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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?
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.
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..
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...
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?
Actually, that sort of thing has been done before. Read Daniel Dennett's Where Am I?, it is a great and though provoking read.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Excellent points. The best science fiction writers (IMNSHO) are the ones that extrapolate the future based on human behavior and motivations, rather than where we think our technology will take us. Good science fiction is not about predicting tehnological advances. It should read like non-fiction that hasn't occured yet. My four favorite science fiction writers are Dick, Gibson, Stephenson, and Bester. Their novels have aged well, and seem to portray a pretty accurate picture of humanity's future because they all realize one thing: people do not change. Technological advance and trends aside, we are not that different from people thousands of years ago. Books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, or The Demolished Man seem more and more likely, because the technological advance therorized on are secondary. We identify with the characters in books like these. These books address religion, corporate greed, politics, race relations, the military, etc. They seem plausible because the characters in these books act like we would. A good science fiction writer needs to make a few good extrapolations on where technology might be in the coming decades (nanotechnology, cloning, genetic modifications, interplanetary travel, worldwide computer networks, whatever), but the real value is addressing the human factor. A hundred (or a thousand) years from now, people will still be bitching about the government, religion, and corporations. We will still be greedy and giving, petty and generous, cruel and kind. Human beings do not change. When writing science fiction, it is important to retain that insight into human nature if you want accurately forecast where we are going.
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.
Turing showed that no such program exists that can solve the halting problem for all possible input programs.
However, it's a big stretch to go from that to debugging software. Even if you show that the halting problem is equivalent to debugging a program (assuming you can define that formally), you still can get around the proof by designing a program that only debugs some programs. There might be a very large class of programs for which the halting problem can be solved, and that could be enough for practical use.
Anyway, I'm just saying that one needs to be very careful applying things like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or Turing's proof that the Halting Problem is not solvable. Those theorems are extremely formal and don't necessarily apply to practical situations where partial solutions are good enough.
(Another example is the Traveling Salesman Problem. No one knows a polynomial time algorithm that finds the optimal solution, and it is quite possible no such algorithm exists. However, there are polynomial time algorithms that will get you within a factor of 2 of the optimal solution, and I think there are others that get even closer than that.)
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?
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...
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.
"Enough to know that it's a hard problem, maybe not fully solvable in my lifetime."
How do you know? Before powered flight, how reasonable would the description of a 747 have sounded?
Well, 100 billion neurons or so. Given that these guys are building a system today which emulates 20 billion neurons: http://www.ad.com/ human level consciousness might not be all that far away.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In many cases, physical limits intervene. Exponential increase in speed of travel does not imply that we'll find a way to break the light speed barrier (but we might). But the singularity being spoken of here is not a physical singularity, but a singularity of extrapolation--a kind of discontinuity or state transition beyond which simple extrapolation is impossible, because what lies on the other side is qualitatively different from what came before. And those are actually rather common in the real world.
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.
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.
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.
Take a look at Vinge's *Fire Upon the Deep* for some example SF Singularities (the process is called "Transcending"), and Lem's *Fiasco* for a kind of counter-Singularity.
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!
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.
(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.
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
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.
2101 War was beginning.
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
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?
Reading the article on the singularity, i have one question: What is intelligence?
This question needs to be answered before other questions can be answered, like:
If entity A is intelligent, can entity A create or design an entity B that is at least as intelligent as entity A?
So far, it seems like "No" is the answer. I call this the intelligence barrier.
The border cases seem to support this: A being with intelligence zero cannot design another being of intelligence zero. And God can't create God.
Even if humans could design robots that are just as intelligent as them, it doesn't mean they could design robots that are more intelligent. Which also means these robots couldn't design other robots which would be more intelligent.
This is the basic fallacy in the singularity concept.
P.S.: I am also missing a debate about enlightenment: To be enlightened means to truly understand oneself, and in that, to truly understand life. Yet, most people are not enlightened. And how can you talk about understanding another intelligence if you can't even understand yourself?
This is really not about extrapolating from where we are today to create science fiction, but rather about finding some inspiration...
Its been said that the first Sci-Fi movie ever created had all the plots and themes incorporated in it - Metropolis by Fritz Lang
there are new generations of humans and just like other markets have realized much can be recycled as far as ideas go, simply because its "new" tio the new generations.
Oh no, I just inspired someone to write a science fiction about a master races that lives much longer than us humans and is fully aware of this mental limitation of ours that allows them to watch reruns of our antics...
"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
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...
"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.
No, we *don't* need AI. What my late wife and I came up with that we need is an Artificial Stupid (c, Roth-Whitworth, 1996, and I *mean* this): you *don't * want the M$ idea of "I know how to do this *so* much better than *you* do...."
Rather, what you want is for it to do a lot of what you want it to do, without tons of configuration and without needing expert advice to configure it, and do it neatly and efficiently...and when it finds something it doesn't know how to handle, it *knows* when to bother you, and when not to.
You want a *good* secretary in this case, not a Gentleman's gentleman....
mark
A scientific singularity is not the only possibility. We could just as well be approaching a spiritual singularity. The latter makes more sense.
Remember, the origins of science, at least in the west, were about discovering the physical reality behind "God's creation" (or the creation of the gods, as you prefer). It was a branch of philosophy. Only later did science become associated with technology.
Much of what "science" fiction has been concerned with is the technology side of things: those toys that were based on advances in scientific understanding--or even based on nothing more than wishful thinking. It should more correctly be called Technology Fiction.
It's normal, in a capitalist, materialist, product/sales-oriented culture, that our vision of the future would gravitate toward ever-better toys--even turning ourselves into toys as we imagine bionic selves or even silicon replacements. But to base our future on more and mind-boggling toys is just a cultural preference, not an inevitability. Not unless you abandon notions of free will, that is.
As one poster noted: a SF writer, unlike the scientific specialist, must look at more than one specialty to gain an overview large enough to inspire fiction. I would argue that, in thinking about the future, we must look well beyond "science" and see other parts of the human experience, most notably spirituality and the arts, areas where most SF literature is woefully weak.
If one looks into the current intellectual ferment in these areas, we see that there are other, quite different futures being imagined. In fact, it could be argued that the most important area of development today is the area of human consciousness. That is where the action is.
Humanity is attempting to make a leap from the modern to the postmodern era--which means, among other things, a leap from a modern, stateist mindset to a post-modern, planetary mindset. Indeed, some of us are already (in part at least) living in it. (The best post I've read mentions the desperation of Muslim fanatics to defend their medieval world from encroaching modernism. This is ironic given that the modernism they fear is already history and we are in a post-modern world!)
The traditional trappings of SF--from rocket ships to intergalactic soda cans, from robots to nanobots, and including the existentialist angst that sees colonizing the stars as the only alternative to the "meaninglessness" of earthly existence--are all rooted in the modernist mindset. But for those who can take their eyes off distant planets for a moment and look at the devastation around us, it should be obvious that the modern mentality is not leading us in a good direction here on earth. It has been estimated that nearly one-third of life on earth has died off since 1970. We are living through one of the greatest periods of extinction in the planet's history, and most of this die-off has been the result of runaway technology. Why should we get things any better when we reach alpha centauri?
To be fair, technology is the convenient whipping boy in this explanation. The more root cause of this die-off, which continues unabated, is our modern mindset, which sees the planet as a dead heap of resources to exploit at will. Combined with this Newtonian view of a lifeless, clockwork planet we also have the (primarily American) cult of the individual, with a seasoning of a greed-is-good rationalism. It's obvious that the modern mindset, some 500 years old at this point, has reached the limits of its ability to serve humanity.
Of course, in this chaos-dominated time of transition, there are many scientists who have moved far beyond the Newtonian view. Indeed, the far reaches of physics and mathematics is almost beyond SF to the point of magic and metaphysics. But the Newtonian viewpoint still dominates the popular imagination even as the reality in which we live already surpasses it.
The post-modern mindset I'm rooting for is a Gaian one which recognizes the planet as both living and sa