Reflections and Structures

(Fairly) Deep Future Speculation

Some time ago I finished 'reading' (listening to while walking would be more appropriate) Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. Today I came across a story called Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson who visited Google in October this year and felt like he was

entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

He continues with a beautiful story of intelligent machine evolution and puts forward a speculative argument, ending by saying:

the real sign [of the existence of true AI], I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings: "When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."

Kurzweil adds one more ingredient to this mix: our organic connection to the AI (through implants?), or its creation as an extension and expansion of our own intelligence. Not as (a) different entity(/ies), but joined together. "You will be assimilated" by the Borg, to paraphrase a popular sci-fi series, might or might not be an option. Indeed, it might or might not be an attractive prospect... hopefully we'll work that one out in time! As this evolution takes place, however, resistance will certainly be ultimately futile. Pointless. Wouldn't you want to be able to do more, know more, feel more simply by plugging something into the back of your head?

In the meantime, here's a nearer-future (though not necessarily more likely) scenario that caught my eye: Bruno Giussani's ESE (Evil Search Engine) movies post, referencing a John Battelle story in his blog, Lunch over IP. It's essentially about private information being harvested and then, at some point in the future, made public on a mass scale--all with very interesting results. Not the same thing as the scenario above, no AI included, but scaaary. There's no way I'm installing the new Google local drive indexing thingie now! :-)

posted by Ciprian Man @ Sunday, March 19, 2006