Tag Archives: singularity

the singularity is…boring?

I’ve read a couple near- to mid-term future books this summer that you could describe as being about the singularity. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson takes place in…well, that’s not too hard to figure out. Humanity has populated most of the solar system, and people are still people but they have various augmentations to their bodies. Artificial intelligence is around although it is not clear just how intelligent it really is. The last book I read by Robinson was Red Mars, and like that book, I find that the world (really, the entire solar system) of his imagination is breathtaking and he describes it very vividly. The passages where he describes what the world is like and how it got that way are fascinating. His actual characters and plots…less fascinating. I just couldn’t get into them or care about them.

Accelerando by Charles Stross is kind of similar. He is pretty explicit that events in his story take place in the near future, say 2030-2100. Things are far more advanced and weird in Stross’s 2050 than Robinson’s 2312. Humanity spreads out to most of the solar system during the course of the book. People have radical augmentations to their minds, and artificial intelligence is a major factor. The world building is fascinating, the passages that describe how the world is changing are fascinating, and…the characters are forgettable, and the actual plot all but incomprehensible. It’s just beyond weird. I think his purpose was just to show what it could be like if things get really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Stross. He is an excellent story teller when he wants to be, and I think he has just purposely written a very different kind of book here. Maybe he is just showing off his imagination, which is astonishing. Actually, he writes several different kinds of books, and if I had to randomly read passages from them without prior knowledge of Charles Stross, I would never guess they could be the same author. I’m not sorry I’ve read Accelerando but I’m not sure I would recommend it as light reading.

Let’s digress briefly and talk about dudes named Kim. According to Wikipedia, Kim was a popular boys’ name in the U.S. as recently as the 1960s. I don’t know any men named Kim and I had no idea. And no less a journalistic powerhouse than the Omaha World-Herald has published an exhaustive article on the subject.

One strange common thread between 2012 and Accelerando is the idea of dismantling entire planets and using them as raw materials for enormous computers.

I also read Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan this summer. I didn’t love this book either. And I love Richard K. Morgan. He’s another author that likes to experiment with completely different writing styles and even genres.

One strange common thread between Accelerando and Market Forces is the idea of bringing back some form of dueling or trial by combat to settle disputes between corporations. It’s a strange coincidence – then again, it’s entirely possible these authors talk and occasionally bounce bizarre ideas off each other. Corporations are not people, they exist to compete with each other and only the strong and nimble survive. They don’t need to be treated the same as people.

Strangely enough, after not thinking about dueling for more than five seconds for several decades, I just listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on dueling. It occurred to me that maybe dueling did serve one purpose in societies where people do not trust the authorities to administer justice fairly – perhaps it breaks the cycle of revenge. Normally in human societies, if someone wrongs you, a close family member or friend, and there are no civil authorities you trust to administer justice, you are honor bound to seek vengeance. The people you seek vengeance upon will then seek vengeance in return, in an escalating cycle of violence that leads to a lot of suffering and death. Maybe dueling, violent as it was, served a purpose because if your friend or family member was killed fair and square in the duel, justice was served and you were not duty bound to do anything more about it. I’m not saying this is good – the trustworthy civil authorities are the way to go. But one dead body is better than many.

I’m also reading some Agatha Christie, just because I never have. I am liking it but not loving it.

So…hooray for podcasts and boo for books I have picked so far this summer. Oh well, some summer reading binges are more fun than others.

I am actually half-seriously trying to write a novel this year. It’s hard. I just want to get my 80,000 words written down to prove to myself that I can do it. More likely, it will renew my appreciation for the people who do it all the time and are actually good at it.

Superintelligence

I’m reading (listening to, actually) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and finding it unexpectedly very interesting. The book focuses on artificial intelligence, but early on he talks about possibilities for enhancing biological intelligence using current or near-future technology. Here’s an online paper where he talks about the same concept. Just using current in vitro fertilization technology, which creates about 10 embryos at a time, you could theoretically boost IQ by about 11 points if you pick just the smartest of the 10. (This is just a thought experiment so let’s not worry about the other 9. Of course, some otherwise reasonable people are going to have an ethical problem with this.) Do that 10 times in a row and you could theoretically boost IQ by 100 points or more. Einstein had an IQ of about 160. So you can produce a race of super-Einstein’s using current technology. Now, it would take 250 years to do this, and you would have to get everybody to do it, both to make a real impact at the societal level, and to avoid disturbing implications of those left behind.

Using a likely near-future technology called iterative embryo selection, you can theoretically extract the DNA from one or more embryos, move it to sperm and egg cells, combine them again to make a new set of embryos, and do it again. This might take a few years or months to go the 10 generations of 1-in-10, rather than 250 years. Now it’s potentially something big.

I’m a bit worried about super-villains. I don’t see any reason to think twice-as-smart humans will automatically be twice as ethical or twice as empathetic, and it might only take one really bad apple to ruin whatever utopia our newly brilliant problem solving selves come up with.

Like I said, the book is really about artificial intelligence. He believes that even humans enhanced to have, say, double the current average IQ will eventually be far outclassed by machines. It is not going to take 250 years for that to happen, so creating smarter humans in 250 years won’t make a lot of sense. If we create smarter humans in the short term, he thinks they will just use their smarts to make smarter machines even sooner.

This is just scratching the surface. It’s really a fascinating book, and somewhat like when I first read The Singularity is Near, I kind of feel like I am being let in on secrets that nobody else around me knows.

the singularity is near…in China

This article in Economist says China wants to be a

“cyber superpower”—one that, within a dozen years, will lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, semiconductors and the coming “5G” generation of mobile networks, not to mention synthetic biology and renewable energy.

This is a pretty good list of technologies of the future. Although they clearly have some potential military applications, they have many more civilian ones where everyone can gain at the same time. Personally I don’t think investing in the technologies of the future should be thought of as a zero sum game. It is more a question of whether the U.S. wants to keep up with its current peer group of the most advanced nations with the highest quality of life, a group it is still part of but in the middle of the pack and slipping toward the back, rather than out in front. If the idea of competing to lead in these technologies spurs the U.S. to action, that is okay with me. The article does have a few policy prescriptions:

Better that it should develop a broader policy to strengthen its technosystem, argues Ms Kania of CNAS. Instead of making it as closed as the Chinese one, which would seem to be Mr Trump’s preference, it needs to engage with allies such as Europe, Japan and Korea to spread open standards. It needs to build a shared digital infrastructure, such as common pools of key data for things like self-driving cars. And it needs to rediscover what has made it great in technology: investing in both basic and applied research and being an attractive destination for highly qualified immigrants (a requirement which, it must be admitted, the Trump administration is not well placed to meet).

I’ll offer a few more along these lines, if the U.S. would like to be a “cyber-superpower” a dozen years from now:

  1. Small businesses and startups innovate, and they challenge lazy established big businesses to innovate. It needs to be much, much easier to start a business anywhere in the United States. It is not necessarily taxes and regulations, but the fact that there are too many complicated, confusing taxes and regulations fragmented among local, state, and federal entities. We need to figure this one out.
  2. Economic growth requires continuous investment in human capital. People working toward an academic degree need an income, and the government needs to find a way to provide them with one. We need job skills training and retraining programs, and employers need to be heavily incentivized to train the workers they need in the skills they need. Skills-based immigration and guest worker programs can fill in the remaining gaps between the needed skills and available trained Americans.
  3. Economic growth requires continuous investment in physical capital (what economists call “plants and equipment”) and in public infrastructure. For the former, tax incentives could be the answer, however unpopular they might be. For the latter, an infrastructure bank could be the answer, where the actual creation of the money supply is done through the issuance of infrastructure bonds.
  4. Economic growth requires continuous innovation. On the private side, big tax incentives for research and development could be the answer, while on the public side, we could just turn on the taps for funding research, particularly at public universities. This has been slipping in recent decades from where it used to be.
  5. I just mentioned a number of programs that require public spending, of course. I think they would pay for themselves in the long run, but in the short run new sources of revenue would be needed, however politically unpopular. I would look to a value added tax as the international best practice which the U.S. continues to ignore, and taxes on pollution and waste which have the added benefit of making us healthier and safer.
  6. For any of these policies to have a prayer of getting through our political system, we would need a constitutional amendment making it clear that the right to free political speech applies only to human beings, not to corporations or dollars. Otherwise the United States will not be able to have these nice things.

augmented reality and Rainbow’s End

This video is meant to convey a concept of what augmented reality could look like in the not-too-distant future. Which reminded me of Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel set in the not-too-distant future. In Rainbow’s End, people have wearable computing and contact lenses that allow them to project pretty much anything they want onto the world, from basic information to, yes, strange fantastic beasts. The dark side of the novel is that weapons of mass destruction have also progressed quite a bit, and various governments and groups are fighting that behind the scenes unbeknownst to most of the people and their gadgets.