Technological singularit.., p.2
Technological Singularity, page 2
More symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focused on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.
Local area nets to make human teams more effective than their component members. This is generally the area of "groupware"; the change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism.
In one sense, this suggestion's goal might be to invent a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Individual members'
expertise could be isolated from ego issues so that the contribution of different members is focused on the team project. And of course shared databases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations.
The Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest. The power and influence of the Internet are vastly underestimated. The very anarchy of the worldwide net's development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity, bandwidth, archive size, and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves). The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms. For example, much of the work in artificial intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance, or for the features we don't understand well enough yet to implement in hardware. A longtime dream of science fiction has been direct brain-to-computer interfaces. In fact, concrete work is being done in this area: Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve-to-silicon transducers can be made. This is an exciting near-term step toward direct communication.
Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.
Plugging into the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1
Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high-bandwidth connection to add to the paths already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won't do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present as the brain structure was setting up, as the embryo developed. That suggests:
Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might, in the long run, produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities. I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity (after all, IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendence). Alas, about all I am sure of is that these proposals should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for safety --some of the suggestions are a little scary on their face. IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built de novo might possibly be a much more benign entity than one based on fang and talon. The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.
4. Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask For Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for? That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurred would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress (leaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive) would be achievable.
But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow . . . and when it becomes great enough, and looks back . .
. what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally?
The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid. This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the artificial intelligence people. Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when self-awareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Posthuman era will be --no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.
From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it's a lot like the worst-case scenario I imagined earlier.
In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think certain notions of ethics would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says, "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."12 ¦
1. Ulam, S., "Tribute to John von Neumann," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 64. no. 3, May 1958, pp. 1-49. 2. Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," in Advances in Computers, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds., 31-88, 1965, Academic Press.
3. Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989.
4. Searle, John R., "Minds, Brains, and Programs," in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. 5. Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, Harvard University Press, 1988. 6. Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969. 7. Drexler, K. Eric, Engines of Creation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.
8. Minsky, Marvin, Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985. 9. Cairns-Smith, A. G., Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
10. Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmoss: Four Billion Years of Evolution From Our Microbial Ancestors, Summit Books, 1986. 11. Sims, Karl, "Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems," Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991. 12. Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions, Harper & Row, 1988. Other Sources
Alfvin, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, The End of Man?, Award Books, 1969.
Anderson, Poul, "Kings Who Die," If, March 1962, 8-36. Asimov, Isaac, "Runaround," Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942, 94.
Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Bear, Greg, "Blood Music," Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact, June, 1983.
Conrad, Michael, et al., "Towards an Artificial Brain," BioSystems, vol. 23, 175-218, 1989.
Dyson, Freeman, "Physics and Biology in an Open Universe," Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, 447-460, 1979.
Herbert, Frank, Dune, Berkeley Books, 1985. Kovacs, G. T. A., et al., "Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 39, no. 9, 893-902. Niven, Larry, "The Ethics of Madness," If, April 1967, 82-108. Platt, Charles, private communication.
Rasmussen, S. et al., "Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks," in Emergent Computation, Stephanie Forrest, ed., 428-449, MIT Press, 1991. Stapledon, Olaf, The Starmaker, Berkeley Books, 1961. Swanwick Michael, Vacuum Flowers, serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1986 - February 1987. Thearling, Kurt, "How We Will Build a Machine That Thinks," a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Vinge, Vernor, "Bookworm, Run!", Analog, March 1966, 8-40. Vinge, Vernor, "True Names," Binary Star Number 5, Dell, 1981. Vinge, Vernor, "First Word," Omni, January 1983, 10.
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Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
