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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..."
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..)
Also worth investigating is John C. Wright's The Golden Age Trilogy...I had bought the first book to read on my Vegas trip (honeymoon) next week. Already ripped through it. Set 10,000 years in the future, where the Singularity, if it hasn't already happened, is damned close.
The books (in order) are:
* The Golden Age
* The Phoenix Exultant
* The Golden Transcendence
That said, the first 50 pages of the first book are a little tough-going, given that Wright is painting a really alien picture and forcing you to catch up with his terminology, but in the end, it's worth it. Having just started the second book, I can tell you that one of the major themes is socialism vs. libertarianism, and as a subset of that personal responsibility to society.
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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
The basic point I suspect the article is trying to make is thus: the field of speculative science fiction is no longer what it once was. Look back at the middle of the century, and you'll see that the predictive writings of science fiction authors all contained major assumptions about the social and cultural settings of the future. Even the ones that realized that fact, and tried to compensate, still failed for a lack of ability to predict. Absolutely no one in 1950 had an inkling of what the computer would do to society in fifty years. Looking at the history of science fiction, you see that while on occasion a few skilled authors make an accurate prediction or two, the vast majority of speculative sci fi fails dramatically to come close to reality. In the last two or three decades, it is generally considered that this situation has been growing steadily worse. Cultural changes are effectively impossible to predict long-term, because of their very nature (many small meme introductions over a long period of time), but now it becomes increasingly difficult to predict scientific and social changes. If the WWW had such an incredible impact on global economy within a span of nine or ten years, how can anyone hope to guess what will happen in eighty or ninety years?
I mean, you use your terminal (aka "web browser") to connect to the master server that holds the content and responds to your queries (aka the "web site") all the time, don't you? None of that stuff is actually on your home machine, you're just accessing it remotely...
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.
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.
Indeed, this can be difficult even for scientists who read the physics literature. Much of what was regarded as science fiction in the 50's is fact today, including some things that were generally considered to be fantasy at one time, like beam weapons. Physicists are carrying out serious experiments on quantum teleportation, and methods of transmitting information (random information, but still information) faster than light.
Now there are multiple lines of serious investigation, any one of which that could lead to massive transformation not merely of human culture (such as happened so recently with the internet, and was predicted by hardly anybody), but also of humanity itself:
-AI
-Genetic modification of human beings
-Direct man/machine interfaces
-Nanotechnology
Perhaps any one of these will not pan out. AI progress has moved fairly slowly of late. On the other hand, neurobiology has been booming along, and there seems little doubt that it will eventually be possible to simulate brain function. I can understand why writers are finding it difficult to extrapolate far into the future; it is simply hard to imagine that all of these will stall out.
The internet did not cause a "massive transformation of human culture". It has made hardly any difference at all to human culture.
Some of the unexpected changes:
1) The free press no longer belongs to "the man who can afford one." Everybody has the equivalent of their own printing press. Individual bloggers, unaffiliated with major news organizations, are now a significant influence on political races.
2) Distribution of music has been transformed, and the control of traditional studios of media distribution is eroding.
3) Virtually everybody worldwide has access to research capabilities that were previously available only to the wealthy and those who had access to a major library are now available worldwide.
4) Government control of information distribution has become enormously more difficult. Interdiction of taboo political or cultural information (e.g. pornography) is much weaker.
5) There is now a market available to the average citizen worldwide in almost any product you can identify, new or used.
Computers have changed hardly at all in the last thirty years, even. The sort of software running on your desktop at a kernel level is not exactly revolutionary, it is just the same sort of thing as 30 years ago.
However, applications and interfaces have changed enormously. Almost everybody now has access to music, photo, typesetting, and video editing facilities that were available only to professionals 30 years ago.
It is sad that the most revolutionary and transforming effects could be acheived with the simple technologies we have already developed, like anti-malarial drugs, vitamin supplements, fertilisers, and so on, than can possibly be acheived by any future development that is remotely likely.
Yes, if only we could make more rational, more humanistic use of the resources we already have, the world would be transformed. But practically speaking, this is as much fantasy as orcs and wizards. While the technology of doing more with computers is rapidly advancing, the "social technology" of achieving in practice the sort of "revolutionary and transforming effects" that you envision seems to have stalled decades ago.
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.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I can't get past the fact that we haven't had any real breakthroughs since the birth of the Atomic and Computer ages 40-50 years ago.
It is not a "fact", it is an illusion which you have due to, I guess, insufficient education and/or knowledge.
Okay -- I'll go out on a limb and say they'll be no smarter-than-human intelligence in, say, the next 1000 years.
Of course, a definition of intelligence would be helpful, and we don't have a very good one yet. The Turing test, which I like for recognizing intelligence, doesn't help much determining how intelligent something is.
I think we can all agree that number crunching isn't intelligence. I think of intelligence as the ability to find similarities between things that are different, and differences between things that are similary. Basically an ambiguity processing engine. Needs to be terribly adaptable, too.
Anyways, I think the human brain stopped developing a long time ago because it already contains all the processing power needed for such actions. In fact, it's overkill. The proof is that while our hardware is all very similar, our "intelligence" varies greatly. Our current limitations on intelligence are limitations on learning, not on processing. Even if we built a better brain, we wouldn't have any idea what to feed it. We don't have any idea how to feed ourselves. Most geniuses arise by chance.
Also, I think we strive for the elimination of all ambiguity, and concoct ideas of super-intelligence, or God, to represent this ideal. But I also think that we're fooling ourselves if we think there is a "right" answer to every question. If we were really intelligent we might realize the limits on intelligence are inherent, and not a lack of.
So I think people can be smarter than they are today, and that a super-brain could be built. But i think the technology would be in education and environment. And I think that it would still be confused most of the time, kind of like us.
Cheers.
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.
2101 War was beginning.
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[Big Brick Wall]