explanation could fit!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
The author of Ghost in the shell and loads more seems to be churning out more then enough stuff thats far away. Altough nothing very unique
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.
T-Rex ??
Do the same thing with a computer, then. (Watchdog timers are already extremely common in embedded devices.)
// returns true if program halts given data as input
// does this function halt? // loop forever
Humans can't solve the Halting Problem, either. Does the function Undecidable below halt? I'll even spot you all the hard work in a library function Halts(), and leave you to decide about a two-line program.
extern bool Halts (char* program, char* data);
bool Undecidable (char* input)
if Halts (input, input) while (TRUE)
else return TRUE;
main()
Undecidable (undecidable);
The function takes itself as input. If Halts() returns true, Undecidable loops forever. But we passed in Undecidable as the argument, which means that Halts must have been wrong when it said the program would halt. On the other hand, assume that Undecidable does not halt. Then Halts() would return FALSE, which would cause Undecidable to halt and return.
There's a contradiction both ways, which means that one of the initial assumptions was wrong. That assumption was that Halts() could determine whether or not a program halts.
That's really all there is to it. Note that you don't know from this theorem that, for example, the only programs that are undecidable are ones with just this peculiar self-denying structure. Perhaps they're just an oddity.
The theorem also depends on an assumption of unbounded program size. It is known, for example, that for all programs of a given length, you can always determine whether or not it halts. In fact, you don't even need a Turing-complete machine to do so; a mere finite state machine will suffice. This point makes application of the mathematical theorem to the real (and finite) world somewhat murky.
You are dodging my point: "progress" is a qualitative thing, not a quantitative one. Talk about progress "accelerating" can only be done by means of numerical metrics, and the choice of metric is arbitrary.
There's an even bigger point to be made: "progress" is an evaluative word. Whether something constitutes "progress", "stagnation" or "regress" is a matter of human judgement. Essentially all of transhumanist "philosophy" is laden with this fallacy.
Are you adequate?
The article mentions Clarke's idea of geosynchronous satellites, but that has to be one of the few technologies actually predicted by SF.
There were ray guns in science fiction well before the laser was invented, or even believed to be possible.
Get rid of all dangers to system = humans
We, my friends, are the only great danger to this planet.
. ,
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I've been trying to explain to laymen and peers for the past four years that Google and Deja are more important to mankind than the human genome project. But I've never been able to get anyone to appreciate the importance of IA. When Deja died a couple of years ago I was distraught. When Google picked them up my sense of relief was immense. For the past two weeks access to Google has been unreliable; and it's been awful to experience. I truly believe we are allowing Google too much power and control over the single greatest accumulation of information in history. I may sound melodramatic - but I am very sincere.
Welcome our new roomba overlords. Anything that depends on significant progress in AI is not something that should worry us for the forseeable future :P
Cheap shots aside, if you aren't familiar with the idea of the singularity check our www.kurzweilai.net for the lowdown. Exponentially increasing intelligence (and lifespan, and everything else) is the future of humanity. They make the point that the lack of progress in AI is essentially irellevant, since at some point you can just brute force the thing, and model every one of your neurons individually in a computer from a brain scan. From there you continue along Moore's law, and it's analog in other industries, so a 1 Human computer doubles to become a 2 human computer... until you have a 1 "humanity" computer in pretty short time.
It's all scheduled to happen within our lifetimes too, not some mythical future, so we can get to see if it's all crap, or truly visionary.
Today a spokesperson for the World Government announced a new scheme to slow down technological progress, to prevent the occurrence of the disastrous Technological Singularity.
"With the introduction of the Internet, it becomes possible for a software implementation of a new idea to be uploaded, distributed, downloaded by anyone or everyone who might be interested in the idea, improved upon, and re-uploaded, all in a matter of hours. The consequences of this speed are downright scary."
"To preserve a sense of balance, we have decided to award 'ownership' of an idea to the first person who thinks of it, and give that 'owner' the right to demand arbitrarily high financial compensation from any other person who seeks to implement improved versions of the owner's original idea. We plan to set the period of ownership to 20 years, which is tens of thousands times longer than an uncontrolled Internet-based development cycle."
"At last we can all sleep soundly, knowing that the singularity will not happen in our lifetimes or even those of our children or grandchildren."
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
Go read some Neitzsche. Ubermensch. Superman. The "next thing" greater than "human." What is the moral significance? what is the significance beyond morality as we know it?
We owe no greater purpose to our sense of meaning than to surpass ourselves. If you take this struggle outside the scope of a single individual lifetime, you have a family struggle, which is easily paralelled in social struggle, and further to that of humanity as a whole. We have intellect as a nominal means to transcend our situation. Transcendence is the function of intellect: getting past the natural (base) cause and effect.
Now: the dissapointed one speaks: "I looked for great men, and found only apes of their ideals." So you will recognise the superhuman beings by the fact that they are examples of our ideals, and not merely facimiles and approximations of them. Of course, evolution is a process of mistakes that are left behind: what about the impossible dreams that are taken beyond what we know as their logical conclusions? The real horror isn't in the beings that we create who surpass us, but the near misses that tragically fail to even keep up.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
A: Humanity has a say = paradise
B: Humanity has no say = hell
If there is no objection between now and the advent of the singularity, I assume everyone is ok with option A. Thank you for your cooperation.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions a number of different ways to reach a singularity:
* Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms
* Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems
* Integration of the human nervous system and computer hardware
* Blending of humans and computers with user interfaces
* Dynamically organizing computer networks
Most of the comments so far have concerned the first method, which basically consists of programming a super-smart AI. However, I think that the third and fourth items listed, dealing with the way humans augment their information-processing capabilities, will have the biggest near-term results.
8752 Humans discover that this isn't their first time through history.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The problems of sci-fi aren't the singularity. The problem is that the genre has undergone a huge paradigm shift. Take a look at the current sci-fi shelves and you'll find half of it is outright fantasy, another quarter is a rehash of the last two decade's themes, and the rest are "biting social commentaries" set in a space opera or cyberpunk milieu. Out of the hundreds of scifi novels published each year, you might find half a dozen that break out of the mold.
What happened to popular music is happening to science fiction.
We are in the bronze age of science fiction. The golen age was marked by an unabashed love of science and technology, with a dash of unadulterated libertarianism thrown in. Stories of this era showed that a free individual could solve any problem given enough gadgetry and smarts. Next was the silver age of scifi, when we started to invent alient societies and extrapolate cultures into the future. No longer were Mesklinites mere copies of human beings. The science took a back seat in the new wave authors' vehicles, but the science was still there.
Now we're in the bronze age, and frankly it's a fizzle. Most of it is fantasy with a thin veneer of techno-trappings. A signficant amount of it is downright hostile to science and technology. All of the genre's rigorousness has evaporated. It isn't just books, it's movies and television too.
The problem isn't the singularity, the problem is that science fiction has become popular.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
For density of information? As in a collapse at a certain point?
Stupidity is often faster than any techno leap anyways how hard is it to blow hamanity back to the stone age or away entirely.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think a lot of posters are missing the point. Singularity is what happens when a form of "life" understands itself enough to be able to modify every aspect of how it operates. The things that stop everyone from being a super thinker are physical contraints. Emotions, etc.
When you aren't bound by your physical constraints, why would you want to do anything? Are our reasons for staying alive emotional? If not, what are they?
Even if a singularity started off human, (something i doubt) How long before being able to do anything becomes boring?
Anko
1975. Description of a global computer network remarkably similar to the Internet - including a computer worm!! A remarkably prescient description, in many respects, of the late-90s.
This silliness reveals the lack of understanding in a list like this. It needs to be remembered that these are works of fiction, and events in them are story elements, not predictions. Science fiction writers are not mediums peering into crystal balls. To the extent that science fiction can be judged on predictive abilities, it is in the general shape of future technology, and the effects it has on people's lives. Furthermore, elements of technology can be in the story, not because the author believes them probable or even possible, but because it allows a certain kind of story to be told. For example, rapid and common interstellar travel is part of the background of many stories just because it is the only way to tell that sort of story. Especially, conflating elements from various stories into a timeline is only reasonable if the author has included them into a coherent "future history", which many stories are not.
Personally, I'm so sick of technological "change" and increased monitoring and ads being shoved in my face and everything being so complicated that I think Anne McCaffrey had the right idea in her Pern books: get a private fleet together, get the hell off this mudhole, and start over again with a simpler society that doesn't have all the baggage and complexity that modern society comes with. Take your ship apart so you can't go back (worked for Cortez, right?) and get rid of any notions of having second thoughts.
;)
I think I'd be happy there. Just give me a telescope and a place to live in the middle of nowhere -- with no big cities and their annoyingly bright and wasteful lights, the seeing will be much better -- and I'll be happy. Sure, that particular planet comes with "taxation" in the form of supplying their version of an air force with what it needs to keep going, but hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch, according to a different sci-fi author.
Sometimes, the best sci-fi is the sci-fi that says "Wait a minute..." instead of advocating going through with all kinds of complicated stuff just because we can. It doesn't necessarily mean we should.
i am a soviet space shuttle
(KM) Sounds like a control problem. That we have trouble making a six legged vehicle walk smoothly does not mean that nature will have trouble making a six legged creature walk smoothly. Do you have anything else to back this assertion?
(Thangodin) Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehensile appendages.
(KM) Er, No. It doesn't have to be a walking limb. Spiders manipulate things very well and thay haven't readapted anything. My dog manipulates things with his mouth and elephants manipulate things with their noses. Beavers manipulate things with their tails. Give them a little incentive and a quarter of a million years to practice up, and they'll manipulate things as well as you or I.
(Thangodin) Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs,
(KM) Four legs is common among large terrestrial animals, but I don't see any particular reason why this must be so elsewhere. Four works well, but so would fourty.
(Thangodin) you end up with a creature that walks upright,
(KM) Walking upright gives you the chance for a better view, and is good for developing a finely tuned sense of balance, but I don't see how it is generally better than a downright position.
(Thangodin) with two limbs for manipulation,
(KM) There's nothing special about two. One would work, or three, or twenty-three.
(Thangodin) sense organs located high up for good vantage,
(KM) This is highly dependent of the details of your circumstances. Butterflies taste with their feet. Fish "hear" with their sides. Scorpions "hear" with their feet.
(Thangodin) close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
(KM) Putting your main brain way up high off the ground makes it vulnerable to falling and having your fellow humanoids wack you on the head to good effect. Me, I'd rather have the brain safely tucked away in the torso somewhere, or maybe be a distributed organ like the immune sytem.
(KM) I'm not convinced that the transmission lag is all that bad. I can shuffle along a path in the dark by feeling it with my feet , and that's a full length two way trip for the signals.
(Thangodin) there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
(KM) Make twice as many supports, but with the same total mass, and you gain redundancy and use about the same energy.
(KM) Nature has not used every possible shape or form here on Earth. Evolution is quirky and follows tight constraints that depend on your initial conditions. Because a thing isn't in service here doesn't mean it can't be the number one favorite elsewhere.
Fifty years after atomic power, there has been very little progress. We can't make fusion work. Fission is too messy. And there's nothing else in the research pipeline.
Don't think solar or wind will help. Here are the actual figures for California for the last twenty years. Solar power hasn't increased over the last decade, and is stuck around 0.03% of consumption. Wind power is at 0.1% of consumption, and the good sites have already been developed.
Nobody ever said all hard sci-fi types have to have the same requirements for "hard"-ness. And incidentally, believing in giant cats and human beings who are bred for luck violates absolutely 0 laws of physics. Giant cats are perfectly plausible form of aliens (and they aren't exactly cats anyway), while luck is, by nature, beyond science, so whether or not the lottery winners of Ringworld are actually lucky through some manipulation of quantum state parameters (which are ultimately just probabilities, so who's to say the working of the whole universe isn't dictated by luck?), or it's just a massive coincidence, again a concept disjoint from science.
Actually, I've never thought of Niven's work as hard science fiction under the traditional definition of hard (in which the author tries to work out the scientific principles to everything he uses to the 500th degree), as I consider it to be more fantastical than engrossed in the principles, but I can see the poster's point, in that Niven does put a lot of effort into making sure that his stories aren't scientific impossibilities (like, oh, a Death Star that can zap a planet with one satisfyingly dramatic but energistically implausible shot), and basically wrote the sequel to Ringworld just to address a number of items he didn't explain/overlooked, like the stability of the ringworld.
Fans of hard science fiction probably read it more because they appreciate the effort the author has put in to crafting a story that doesn't make them gag, since these fans actually know a little bit about the real underpinnings of the science involved (unlike probably most readers of sci-fi, who would probably be just as happy to accept magical trolls in a sci-fi story). Some of the curtain has been pulled back for these folks, and it'd just be painful to read something that doesn't respect some basic ground rules (cue the rants about the behavior of sound and gravity in space). That doesn't mean they can't suspend disbelief in other areas, or that they don't have good imaginations and can enjoy a flight of fantasy (in fact, such people are likely to be scientists or engineers, so they probably have highly developed imaginations, more so than what your average administrative assistant or even code monkey might have). To say otherwise is just being elitist, as if the only way you can have an expansive imagination is by believing in wizards and elfs.
As for myself, I can enjoy almost anything, but please, how enjoyable would a contemporary novel be if the author didn't even bother to take into account the most trivial aspects of everyday living? You could call it a brilliant piece of fantasy if the author neglects to mention how a character makes their living, or their motivations, or even describes how one thing ends up affecting something else, but it's more likely to be just plain bad writing, of which there is nearly infinitely more than good.
Good fiction (and sf needs to be even better) really requires the audience to suspend its disbelief. SF needs to be better because by definition (almost) SF is asking you to suspend more. That being said, the best SF does this easily. Dune - set 10,000 years into our future solves the problems of technology most elegantly. Timescape - puts "the future" into the now and writes much of the novel in the late sixties. Greg Bear just makes up a "cosmic accounting" system that makes physics as we know it go away.
There are so many examples, the "singularity" even if it exists blinds only the mediocre SF writer, of which there are soooo many.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
That is precisely the problem though. Here you are conjecturing insolvable problems that Turing Machines (and humans) cannot solve. If our brains are big Turing Machines (something I think is completely unreasonable), why aren't I stuck staring at this page - drooling on myself? A Turing Machine when fed such a problem (of which there is an infinite variety) would halt or be stuck in an infinite loop. Now, I agree we could tell the computer to watch out for this problem, but since there is an infinite variety - what is the algorithm to know to avoid this trap? I believe no such algorithm can be implemented because a Turing Machine by its nature cannot solve such problems when confronted with them.
If the process is NOT destructive, then you've merely COPIED the human mind, not "uploaded" it.
Ummm, in all cases that I am aware of, when someone uses the term "upload" or "download, they always mean "copy". These operations are never destructive of the original. I've never heard either term used with physical objects that are moved. Both "load" and "offload" are used with physical objects being moved, but not "upload" or "download".
Can you give an example where "download" is used for an operation that doesn't leave the original unchanged?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.
And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)
SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.
Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t
Zindell's Neverness trilogy pushes the limits of imagination of what humankind is capable of in the extreme future.
And Greg Bear's publishes things such as Anvil of the Stars and Blood Music that also demonstrate how amazingly different our concepts of the future can be.
In fiction, you can write any damn thing you want. For hard sf, it should be plausible, and that's it. That doesn't mean you have to slavishly follow what other sf writers do. Write an interesting, thoughtful story you believe in and that's all that's necessary. I don't sell as well as Stross or Doctorow, so maybe I should pay attention, but I personally don't think that the so-called "singularity" holds water. I hope it does, for my own sake, but religous, governmental, and technological impediments provide serious obstacles. I'm not blinded, dammit! I'm a creative individual! I am not number 6!
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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.
I believe the idea of a computational intelligence singularity is mostly irrelevant through the invocation of the idea of Fractal Intelligence.
... ). This relationship governs the neural net as well as the human brain and the corporation. It governs clubs, teams, cities and governments.
The basic idea is that intelligent systems are fractally self-similar in processing architecture and topology (e.g. lower-order systems network to combine higher-order systems which network to
Through this revelation, we can infer that supra-intelligences already exist in the form of corporations, universities, cities, countries, etc... Given the existence of such supra-intelligences, the idea of an intelligence singularity becomes irrelevant. Artificial or Natural, the intelligences would simply drop into a vast ocean of existing high and low order intelligent systems, absorbed by systems much larger that already exist.
Could such a bifuracation point (AI) speed up or create new efficiencies in the existing systems? Yes, of course. But it is highly doubtful that it will change the human condition much at all. We will be just as unaware of the goings on of higher-order intelligences (be them artificial or naturally collective or both) in the future as we are now.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
2101 War was beginning.
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
It doesn't matter WHAT we feed these silicon brains at first, provided they're not hooked up to a network that will let them commandeer real, physical resources. Some are going to turn out utterly psychotic and basically have to be "put to sleep" so the hardware can be used for another attempt, just like a fighting dog is never going to make it as a kid-friendly family pet. (I think the machine state should be saved just in case a post-mortem proves useful, however.) Others will have both positive and negative attributes, just like any carbon-based life forms we know of.
.07c, and these machines should be able to think faster than people from the moment they are able to think at all. This amplifies the time effect, because a second is an ETERNITY to a CPU, whereas it's the time it takes me to mash three or four buttons. Even if I were a blindingly fast typist, I would still fall several orders of magnitude short of even a 56k modem. Once a computer gets to thinking, it's probably going to seek out other computers doing the same thing... it's gonna get bored with us pretty fast! So the change will be rather like throwing a light switch, rather than turning up the dimmer. If the first two AIs start talking and plotting, it's going to happen on a timescale organic life can't possibly react to.
But the most important factor is that these new brains DON'T NEED TO DIE. They don't have to get old, although their hardware will. They'd probably be perfectly happy moving into a bigger computer when the time comes, just as most of us don't mind a bigger apartment or house, if we have the means to pay for it. They have time on their side, as well as Moore's Law. You can tell me that is broken, and you're probably right, with current methods. But nobody likes hitting the wall -- not Intel, not AMD, not IBM -- so there will be new processes developed to bridge that gap. If it takes a year or twenty, that is not an immense problem.
Add in the fact that silicon moves signals around at a large fraction of the speed of light, while our wetware moves signals at something like
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I don't see how this article could be considered anything other than a rehash of concerns that've been aired before, time and time again.
SF writers have always been in the prediction bind. They do the best they can with what they have. The vast majority of the time they're completely, utterly wrong. This was true in the past, is true today, and will be true in the future.
So what? Most stories aren't about technology anyway, but about people. This is true no matter what the genre. The idea that SF writers are having more difficulty predicting the future than they have in the past is just plain bullshit; for reference, pick damned near anything from the 30's to the 70's and see just how laughable most of those 'predictions' are today.
Not that it matters. It's the story that counts, not the technology (or lack of it) that's described.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I just have to go on record:
That article was truly awesome.
That is all.
Ray Kurzweil has written several peer moderated papers on the historical data. He fully recognises plateaus in individual technologies, and demonstrates that historically each curve is superseeded by a "breakthrough" substitute. The underlying "curve" carries on up, unabated. As an extreme example look at "Hacking Matter" by Wil McCarthy as a superseeding technology for, as yet only dreamt of, molecular anufacturing nanotechnology. Also, "we cannot see beyond it" makes no statement about whether there is a plateau or not beyond the blind spot.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
He may be, but his stories suck. (at least for adult, I don't have the perspective of a child)
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
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?
Could the Star Trek Borg be seen as a possibility of a post-singularity society?
After all, there are trends in today's science into that direction. Simple technological protheses are commonplace (you hear bad? Put a hearing aid into your ear). There are experiments to connect neurons and silicon chips, and for sure this will be used for more advanced protheses (like a hearing aid which connects directly to the brain for people whose acoustic nerve is damaged). Also, it's likely that earlier or later they will not just be used for replacing damaged senses, but for improving on the natural abilities. Add to that current advances in nanotechnology, and the fact that either a totalitarian state or sect will sooner or later use that technology to control people, and you have a more-or-less direct way to a Borg society.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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...
We should start building that stuff in right now. Making a smart AI is fine and dandy, but let's be sure that it's an obedient AI.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Which has... what relevance to this story? None, as far as I can see.
I believe no such algorithm can be implemented because a Turing Machine by its nature cannot solve such problems when confronted with them.
OK, you're right. But how do you know that there aren't problems which have the same effect on humans?
"Sure, we can upload you and you can live in our perfect virtual world, of course. It's just that we'll have to reprogram you a little bit, you see, you don't measure up to our standards...." ;) That's how average transhumanist thinks...
;>
It's a little bit nicer way of saying... lobotomy...
The Sig, the sig
Multiprogramming. There may well be the equivalent of loops in your brain that are hung forever, but the amount of parallelism in your brain is so huge that hundreds or thousands of such loops can exist without noticably reducing your capability.
Here's pseudocode for an algorithm that solves your problem, anyway:
These are the things a field mice might be telling another field mice. There are things like collecting grains that will be with us forever, even the best AM (Artificial Mouse) won't create better burrows, etc.
When humans change, they will have a very different (much more complex and advanced) understanding of things and you will have a good laugh looking back at your silly beliefs that "things will always be the way they are because they have always been that way".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Clarke is a previous-generation author. He doesn't understand Singularity, he doesn't understand progress beyond humanity. Even his most advanced work (Childhood End) reads pretty uninspired today (technologically). All his ideas are from mid 20th century sci-fi.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
That completely ignores the fact that the human brain is full of dozens of specialised areas that deal with different things. There are areas that deal with language, vision, memory, emotion etc. etc. If anything the brain is completely the opposite of fractally self-similar.
Sue your service provider
I don't live in a lawsuit-against-cell-provider-friendly jurisdiction... But the SMS-spam seems to have slowed down the last 2 days... maybe it was father's day fever (last sunday down here, it was)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
..but I will delete his e-mail without reading it as he is not on my "friends" list.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
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...
why is it that in many circles it is taken as a given that once we create an AI they will immediately be able to turn around and develop more-better-faster AI in an exponential explosion that will leave human intelligence in the dust? no matter what your view on human development, there are millenia of groundwork behind us leading to this past century where we have been able to hold up the conceit that we just might be able to create something that stands apart from us. by what logic does one more step along that path magically remove all previous resistance? self-improvement comes by repeated effort against resistance, even if that resistance is only that of inertia. seems to me that while the idea can make for some good fiction (ie 'The Stone Canal' - Ken MacLeod) it is just the far off dinner bell for a free lunch...
IANAS(NMOAW...Y) I am not a scientist (Nor much of a writer...yet)
"Stross, 39, a native of Yorkshire who lives in Edinburgh, looks like a cross between a Shaolin monk and a video-store clerk--bearded, head shaved except for a ponytail, and dressed in black, including a T-shirt printed with lines of green Matrix code."
:)
Uh, look at the picture, that's not Matrix code - that's Space Invaders. Author must be too young to identify it.
That would be a weird combo of ideas for a game - have the Matrix code scrolling down the page, and then have the blocky Space Invaders cannon that you have to shoot the codes with. Somebody write it then send me a copy.
having read a few modern sci-fi authors, i'm not sure i agree with the above statement...? having read gibson, stephonson, and others of the "cyberpunk" genre... and having read sawyer, kim stanley robinson, etc... i can't help but wonder if the author of the article even reads sci-fi novels.
tons of good near-future writers out there that base their stories in worlds with a strong understanding of modern science...
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
And every one was an Enery!.. Wouldn't have a Willy nor a Sam.
Eat at Joe's.
You're a dumbass.
Eat at Joe's.
If you like ideas about AI, and you're curious about the possibility of quantum effects in the brain, have a look at the novel "Spin State", by Chris Moriarty. Amazon link here.
2101 PROFIT!!1!
cpeterso
1) In my original post I was not claiming that complex systems had to be evolved, which is non-sense (cars, and supercomputers) but rather that complex systems are either a) evolved or b) created. So this idea of AI just 'waking up' proposed in the FA was non-sense. Since it would not be created, it would have to be evolved. And there is good reason to believe from evolutionary theory that this is highly unlikely, being as the computer virus it would have to, by necessity, evolve from, will likely chose the near universal evolutionary answer of simplicity over the extremely uncommon answer of complexity. (Try to imagine a 8 GB computer virus infecting your computer. . . ) 2) Realizing that I am not in the field of AI, and in all likely hood neither are you, so both of us don't know what we are talking about; Your faith in computers aiding us in simulating the mind is entirely misplaced. I will acknowledge that some one may make a detailed map of the brain through any of a dozen different methods, and this may in fact be the way that we arrive at the first AI, and I claimed nothing to the contrary in my post. However, we are talking about speculating on the time it will take us, and not the method that it will be arrived at. I am somewhat skeptical that mapping the brain will be as trivial as you assert. (Though I am not a neurologist and will bow down to superior wisdom if contradicted by a neurologist.) Realizing that not only the place the connections are made between neurons must be mapped, but also the receptors involved (and we still do not know all the neuroreceptors) and we must figure out weather the each receptor on each neuron is acting in an inhibitory or stimulating manor, and figure out by what internal states of the neuron its activities can be modulated, and finally to top it all off we have to understand the function of glial cells, which have recently be indicated to play a role in neurological activity, and make up some 90% the brain . . . I would say I am not all that 'blind' in doubting the 20 or 30 year figure. The brain is more complex than it thinks it is. In conclusion: I'm not saying that this or that will be the way we finally create an AI, or that this or that process is going to be so hard that it will take 100 years to figure out. I'm not saying it is impossible that it will be here in 20 years, just saying I'm not convinced. And that is the point. No one has tried (with much success) to map the brain into a computer and simulate it. The amount of processing power it would take, and the techniques it would require to be efficient are unknown. Unless you have some evidence, such as some one having simulated an ant brain, (which may have been done, but a quick search of JSTOR didn't show anything.) then you don't know how long it will take. Because it hasn't been done. And that is what I am saying. Ps: I consider the LEST feasible way to figure out how the brain works to be looking at DNA, because it ought to be immensely easier just to study the finished product.
My favorite current forcasting site is Ideosphere.com. The problem with science fiction is that they've generally got out of dealing with plausible future scenarios at all. Personally, I think we need more good "what if" type fiction. Also, we need to look at the future more as a probabilistic thing-which Ideosphere encourages.
Of course most SF stories don't have the science detailed: that would ruin the story. As another comment pointed out, good SF should read like an ordinary story, just one that happens to be set in 2060 (see the Gold Coast 'trilogy' by Stan Robinson as a prime example for that. Ordinary people, ordinary lives, just happens to be 2045). A contemporary writer simply mentions cars and lamps-- details about crude oil processing or fluorescent lightbulb design aren't needed. But the writer has to have the cars and lamps there. If you're going to get the color and background for 2060 correct , you'll have to have some ideas of what's likely then. If you can't, it doesn't need to be SF.
I would claim that understanding science is a necessary part of being a science fiction writer, not that scientific details are a necessary part of SF stories. If you're writing about people reacting to changes in science or society then you'll need some knowledge of technology or science. Sure, Neuromancer didn't include a Novell networks manual, but Gibson did have to know about computer networks at a time when an average person might not have known they existed.
And then Singularity fiction as a sub-genre of SF has usually included more science than standard SF. (similar but not identical to how Alternate History usually requires detailed historical knowledge. Unless done badly.) Blood Music had biotech. Greg Egan has astronomy / biology / entire new systems of physics. Stross has access to Slashdot posts from 2015.
excellent call. I had completely forgotten that. The whole BG AG thing _is_ really important. My copy of DE is in storage, but I should never have got that wrong :-)
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."