About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Coming Soon: Anything-Can-Happen Day!
Vernor Vinge refers to it as the upcoming Technological
Singularity—a point in time beyond which daily life as a human will become
completely incomprehensible and impossible to predict what it will look like.
When he published the above article in 1993, he estimated that the Singularity
was thirty years away.
He's basing his hypothesis on the blending of the
sciences as scientists get a better understanding of how things really work and
engineers and technicians get finer and finer control over manipulating matter
and energy. For instance, physics, chemistry, and biology used to be quite,
quite separate fields. Now we have people developing a grasp of the minute
quantum forces that influence the shape of folded chemical-chains called prions,
so that perhaps we can use them as tiny machines that would be both computing
components and robot workers for a self-fine-tuning materials factory....
For instance.
Vinge postulates that the real linchpin is
artificial intelligence—particularly, where/when it becomes possible for
something we construct to be smarter than us.
I just have to shrug at
that one. First of all, artificial intelligence is just as hard a term to define
as the ordinary kind. If we describe intelligence in terms of the ability to
gather, store, and process information and use that knowledge creatively and
successfully to solve problems, we're already lagging....
This means
maybe that the Singularity has already happened. At least in a couple different
places.
Okay, okay. "Multiple singularities" seems to be a bit of an
oxymoron. But
that's the way things happen. As you wind up a rubber band, you get a knot
somewhere on the string at random. Then another one, maybe near the first one,
but possibly elsewhere at random. Then you get another and another and another
until the whole rubber band is knotted. It doesn't happen everywhere all at
once. This kind of advance tends to happen first where all the money is
concentrated most densely....
Designers of turbine propellers, for
example, have lots of money from government contracts, because we're talking
about engine-parts for jet-fighters. That generates the right amount of
resource-density.
Rather than tweak designs by hand, run tests, and then
look at the performance data, they buy supercomputers and model the designs
virtually. They give the computers the math that controls the shape of the
turbine blades, the texture of the surfaces, the acceptable operating
temperatures, the pitch angles, the flexibility of the blades, the speed of
rotation, etc.—and all the kinds of rubbery cheese ordinary air turns into when
you push it up against the wall. The computers are then told to, you know, just
vary the parameters at random, maximizing thrust while minimizing materials cost
and the amount of energy it takes to make the buggers spin, and, like, beep or
something when they've found something worth testing in a wind tunnel.
We're really not far from writing software that will rewrite itself to
prevent bugs and maybe keep the hackers out—and also, while at it, redesign
turbine propellers. Hell, I wrote self-modifying code for the sheer hell of it,
back in 1990 or 1991. In Word Perfect macros. Just to prove I was bad-ass. I'm
sure it already exists in more serious applications. It's been nearly fifteen
years.
Self-modifying code tends to modify itself only in prescribed
ways—if you're sufficiently careful, anyway—but it is certainly possible to make
it work more like the genetic algorithms used in advanced propeller design.
They're referred to as "genetic" algorithms for a reason. The processes
are random and unguided. They mix multiple sets of ("attractive") working
solutions to see if they can "accidentally" make a new version that works even
better than the "parents". Humans look in on them from time to time, but largely
only out of curiosity.
Have we crossed the line yet?
Vinge
preaches about his Singularity using the same apocalyptic language that any good
Bible-thumping Southern Baptist will find familiar. "We will all be caught up.
We will all be changed!"
Fair enough. Technology changes what it means
to be human on a daily basis already.
You can already stuff the contents
of a whole library in your pocket. In ten or fifteen years, it'll be cheaper to
just give everybody a copy of everything mankind has ever known than it will be
to provide the kind of infrastructure it would take to give everybody
instantaneous access to some central archive. For a small fee, though, you'll be
able to get instantaneous updates as people make more information available,
possibly by some form of non-lightspeed-limited quantum entanglement effect.
Vinge claims that it'll get exceptionally weird when no human being
alive will know—or care—how the technology works. Except it might be hard to
point to individual humans as distinct and different from one another or from
the self-modifying technology. And whatever counts as human will be just as apt
to modify itself according to the whim of fluctuating desired performance
characteristics, with the virtual models being just as complete and responsive
as any corresponding physical entity.
If any remain.
So is there
reason to get all excited? Will the faithful all get uploaded into a virtual
heaven? Will we all be screened beforehand to determine if our hearts are pure?
Will self-driven technology advance to the point where we can re-derive the
psyches of dead people so we can be together with our departed loved-ones? Are
some of us, through weird time-irrelevant quantum effects, already in touch with
residents of our future eternal home?
Some of that seems no stranger to
me than, say, the current Federal campaign against spam would have seemed to me
twenty years ago.
In another twenty years will we be fighting
"thought-spam", bad ideas with the capability of taking form in a way that could
be detrimental to our continued functioning? Will terrorist hackers assail our
private gate-guarded heavens? Will run-amok ads for Coca-Cola® punch out known
Pepsi®-drinkers in (the virtual equivalent of) the street?
And that's
the "Singularity". Given any hour-long period, anything goes.
It'll
always be Wednesday for the Mouseketeers: "Anything-Can-Happen Day".
Is
your soul ready?
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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy. |
