"I think that my growing disinterest is a result of market saturation... this is especially true of AH. These only so much I can take it before it all starts sounding repetitive and uninteresting to me."

-- I think this may be due to the fact that a lot of writers concentrate on a few well-known historical turning-points; WWII, the Civil War, and so forth. Which in turn is due to an assumption that the reading public doesn't know enough history to follow alternates springing from other periods.

I try to avoid those... 8-).

>>"Science fiction is rather unique in being a type of
>>literature that comes with its own expiration date. Of
>>course, writing far-future fiction doesn't necessarily
>>protect you since the next edition of Nature could knock the
>>pins from beneath any speculative science you might be
>>using."
>
>-- of course, that doesn't apply to Alternate History, or to
>time-travel into the past. Which together describe most of my
>work... 8-).

Heh. I confess that I used to really love time travel and AH stories but, over the last several years, I started to find that they've been losing their appeal. About the only time travel stories I still find enjoyable are Kage Baker's (I will also confess that I haven't read any of your work, Mr. Stirling, so please don't construe this as a left-handed critique).

I think that my growing disinterest is a result of market saturation... this is especially true of AH. These only so much I can take it before it all starts sounding repetitive and uninteresting to me.

I find that I'm really enjoying the New Space Opera (Reed, Reynolds, et al). There's something about gonzo technological speculation and the high concept story-telling that's been appealing to me. I really don't care that the futures they represent are largely implausible.

"Science fiction is rather unique in being a type of literature that comes with its own expiration date. Of course, writing far-future fiction doesn't necessarily protect you since the next edition of Nature could knock the pins from beneath any speculative science you might be using."

-- of course, that doesn't apply to Alternate History, or to time-travel into the past. Which together describe most of my work... 8-).

Even time-travel into the future can finesse the obsolescence problem, if you're careful; the late Poul Anderson did a fine job on that with his Time Patrol series, particularly the later ones.

One should also try to avoid giving too much technobabble on how the "magical black box" works, as was common in the Gernsbackian era. After all, if we really knew how things work we'd be applying for patents, not writing fiction.

>>You are being pedantic. I am referring to the future as a
>>whole, not predictions of some particular aspects of the
>>future.
>
>-- oh, not much dispute there. That's why I don't write much >near-future SF.

Science fiction is rather unique in being a type of literature that comes with its own expiration date. Of course, writing far-future fiction doesn't necessarily protect you since the next edition of Nature could knock the pins from beneath any speculative science you might be using.

I think that it was Niven who once wrote a story that relied on the theory that Mercury always kept one face to the sun. If I remember correctly, the very month the story was published it was announced that Mercury does in fact rotate, albeit slowly.

Of course, I don't think that the value of SF is in trying to predict the future. My own view is that SF provides us with useful metaphors and thought experiments by which we can consider various philosophical, social (and so forth) issues. It's a lucky thing when a story does manage to accurately extrapolate some random element of the future but that's really neither the point nor the purpose.

>You are being pedantic. I am referring to the future as a whole, not predictions of some particular aspects of the future.

-- oh, not much dispute there. That's why I don't write much near-future SF.

>>Actually, since we're poking around in our brains anyway,
>>why bother simulating the sensory input of experiences we
>>find pleasurable, when we could bypass all that and go for
>>stimulating the pleasure centers of our brains directly?

>-- you can do that now, and I don't see any great demand
>for it.

I don't see a great demand for invasive surgery, especially given the difficulty of finding a qualified physician who would be willing to risk his license in order to perform it.

Give people cheap and safe surgery or another means to achieve the same effect (e.g., crack cocaine) and I'm certain you'll find the demand.

>>"I would bet that this sort of VR technology will be one of
>>the 50-years-from-now technologies for a very long time yet
>>to come."

>-- why? We've already got proof-of-concept examples of
>artificial sensory inputs;

The AI folks had all sorts of semi-impresive proofs of concept, too. The first time you see a chess playing machine, much less something like SHRDLU, it's easy to be astonished. The devil, as always, is in the details.

>the synthetic retinas, for
>example. And there's a very strong incentive to develop
>this stuff; it'll be unbelievably profitable, for starters.

So would genuine AI, a cure for cancer, anti-gravity, and an immortality serum. I won't deny that profit is a damned fine incentive. I am skeptical that it will be feasible to clear all the necessary technical hurdles before we get to the point of deeply immersive VR.

I could be wrong, of course. Hell, I hope that I am. I don't know how old you are, so I'm not sure if you expect to be around in 2050, but I'd be happy to stake $50 on the outcome. Even if I lose, I wouldn't feel bad. :-)

>>"Invariably, the actual future will confound and frustrate
>>our expectations of it."
>
>-- "a lot of the time" rather than "invariably".
>
>Eg., I can predict how many 20-year-old people will be around >in 2025 with some accuracy (barring catastrophe) because >they've already been born.

You are being pedantic. I am referring to the future as a whole, not predictions of some particular aspects of the future.

>Can you imagine a political debate with a "verdicator" light >over the candidates' heads?
>
>Or during speeches?

Actually, I can't. Politicians are the ones who write the laws and I have every confidence that they would make double-sure that there were laws to prevent that usage of the technology. Like congressional pay raises, it would be one of those rare topics to get support from all sides.

Edited by author 07-11-2005 11:12 PM
The narcotics industry in the us is worth over $2.8 billion - never mind globally. If stimulating brain centers didn't involve invasive surgery, or if having things implanted in ones brain were suddenly as commonplace as having a tooth filled, i'm sure demand for this kind of thing would explode.

>Actually, since we're poking around in our brains anyway, why bother simulating the sensory input of experiences we find pleasurable, when we could bypass all that and go for stimulating the pleasure centers of our brains directly?

-- you can do that now, and I don't see any great demand for it.

OTOH, there's a very active demand for better simulated realities; huge megabillion-dollar industries already exist.

>Exactly. You make everything you say a deceptive lie

-- "And," said the interrogator, "every time the red light comes on, an extremely painful electric current will be channeled through your body. The voltage goes up with each repetition. Now..."

8-).

I don't see how you could be deceptive about your own name. Remember, the process is subconscious. If you know your name really is Charlie Stross, then saying that won't be deceptive.

Quibbles about "that's not my real name" or "I now decide I'm named Sauruman" don't count.

And what's up with Bill Joy? Has he fallen off the techno-rejectionist wagon or something?

As our host has pointed out, the AI community has spent about 50 years being fairly bogus, and grossly underestimating the processing power required to solve interesting problems.

Many introductory AI courses still focus on A* and formal reasoning, which basically have nothing to do with intelligence. But there's a lot of good work being done, too--computer vision is slowly becoming useful; statistical databases of common sense can support modest inference engines, and Kurzweil just demoed another vision device.

Give me another 1,000-fold increase in computing power (beyond current stream processors), and make it portable, and I'll give you some pretty mind-blowing wearable computers. And the accompanying advances in robotics would basically transform the economy--a few hundred cheap teraflops dedicated to vision and physics would make manual labor almost obsolete.

...Stirling, the technology required to support a direct neural interface would presumably involve: (1) serious processing power, (2) a rough understanding of a few major brain subsystems, and (3) mixed electric/biological engineering bordering on primitive nanotech. I could see it happening (late) in my lifetime, sure, but it would be an awfully exciting lifetime--more like 1900-to-2000 than the future you described.

Edited by author 07-11-2005 05:38 PM
Actually, since we're poking around in our brains anyway, why bother simulating the sensory input of experiences we find pleasurable, when we could bypass all that and go for stimulating the pleasure centers of our brains directly?

I'm reminded of an experiment in which a rat had electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of its brains. In its cage two paddles were installed - on dispensing food, the other a jolt to the electrodes. The rat starved to death (or was about to anyway, before the lab techs intervened) tapping on that second paddle; Why eat, when eating is just a means to pleasure, if you can invoke pleasure directly?

Could this be an impediment to the singularity? Perhaps any sentient being that can modify its own brain/programming will just be hopelessly hedonistic..

Edited by author 07-11-2005 04:47 PM
"The activity in question is pre-conscious; it's a product of your intention to deceive." Exactly. You make everything you say a deceptive lie, adding double meanings to it in your own mind before you let a word out. A lie detector that gives nothing but positives is useless; if you don't actually ever tell the truth then they've got nothing to calibrate it against.

(And yes, I'm pretty sure I can tell you "my name is Charlie Stross" and convince myself I'm lying to you at the same time. Now, doing it the other way round would be a neat trick ...)

Charlie: I'd be surprised if surgically-implanted computer interfaces that you plug yourself into ever take off. (On the other hand, one that's inserted via keyhole surgery, implants itself in the right place, communicates via ultrawideband radio, and has a built-in firewall is another animal. Dunno about you, but for me any lack of a firewall would be a deal-breaker :)

-- what I had in mind was artificial sensory input -- replicating what goes into your brain through the various sensory nerves. Initially they'd be surgically implanted but eventually some other form of contact.

Essentially, you switch it on and instead of the 'real' input, you're getting either input from another location, or simulated, 'fictional' data.

It could be used for very intense teleoperation scenarios (artificial 'bodies' for soldiers, engineers in hazardous environments) and also of course for entertainment. You get to _be_ Aragorn or a Lensman or whatever.

Think of the porn potentialities, just for starters... 8-).

>Incidentally, I'm pretty certain that I can guaran-damn-tee you that I can hoax any lie detector there is, or ever will be: all I need to do is to convince myself that everything I say is a lie, and it'll be delivering so many false positives the data stream is junk.

-- I don't think so. The activity in question is pre-conscious; it's a product of your intention to deceive. There are a number of brain functions which flag a decision before you're conscious of making it, IIRC.

Incidentally, I'm pretty certain that I can guaran-damn-tee you that I can hoax any lie detector there is, or ever will be: all I need to do is to convince myself that everything I say is a lie, and it'll be delivering so many false positives the data stream is junk.

Andrew: on perceptrons, see this discussion of the controversy.

Steve: I'd be surprised if surgically-implanted computer interfaces that you plug yourself into ever take off. (On the other hand, one that's inserted via keyhole surgery, implants itself in the right place, communicates via ultrawideband radio, and has a built-in firewall is another animal. Dunno about you, but for me any lack of a firewall would be a deal-breaker :)

>I will agree that trying to make *predictions* at this point is thoroughly daft. As I stated ealier, we don't even have a basic model of what cognition *is* at this point. As I've also said, I think that the most important function that AI research has provided is to offer empirical demonstrations of what intelligence *isn't*.

-- 100% agreement there.

>I can't decide which I find more frightening: that governments are currently using pseudo-scientific equipment to "detect" lies or the prospect that they may get a lie detector that actually works as advertised.

-- well, it would certainly change the world.

Can you imagine a political debate with a "verdicator" light over the candidates' heads?

Or during speeches?

"Invariably, the actual future will confound and frustrate our expectations of it."

-- "a lot of the time" rather than "invariably".

Eg., I can predict how many 20-year-old people will be around in 2025 with some accuracy (barring catastrophe) because they've already been born.

From there, predictions diminish. Eg., Germans or Japanese might suddenly start having lots of babies, and screw up longer-term demographic predictions, but thats very unlikely and in any case would take a generation or two to have a big impact.

"I would bet that this sort of VR technology will be one of the 50-years-from-now technologies for a very long time yet to come."

-- why? We've already got proof-of-concept examples of artificial sensory inputs; the synthetic retinas, for example. And there's a very strong incentive to develop this stuff; it'll be unbelievably profitable, for starters.

>On the other hand, by 2050 I'd expect some sort of virtual
>reality with direct neural input to be common, and used for
>both work and entertainment, and to be a serious social
>problem.
>
>Interactive "feelies", in other words.

You know, Mr. Stirling, it's interesting for me to compare what you find plausible and implausible with my own estimations.

I would bet that this sort of VR technology will be one of the 50-years-from-now technologies for a very long time yet to come.

Of course, there are two primary sins that all futurists commit: over-estimating the rate of change and under-estimating the rate of change, the classic example being everyone predicting moon-bases by the year 2000 without anyone predicting that computers would become small, cheap and ubiquitous by the mid-80s.

Ultimately, futurism is just mental masturbation (not that there's anything wrong with a bit of harmless self-stimulation). Invariably, the actual future will confound and frustrate our expectations of it.

>Meanwhile, something that's actually likely to happen, and to
>be tranformative: lie detectors that really work.

I can't decide which I find more frightening: that governments are currently using pseudo-scientific equipment to "detect" lies or the prospect that they may get a lie detector that actually works as advertised.

>>I don't really think that the emotional motivations are
>>relevant to the technological question

> they are relevant to people's appraisal of technological
> possibilities; the will to believe is a powerful force.

Again, that's not something that particular concerns me. If you want my own appraisal, a singularity, if it is to happen, will most likely happen well outside of my lifetime.

>Hence, as Charlie pointed out, the deranged over-optimism
>of AI types, something that has been with us for 50 years
>and more now.

I don't think that it's deranged as much as an example of betting on simplistic models of the mind. The AI folks were universally hopeful that the simpler models of cognition -- the sort that could be modeled top-down without much effort -- would be the right ones because, frankly, it would have made their jobs much easier.

I will agree that trying to make *predictions* at this point is thoroughly daft. As I stated ealier, we don't even have a basic model of what cognition *is* at this point. As I've also said, I think that the most important function that AI research has provided is to offer empirical demonstrations of what intelligence *isn't*.

>The question of indefinite life extension is, I think, another empirical question.

> it _could be_ an empirical question.

It absolutely is an empirical question regardless of how many soft-headed optimists there are out there who are approaching it with all the intellectual rigor of alchemists searching for the philosophers stone.

>In fact, take a look at all the geeks who firmly believe
>they're going to bre "uploaded" to immortality, which is
>about as likely as the Second Coming. Or the ones having
>themselves or their heads frozen.

/shrug

I'm not in that crowd, nor am I particularly interested in their wishful thoughts. Never the less, I see nothing in our current knowledge of physical law that would, a priori, preclude technologies that allow for such to *eventually* arise. Again, I would be very seriously surprised if such arrived on the scene during my lifetime.

>You would not believe the hostility that results when you >debunk 'em.

Sure I'd believe it. I would guess that you would have found similar hostility from those persuing demonstrably idiotic ideas concerning powered flight in the run-up to Kitty Hawk.

>Do the laws of nature forbid us from using technology to
>become something more than merely human?

>-- no; but then, they don't forbid us from terraforming
>Mars, or building a Dyson Sphere, either.

I rather suspect that they do forbid the latter, but I won't quibble.

>I'm not holding my breath.

I apologize if I gave the impression that I was.

>The madness of the Singularity types is that they expect
>all this stuff to happen in time to rescue _them_ from the
>common ills of humanity.

Sure. I agree that there's a lot of unmerited optimism. If that's your complaint, then I have no disagreement. My impression was that you felt that the entire topic was concerned with a technological impossibility and that you felt that the emotive reactions of some towards the question disproved the technical aspect of the question.

>Come now. "Marooned in Realtime" was a fiction.

>-- true, but my impression is that it's very much what
>Vinge expects and strongly desires. He pulls back from it,
>not being a fool, but the magnetic attraction always pulls
>him around again.

Unless Vinge does us the service of dropping into the discussion to englighten us, I don't think that there's much use in speculating on his true beliefs. Suffice it to say that what I've read and heard in various interviews doesn't lead me to agree with your assessment. We will have to agree to disagree on this point.

Meanwhile, something that's actually likely to happen, and to be tranformative: lie detectors that really work.

"Intent to deceive" seems, according to some research I've seen, to involve specific and detectable brain activities.

So, imagine a world a decade hence in which you can sit someone down under a light. You ask questions. If he/she lies, the light turns red. No fallible tension clues; this is right from the brain and can't be controlled or faked. Th subject has to tell you the truth, or at least what they think is the truth.

H. Beam Piper had a machine like that in one of his stories; he called it a "verdicator". In the scene I'm thinking of, the interrogator was standing by holding a pistol by the barrel. He explained that every time the light turned red, he was going to hammer the subject's teeth in...

>I don't really think that the emotional motivations are relevant to the technological question

-- they are relevant to people's appraisal of technological possibilities; the will to believe is a powerful force.

Hence, as Charlie pointed out, the deranged over-optimism of AI types, something that has been with us for 50 years and more now.

>The question of indefinite life extension is, I think, another empirical question.

-- it _could be_ an empirical question. In fact, take a look at all the geeks who firmly believe they're going to bre "uploaded" to immortality, which is about as likely as the Second Coming. Or the ones having themselves or their heads frozen.

You would not believe the hostility that results when you debunk 'em.

>Do the laws of nature forbid us from using technology to become something more than merely human?

-- no; but then, they don't forbid us from terraforming Mars, or building a Dyson Sphere, either. I'm not holding my breath.

The madness of the Singularity types is that they expect all this stuff to happen in time to rescue _them_ from the common ills of humanity.

>Come now. "Marooned in Realtime" was a fiction.

-- true, but my impression is that it's very much what Vinge expects and strongly desires. He pulls back from it, not being a fool, but the magnetic attraction always pulls him around again.

>>Technology is about allowing us to achieve our wishes.

>-- but it's not about "becoming as Gods", etc.

I would absolutely say that it has allowed us to become more god-like! We now have the ability to communicate over vast distances instantaneously, to command tremendous forces, to forestall death to the point where we've had to carefully redefine it, and so forth and so on.

Traditional godhood has often struck me as being nothing more than a reflection of what humans would like to be like and which we aren't. I think that the driving force of technology is, in fact, enabling us to approach those ideal images of ourselves.

>Which, you must admit, seems to be the emotional driving
>force behind a lot of Singularity-worship.

I don't really think that the emotional motivations are relevant to the technological question any more than the mythical motivations of those who persued the dream of flight were relevant to the empirical question of whether or not it is possible for us to fly.

>People who just can't face personal extinction and the
>ontological emptiness of the universe.

The question of indefinite life extension is, I think, another empirical question. Are there physical constraints that would prevent us from achieving this? I'll be the first to admit that I don't know, but I would be rather surprised if there were.

As for the ontological emptiness of the universe, I don't think that the idea of transcending our base humanity is going to address that question whether or not that transcendance is feasible.

> It makes my skeptic's nose twitch. Goshwow always does.

I understand that. Skepticism is a healthy thing. I certainly am not inclined to swallow every futuristic speculation wholesale. That said, I think that the primary questions are ones of physical law. Do the laws of nature forbid us from using technology to become something more than merely human? I haven't heard a good empirical argument that says that it can't.

>>I've been following the idea of a singularity from the
>>mid-eighties. Aside from Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime"
>>conception (which is quasi-mystic) of a singularity, I
>>don't think that many people really imagine a singularity
>>as being like that.

>-- well, since Vinge _invented_ the concept...

Come now. "Marooned in Realtime" was a fiction. I think that Vinge will be the first to assert that it wasn't intended to be a blueprint of the singularity or a prediction of how it would happen (should it happen). If you read Vinge's writings, he demonstrates a respectible skepticism towards his own ideas and has offered a list of conditions which might prevent a singularity.

As for the conception in Realtime, I called it *quasi*-mystic for a reason. In it, humanity has disappeared from the scene. Vinge does not assert that humanity has literally transcended to some other plane of existence. The disappearance is simply a literary metaphore by which he indicates the fundamental unknowability of the singularity. I doubt that it's intended to be taken as a literal prediction.

>>In fact, I would say that the advent of writing is a good
>>example of intelligence amplification that's already
>>happened.

>-- oh, come now. That's like saying cars enable us to run
> faster.

They allow us to achieve a greater velocity, which is much the same thing.

Do you disagree that someone with access to the tools of literacy is better able to organize and utilize their intelligence? Again, I offer the example of a mathematician with a pencil and a ream of paper vs. one who insists on keeping everything in his own head.

>Of course. However, again, if I don't have to hold all that
>information in my head all at once, it's much easier for me
>to make better use of that grey matter.

>-- not really true. You're talking about different brain
>functions.

Intelligence spans a variety of brain functions, including memory. Even if literacy simply allowed us to enhance our capacity to retain information (by moving some of it outside of ourselves) this would represent a *quantitative* improvement to our intelligence. Please do understand that I have made no assertions about qualitative improvements.

Be that as it may, being able to use artificial means to leverage our intelligence is no small thing. You might argue that a climatologist who uses supercomputers to perform his modeling is no more intelligent than one who doesn't, but his effective ability to consider alternative models is better than a climatologist who is only relying on his naked intelligence.

To use your running anaology, you might well insist that the former isn't *really* thinking and faster or deeper than his collegue, but he's still getting to his destination faster and more efficiently.

Again, the central hypothesis of the singularity, per Vinge, is that once a truely greater-than-human intelligence arrives on the scene, history as we know it ends because that even will lead to a positive-feedback explosion of intellgience with the end result something utterly beyond human conception. The fundamental question is whether or not human being can ever produce such an initial intelligence.

Even without structurally altering our brains, it is not obviously ridiculous to suppose that we could *quantitatively* leverage our native intelligence enough to achieve the creation of something that is *qualitatively* more intelligent.

Will it happen? Well, I think that seriously trying to predicting the future beyond a very narrow distance is a genuinely superstitious act, particularly when we don't understand all the parameters to the question. On this subject, I remain agnostic.

On the other hand, by 2050 I'd expect some sort of virtual reality with direct neural input to be common, and used for both work and entertainment, and to be a serious social problem.

Interactive "feelies", in other words.

So all in all, technology is _not_ on an ever-accelerating curve.

In 2050, I expect life to be about as different from today as today is different from 1953, when I was born.

That is, the difference will be substantial, but less overall than that between 1905 and 1955, and less than that between 1855 and 1905.

People will still be people, not IA or uploaded or nanotech Gods.

They'll drive cars, fly in commercial jet aircraft at about the same speed, and so forth. Most will live in cities and work in offices or equivalent, but far fewer in factories or on farms than today. Most will believe in some religion or other, and be under the political authority of sovereign states. Medical care will be much better than it is now, and lifespans somewhat longer. Computers and computer-like devices will be more powerful than now, and much, much more ubiquitous, but although your refrigerator may be able to tell you when the lettuce is going off, it'll still be a refrigerator.

There will be more people than there are now, but not a whole lot more, and the world population will probably be dropping.

>Technology is about allowing us to achieve our wishes.

-- but it's not about "becoming as Gods", etc. Which, you must admit, seems to be the emotional driving force behind a lot of Singularity-worship. People who just can't face personal extinction and the ontological emptiness of the universe.

It makes my skeptic's nose twitch. Goshwow always does.

>I've been following the idea of a singularity from the mid-eighties. Aside from Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" conception (which is quasi-mystic) of a singularity, I don't think that many people really imagine a singularity as being like that.

-- well, since Vinge _invented_ the concept...

>In fact, I would say that the advent of writing is a good example of intelligence amplification that's already happened.

-- oh, come now. That's like saying cars enable us to run faster.

>Of course. However, again, if I don't have to hold all that information in my head all at once, it's much easier for me to make better use of that grey matter.

-- not really true. You're talking about different brain functions.

"his is so far away from the original 1950s AI program that it ain't funny -- but at least it's happening. (Some day I ought to do an alt-hist story in which Minsky's devastating demolition of the perceptron -- which stalled neural network research for a quarter of a century -- didn't happen.)"

I'd be interested in knowing more about this. Do you have a link that you could toss me?

>>I wouldn't be surprised if there were some radical
>>approaches to increasing the effectiveness of our
>>programming that are yet to be discovered.

>quite true, but not, I think, relevant to the "singularity"
>thing.

I don't know if it is or isn't. I am merely pointing out that the even as we're approaching some rather daunting hardware limitations with our computers, we'll still have a ways to go, yet, before we have really plumbed the limits of their capabilities.

>To be absolutely frank, I think the whole "singularity" >phenomenon is merely a secularized version of the old >religious longing for transcendence; transcendence of >mortality or of material existance and its limitations.

Bah. I've heard this claim made again and again and I don't buy it. Technology is about allowing us to achieve our wishes. When people say that the idea of the singularity is bound up in religious longing I think that you could just as easily say similar things about our desire to fly. Prior to our actual achievment of flight, one could have said that those persuing flight were just chasing after an Icarus myth, or some such.

Mind you, anyone who supposes that the singularity will allow for the violation of physical law is being slope-headed and I don't expend much patience on them, but I find that most of those theorizing about it are fairly commited to a materialistic world-view.

The central theme of the singularity is that there will be an explosion of intelligence. While I think that a lot of those hoping for a singuality are hyper-optimistic about what it will take to get a self-amplifying intelligence off the ground, I don't see any reason to suppose that it's impossible baring the conjecture that we're simply not smart enough to get to first base.

>The desire to "break on through to the other side", as the >song had it. But there _is_ no other side.

I've been following the idea of a singularity from the mid-eighties. Aside from Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" conception (which is quasi-mystic) of a singularity, I don't think that many people really imagine a singularity as being like that.

>>that, perhaps, a more plausible way to achieve this would >>be via intelligence amplification (IA) rather than via AI.

>-- the problem with that is, first, that once again we
>don't understand the mind. How can we amplify it if we
>don't know what it _is_?

You don't always have to fully understand a phenomenon to improve it. Humans were building and using some rather sophisticated ballistic weaponry well before we have a good understanding of the physics.

In fact, I would say that the advent of writing is a good example of intelligence amplification that's already happened. It allows us to offload our thoughts into external storage and to more efficiently share those thoughts with one another. A mathematician with pen and paper is able to perform much more complex operations (and achieve deeper realizations) than an illiterate mathematician whose forced to keep everything in his own head.

>Second, there's a good deal of epistemological and other
>confusions among those talking about it.

I'd say that's true of nearly any topic.

>Eg., there's a perennial favorite, a neural link to access >vast stores of information.
>
>If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize that >this is only marginally superior to the Web, or for that >matter to having a big reference library.

I would agree that the degree of improvement is less than some imagine. On the other hand, efficiency of access to information does result in a quantitative (if not qualitative) improvement to cognition. If I can avoid spending five hours tracking down a tidbit of info, I have five hours to not only address the problem I'm trying to solve, but additional time to think up and address new problems.

>If I have a math textbook, I can look up how to do matrix
>algebra. But until I _understand_ it, it's so much
>gobbledygook to me. Information still has to be processed
>through my consciousness before it's useful to me.

Of course. However, again, if I don't have to hold all that information in my head all at once, it's much easier for me to make better use of that grey matter.

I'm a database administrator. My specialty is something called SQL Server (a Microsoft product). I seriously doubt if anyone on the planet has a full and complete understanding of its capabilities. However, no professional DBA needs to. You need to know enough to understand the core functionality and to understand the documentation but the majority of knowledge of the product is bound up in something called Books Online. Because of BOL, I don't *have* to know how to have the specifics of restoring the Master database comitted to memory. So long as I know how to find that information in BOL (and know enough to interpret it), I can confidently perform the action when I need to.

BOL makes me a smarter DBA. It's a qualified smartness, to be sure. BOL won't make me more creative, and any new info will still have to be integrated into my actual brain, but it still is a kind of external amplification of my capabilities.

>Eg., I understand the Hundred Years War fairly well. That
>isn't because I've got copies of several good books on it
>sitting near me, though I do, and I use them to look up
>details. It's because I _read_ the books, discussed them >with people who knew the material, and thought about them.

Of course. However, even though you've read them, I'm fairly certain that you have only memorized a fraction of their material. It's not necessary. You can concentrate on integrating the broad details of the 100YW while keep the books as references for the lower level details.

>To give me "instant expertise", an IA system would have to
>simulate the results of this process.

I don't think that one needs instant expertise in order to claim IA. One simply needs a system that allows you to think faster and more efficiently. I would also say that anything that improves our ability to share and distribute intelligence serves that goal (consider the fact that no one really knows, or needs to know, every bit of knowledge required to make a modern jet aircraft).

>genetic engineering, etc).

>-- now, genetic engineering is just getting going. From
>that, I expect really dramatic results over the next
>generation or three.

Perhaps. I think that GE is as subject to hype as any other technology.

On a related topic, the concept of "post-scarcity" economics is based on a similar misunderstanding.

"Scarcity" is a _relative_ term.

We're already "post-scarcity" in the modern West, in the sense that you can have a perfectly acceptable living standard -- better than what our grandparents usually had -- without much effort. In many places without any effort at all.

But of course 'sufficiency' is a moving target. We don't want what our grandparents had; we want what's available to us, and so we go on chasing the carrot, hoofs churning and teeth snapping.

This process can and probably will continue indefinitely. Wants are infinitely extensible.

There are two examples which I like to quote when people talk about historical discontinuities.

The first is a letter from about 1,800 BCE, discarded unopened back in the Bronze Age and discovered by archaeologists in Mesopotamia. They eagerly broke the clay envelope and found that the text began:

"This is the third letter I have written you about the silver you owe me for the sheep..."

The other occurred in central New Guinea, where one tribe previously unexposed to Western civilization was first contacted by a light aircraft. These people were so primitive that they were still making and using polished stone tools -- they hadn't even gotten metal implements by hand-to-hand trade.

A day after the plane landed, the 'big man' tried to use an offer of pigs to get the pilot to fly over a neighboring village so he could drop rocks on their heads to settle a longstanding feud.

From the Neolithic to Strategic Bombing in 24 hours...

>Having said which, there are some promising signs out there -- but the developments that interest me are coming from the neurobiology community.

-- well, sure. It's logical that if you want to know about minds, you should investigate the structures which actually produce them (brains) rather than those which never have and probably never will (computers).

It's important to remember that comparing the brain to a computer is a _metaphor_, not a description.

In the 18th century they compared minds to mechanical clocks. In our time, we compare them to computers. But minds (or even brains) are neither clocks nor computers, and literalizing the metaphor, while a staple of SF, is a really dodgy thing in out here on Planet Reality.

Since the brain is a material object, I expect that _eventually_ we'll be able to duplicate its functions.

(Unless we're simply not smart enough, the way a gorilla isn't smart enough to understand a Coke machine, though it can learn to use one.)

However, I also strongly suspect that when we learn to duplicate brains, we'll find that doing so is largely pointless in the larger sense. Useful for some things, but not world-transforming; less significant overall than the IC engine.

>For the most part AI in the comp. sci. field is enthusiastically barking up a variety of wrong trees, or reinventing the wheel.

-- agreement; see above.

>Meanwhile, we've got prototype artificial retinas undergoing human trials

-- one thing I do expect to see is a lot of "telepresence" stuff hooked into our neural circuitry one way or another.

Artificial vision will start by restoring sight to the blind. And hearing; so much for "Deaf Culture", one of the more memorably silly concepts of the past generation.

But then it'll get better than the natural equipment, and you'll be able to plug into machines that convey your senses somewhere else.

I suspect that military applications will drive the field. Soldiers will remotely-operate weapons and vehicles. That's already started, at the screen-and-joystick level, and it will advance quickly.


>i.e. a proof of concept commercial prototype will be in the 3-5Gw range, and there's no such thing as a cheap 3Gw power station.

-- no, but the larger power-plant complexes have been in that general range for some time now. The basic reason, as you say, is that the necessary research is expensive.

Myself, I think it would be worth financing on a shorter timeframe just to watch the Saudi princes' faces.

>I suspect a Manhattan-style emergency push would get us working fusion reactors inside 5 years, 10 at the outside ... if anyone had $100Bn to throw at it.

-- probably right.

>I wouldn't be surprised if there were some radical approaches to increasing the effectiveness of our programming that are yet to be discovered.

-- quite true, but not, I think, relevant to the "singularity" thing.

To be absolutely frank, I think the whole "singularity" phenomenon is merely a secularized version of the old religious longing for transcendence; transcendence of mortality or of material existance and its limitations.

The desire to "break on through to the other side", as the song had it.

But there _is_ no other side.

I don't find the religious version either attractive or convincing, and it's no more so dressed up in a lab coat rather than a cope and mitre. Sort of like a SFnal version of "intelligent design".

>that, perhaps, a more plausible way to achieve this would be via intelligence amplification (IA) rather than via AI.

-- the problem with that is, first, that once again we don't understand the mind. How can we amplify it if we don't know what it _is_?

Second, there's a good deal of epistemological and other confusions among those talking about it.

Eg., there's a perennial favorite, a neural link to access vast stores of information.

If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize that this is only marginally superior to the Web, or for that matter to having a big reference library.

If I have a math textbook, I can look up how to do matrix algebra. But until I _understand_ it, it's so much gobbledygook to me. Information still has to be processed through my consciousness before it's useful to me.

Eg., I understand the Hundred Years War fairly well. That isn't because I've got copies of several good books on it sitting near me, though I do, and I use them to look up details. It's because I _read_ the books, discussed them with people who knew the material, and thought about them.

To give me "instant expertise", an IA system would have to simulate the results of this process.

>genetic engineering, etc).

-- now, genetic engineering is just getting going. From that, I expect really dramatic results over the next generation or three.

> Now, perhaps computers will be the first exception to
>this rule. It's not inconceivable. But it isn't, on
>the record, likely.

I agree. Computers, at least the sort made from integrated circuits, are quickly approaching that point. There are some speculative technologies that offer the possibility of going beyond IC limitations (e.g., spintronics), but I don't think any of them are going to be able to jump into the breach for awhile.

I do suspect that there will be future computer revolutions. Unlike guns and planes, there are a lot of potential ways to make a computer which offers the possibility of a series of dicontinuous computational revolutions spread out over time, each with their own S-curves.

We also need be careful to distinguish maturity of hardware from maturity of software. Even if computer technology stopped dead in its tracks today, there's still a lot of unexplored design space for software. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some radical approaches to increasing the effectiveness of our programming that are yet to be discovered.

I think that Singularitarians have staked far too much on Moores Law. I find it interesting that Vinge, himself, didn't. I think that Vinge was correct in supposing that the real catalyst of a singularity, if one should occur, would be the production of greater than human intelligence. Vinge's paper on the subject suggested that, perhaps, a more plausible way to achieve this would be via intelligence amplification (IA) rather than via AI. I, personally, find that a compelling hypothesis, particularly since there's a number of unexplored avenues by which that could be approached (mind/machine integration, genetic engineering, etc).

I think the basic problem is that we don't know how our brains produce our minds.

And worse than that, we don't have any convincing explanation of what our minds _are_.

Our descriptions of our minds are at a crudely prescientific level, rather like Aristotelian physics. We do have some knowledge of the biology of the brain, but not at anything like the level needed.

Yes, yes, and yes again.

Having said which, there are some promising signs out there -- but the developments that interest me are coming from the neurobiology community. For the most part AI in the comp. sci. field is enthusiastically barking up a variety of wrong trees, or reinventing the wheel. Meanwhile, we've got prototype artificial retinas undergoing human trials, we've reverse-engineered bits of lobster digestive tract control circuitry (and other odds and ends), IBM are trying a brute-force approach at simulating real chunks of human neocortex to get a feel for how they work, and so on.

This is so far away from the original 1950s AI program that it ain't funny -- but at least it's happening. (Some day I ought to do an alt-hist story in which Minsky's devastating demolition of the perceptron -- which stalled neural network research for a quarter of a century -- didn't happen.) Meanwhile I'm going to stick with the quote I stole from Edsger Djikstra for "Accelerando": "the question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

Oh yeah, fusion: I don't buy your analogy. Fusion is 25 years away because we know how to do it, and we can make a stable tokamak; but it'll take 600Mw just to keep the bloody thing burning, which means a minimal power-production reactor will have to be scaled accordingly, i.e. a proof of concept commercial prototype will be in the 3-5Gw range, and there's no such thing as a cheap 3Gw power station. So it takes decades to put the financial infrastructure in place to spread the risk of building a wholly new and untried reactor that has to be 3-5 times the scale of a large PWR. I suspect a Manhattan-style emergency push would get us working fusion reactors inside 5 years, 10 at the outside ... if anyone had $100Bn to throw at it.

Charlie: I think the basic problem is that we don't know how our brains produce our minds.

And worse than that, we don't have any convincing explanation of what our minds _are_.

Our descriptions of our minds are at a crudely prescientific level, rather like Aristotelian physics. We do have some knowledge of the biology of the brain, but not at anything like the level needed.

Until we do really understand how our minds work, trying to duplicate them (or their more complex capacities) with computer simulations is pretty damned futile.

A metaphor I like compares it to filling an empty swimming pool with ping-pong-ball models of water molecules and then jumping in. That won't get you wet or let you swim.

We understand fusion reactions far better than we understand our minds, yet we're still struggling to build a working fusion reactor -- and success is still the proverbial 25 years away.

I think we ought to start by admitting that this problem is _very, very hard_ -- like controlled fusion, only much more so.

It's not comparable to our prototype reactors; it's comparable to someone in the 1820's trying to build a fusion reactor, or even just a bomb.

The whole field is probably a distraction from what we should be doing, which is trying to understand the basic phenomenon involved in consciousness. You have to walk before you can run.

For starters, comparing the brain to a computer is a metaphor, not a one-to-one mapping with objective reality. Strong AI is a literalization of a metaphor, which is fine for SF but a really bad idea in the outside world.

Eric:

>Accelerando. Yum. Must buy copies for friends...

-- I'd second the notion.

>Stirling, that's an interesting analogy. But transportation hit an energy wall, I think--technologically, we could go faster, but who wants to pay $8,000 for Concorde tickets to save four hours on a Paris-to-New-York flight? Further improvements in transportation speed would need to be accompanied by declining fuel prices.

-- that's sort of the point; but we didn't just reach an energy wall, we hit a whole _series_ of walls in flight technology. Materials, cooling, steep upward curves in the energy cost of each additional mph, and so forth. The radical increases in capacity (and in power-to-weight ratios in engines, airframes, etc.) simply stopped dead between the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties.

Since then we've been making incremental improvements, but nothing even remotely comparable to the introduction of the all-metal stressed-skin fuselage or the jet turbine.

The same thing happened in the other technologies I mentioned. Eg., small arms underwent really revolutionary changes between the 1830's and the 1890's.

Nations anxiously watched the new rifles their rivals produced, and leapt to copy their features; the advantages were potentially decisive.

1830-1890 is the span between the round lead ball, muzzle-loaded with black powder and ignited by a flintlock (Brown Bess)and weapons with modern effective ranges and muzzle velocities in the 2000 fps+ range. By the 1890's, the latest small arms were breech-loaders using box-magazine or belt feed, small-bore jacketed ammunition fixed in centerfire-primed brass cartridges filled with smokeless nitro powder, etc.

Just as early-21st-century weapons are.

Since the 1890's, no fundamental changes -- despite years and years of effort, we haven't got one single issue weapon using caseless ammunition, for example. A good armory workshop in 1895 could duplicate a 2005 assault rifle or machine gun without much trouble, given an example to reverse-engineer.

It would be somewhat heavier and somewhat less reliable, and if it had a plastic stock they'd have to substitute wood, but it would be the same basic animal and perfectly useable. The Enfield or Mauser engineer of the 1890's presented with an AK-47 would understand it instantly.

Going an equivalent distance back from 1895, and armory in 1785 couldn't even begin to make a Lee-Enflield or a Maxim machine gun. They probably couldn't even figure out how the ammunition worked, much less duplicate it; the composition of the metals and the fabrication methods would be similarly beyond them.

Now, perhaps computers will be the first exception to this rule. It's not inconceivable. But it isn't, on the record, likely.

In any case, the above points out that there hasn't been an ever-increasing rate of technological change.

Instead, separate technologies have gone through spurts of rapid change and have then reached a plateau of stability.

In fact, you can make a strong argument that technological change was more rapid and had a greater impact on society in 1900-1960 than in 1960-2005. Certainly the life of an average American or European underwent greater changes between 1900 and 1960 than between 1960 and now.

Charlie, it seems to me that your two questions answer each other. Or at least represent opposite poles. One lot of disputantes want to simulate down to the molecular level because the other lot insist that the secret of human consciousness resides there. (And when the AI advocates say, okay, that should be possible in another (quick calculation) 25 years, the priests of human consciousness try to retrench and proclaim that consciousness depends on spooky quantum effects in the microtubules, a la Penrose.)

For myself, layman that I am, I feel that it should be possible in principle to create an AI without directly simulating neurons at all, once the neurobiologists have a better handle on how neurons build the effects that build intelligence. But it will probably be easier to model neurons first. When they've modelled a few seaslugs' and nematodes' nervous systems we might have an idea of how closely that analog-ish response needs to be modeled before it visibly impacts on the workings of a brain simulation. 32-bit? 8-bit? 1-bit?

I say "intelligence" above, rather than "consciousness", because it's my feeling that consciousness is an emergent property of having a load of parallel processes working together. A system capable of doing all the things that we would expect an AI to do, would of necessity have a consciousness, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. A conscious machine will not be created by trying to directly program consciousness; it will come from trying to program a machine to walk and chew gum (and monitor its energy usage and perform low-level maintenance routines and think about a problem and avoid mashing puny humans underfoot and...) at the same time.

Well, consciousness is a tricky word. Call it self-awareness, or a sense of qualia, or what have you. Of course, I think that this underscores my point that we don't have a good theory of the subject -- we can't even properly define our terms! I also certainly didn't mean to imply that it's, a priori, a human-only trait.

I would like to clarify that I am certainly not presupposing that it must be accurate down to the molecular level. My view is that we don't know how closely a self-aware "simulation" of a human mind has to resemble the actual wet stuff that our own brains use. I suspect that there's a lot of non-optional complexity that would need to be accounted for, and that not all of it has to due with simulating neural architecture, per se (the whole subject of how the brain interacts with our glandular system comes to mind), but I also suspect that there is a lot of room for simplification. I doubt that we need to be running quantum-accurate simulations of virtual neurons (but I could be wrong).

I really doubt that the brain is digital. The question is how we can map minds (or something sufficiently mind-like to satisfy our desires) to a digital environment.

I do agree that there is a big disconnect between the two communities. A huge one. Right now, I think that the main contribution to the subject, from the AI camp, has been to help us pin down what intelligence isn't rather than what it is. I think that's a useful contribution, but not quite what most dedicated AI theorists really want.

I would be curious to know what your particular doubts about the existence of consciousness are and why you think that it's a red herring. I'm particular interested to know why you suspect that the goal won't be desirable. Could you please elucidate?

Andrew: I've yet to hear a convincing argument that consciousness exists, and/or that consciousness is an exclusive human trait to which no other organism has access. I suspect the pursuit of consciousness is actually a red herring on the road to AI, in much the same way that the pursuit of the Alchemists' Stone was a red herring on the road to the transmutation of lead into gold, and indeed, that the goal itself will (once we understand how it could be done) will prove about as desirable -- and about as closely related to useful activities.

Here's a question to chew over: why do discussions of digital consciousness so often to presuppose that any simulation of the human brain needs to be accurate down to the molecular level? Or that the brain is a digital instrument (when fairly clear cytological evidence says that it's a neural network with components which switch but have a rather analog-ish response curve)? There seems to me to be a huge disconnect between the neurobiology community and the AI folks, to such an extent that many of the AI folks need to do some remedial biology coursework before they open their mouths and start talking about the pros and cons of brain-level simulation.

I'm late to the thread but I've been reading Carlos Yu's comments. First and foremost, I'd like to congratulate him on his clear reasoning.

I think that the real problem is that we don't really have a good theory of consciousness, yet. All we know is that there is a type of structure -- the human brain -- which produces it. We really don't have a good understanding of how it produces it nor what the minimal constraints for producing it are.

I think that it's the minimal constraints that are really the question. If producing digital consciousness requires a molecular (or atomic) level simulation of a human brain, then we probably won't see it within our lifetimes, if ever. If, however, the hardware is just natures kludged and inefficient solution, perhaps we will find that it's reproducable with conceivable technologies.

To use an admitedly simplistic analogy, if I wanted to make a pump and my only knowledge of pumps were based on the human heart, lacking an understanding of what makes a pump pump, I might despair of ever making one. Paradoxically, the more I know about hearts, the more I might think that pump-building was impossible.

Once I managed to develop a theory of pumps, however, I would be able to see that pumps are simple even if the heart is complex.

Now, before anyone starts yelling at me, I recognize that there's a lot of holes here. For one, a better analogy wouldn't be creating a pump but creating an artificial heart (which is significantly more challenging); however, I think that the point stands. Having a good theory of pumps is critical to understanding how difficult the problem actually is. In like manner, having a good theory of consciousness is necessary to know whether the problem of reproducing awareness is a tractable problem. Dennett to the contrary, I don't believe that we have such a theory or are likely to for awhile.

That, alone, makes me think that there's not going to be a singularity in my future (except, perhaps, via the Intelligence Augmenting path that Vinge sketched out). For the larger question, though, I don't think we have enough information nor shall we for some time.

Goodness. I really didn't intend that to be the conversation-killer it turned out to be....

I would just like to mention the fact that while reading Accelerando (about 3/4 done now, sadly) I distinctly felt my brain reboot yesterday.

Interesting discussion. I can't add much... only that, as a former extremely hardcore gamer (I still game but my wrists don't handle it well) I'm glad that I could do my part driving the microprocessor revolution.

Okay, this is a little frustrating. I already know about this discrepancy in performance. I AM NOT ASKING, WHY DON'T THEY JUST USE MORE PROCESSORS?

What I'm trying to suggest is that this discrepancy might be showing up in the price data: that the price decline of older components is due to buyers and sellers factoring it in, rather than the marketing department of Intel coming up with a magic formula for last year's models.

It strikes me as an easy concept to understand. I guess not though.

N-processor systems do not typically produce N times the throughput of a single processor. Typically when I was benchmarking well-written multithreaded applications a dual-CPU box would run a real-world application about 50% faster than the same app run on the same box but with one CPU disabled. There are many reasons for this discrepancy but they tend to coalesce around the idea that a single CPU is tightly coupled where multiple CPUs have communications latencies.

 Throwing CPUs at a problem is a bit like throwing programmers at a project to make it happen faster. It seems like a good idea, but... As Andrew says some tasks are naturally susceptible to parallelism, some aren't. Anything involving direct human interaction tends not to be in the first category and human interaction is Big Business these days.

Edited by author 06-21-2005 08:26 PM
Which is why AMD as a genuine competitor to Intel producing x86 architecture CPU's made a huge difference to Intel. Generation times for the introduction of new processors moved from 2-3 years to 18 months, prices became competitive rather than 'what the market will bear'. We have all benefited from this...

On the one vs many processor argument, it really depends on what sort of problem you want to tackle...some suit multi-processor systems - cf Beowulf hugely multi-processor arrays running particular program codes. Others such as typical mixed individual user loads are better executed by high-power, single cpu systems...horses for courses,

-- Andrew

I think we're talking past each other, because although we're in agreement, your response is framed as an objection.

 Carlos he say: "Here's the problem: if two chips each with half the computing power of the cutting edge cost less total than the cutting edge chip, why not buy the two cheaper chips?"

 Problems. There's the physical interconnect between the two chips, the sharing of physical resources between the two chips, message passing and process locking, synchronisation, error handling, power consumption, expensive PCB real estate, cooling...

 By the time a chip design has capability Y, they've long ago stopped making all the previous models with capability Y/2 because the production lines are either obsolete or being used to make the new version. The sticker price for (say) CPUs does not reflect the manufacturing or design cost, it represents the best price the Marketing division reckons will maximise the financial return over the chip's lifespan, with price reduction kickers every three months or less as new models replace the older designs as the top of the range devices.

 An old story, probably apochryphal, is that an Intel engineer was asked how much it cost to produce the 8080 processor.

 "Well, the first one off the line cost us ten million dollars. The second one cost fifty cents."

 Intel didn't sell the 8080 based on manufacturing cost plus a markup, they sold it at the price that would make them the most money.

Here's the problem: if two chips each with half the computing power of the cutting edge cost less total than the cutting edge chip, why not buy the two cheaper chips?

Aizcorbe and Kortum hypothesize that consumer heterogeneity drives the more rapid price decline. (Their hypothesis is only six months old; they don't develop the idea any further.)

I look at the price difference and go, hm, there seems to be an arbitrage opportunity here! But no one has taken advantage of it... so perhaps there are technological reasons why it can't be taken advantage of.

Does that make sense?

The semiconductor industry is tricky to understand, there
is a constant pressing forward in terms of process technology
to generate more capable parts...however there is a balancing act in terms of the specification of the final parts and the functional yield from a wafer (unit of production).

Creating a leading edge fabrication plant will cost you 1-2Bn$ - and there are many companies trying to catch sweetspots where they are selling parts at high margin without too much competition. The side effect of this is that, the cost of a fab will be amortised in its first three-four years of production. So once a fab becomes second-line it can create silicon which can be sold at a bargin basement price,

-- Andrew

Let's take a look at it from the passenger's viewpoint. She pays $1000 for a NYC to Paris roundtrip flight. Given your figures, that's $380 spent on gas. (I am assuming ticket price = operating cost per passenger, which is close enough. Airlines are not especially profitable.)

The Concorde burned 3.5 times as much fuel per passenger. So that's $1330 on gas... but she's paying $8000 for a ticket! The fuel expenditure was only 17% of the actual cost to the passenger. So yeah, it's not the fuel at all.

(The real cost of operation problem with the Concorde wasn't fuel, but maintenance. It was a very small fleet of very specialized aircraft -- they only numbered in the teens -- so there weren't the economies of scale for parts and labor other commercial aircraft have, whose total fleet might number in the hundreds.)

An interesting question in the economics of the semiconductor industry is, why do older component prices fall faster than technological progress suggests they should. If I understand the literature correctly, chip prices for less powerful back numbers are lower than what Moore's Law would predict. My economist hat has a hunch that it's possibly an artifact caused by inventory clearance. But my other hats wonder if it's because of the difficulty of combining computing power effectively: i.e. parallelism. So two chips from one doubling ago don't quite add up to one chip today; hence the price differential.

This leads me to a prediction: as computer scientists become more adept at parallel architectures, less powerful back number chip prices should converge towards the price predicted by Moore's Law at that time.

This also suggests an econometric way to measure the advent of parallelism.

Edited by author 06-19-2005 10:48 AM
Let's dig up some numbers here. A Boeing 747 is a relatively efficient plane, with only 38% of its airborne operating cost being spent on fuel (in 2000; it's almost certainly worse now). A Concorde originally required 3.5 times as much fuel per passenger, which would--all other things being equal--make it a good 95% more expensive to operate. At modern oil prices, it would be 140% more expensive to operate. So the death of high-speed air travel is all about economics (and the politics of sonic booms over land, but that's another story). This supports your textile economics analogy.

Right now, there isn't much economic incentive to increase CPU performance. Most software runs tolerably well--and much of it is web-based--and we have several years before Microsoft's next bloatware dump. What's worse is that clock speeds have stalled even as transitor density has increased, so if we want better performance, we'll need to adopt multi-core chips and greater parallelism. I expect this transition to take at least a decade; programmers are conservative.

GPU performance, on the other hand, is driven by gamers, and it's grown at a mind-boggling rate--doubling every six months over the past couple of years. I don't know when we'll reach diminishing economic returns here, but it may take a while. And if the gaming market ever delivers a portable teraflop, that should really kickstart the robotics market, which has potentially fascinating economics.

Incidentally, Eric, do you know the story about Concorde prices? When it was first introduced, Concorde flights were actually priced comparably to slower flights. Fuel costs in the Concorde were higher compared to a 747, but only a few hundred dollars more per passenger. But it still had problems turning a profit.

Then someone decided to conduct a bit of market research among business people, asking them, how much do you think a Concorde flight costs?

The ticket prices were then raised to slightly less than this, much higher, value.

Putting on my economist hat for a moment, I should comment that Moore's Law and its relations are really statements about economics rather than technological capability.

The closest historical analog to the semiconductor/IT industries is, oddly enough, textiles. Textiles were once a large part of the economy, usually the next major expense after food and shelter for a household. They also had what's called a "price elasticity of demand" significantly greater than one. This means that, for every percent drop in price, the average person would buy more than 1% in response.

Thus, when modest productivity increases in textile manufacture came about at the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, you hit a virtuous circle. As the price of cloth dropped, people bought proportionately more of it. And the windfall profits drove further investment.

This would have been difficult had the technological potential to easily manipulate cotton fibers not been present. And in fact, one can view the history of the Industrial Revolution as a rather dull forward progress in spindle design et cetera, just as one can view the information revolution as a rather dull series of incremental improvements in photolithography etc.

But, had these physical properties of the cotton fiber not been present (or, more easily, if England only access to wool), the Industrial Revolution as we know it would not have taken place.

(The counterfactual, incidentally, has been run: Gregory Clark has computed a 30% loss in total factor productivity for England up to 1860 without cotton, basically an island version of the Low Countries. Not horrible, but not the Britannia uber alles fantasy that Steverino Stirling enjoys wanking about. No hot bi babes in Clark's paper either: sorry, Steve!)

But note: eventually the price elasticity for cloth dropped. It's rather below one now; textiles are cheap enough so that further drops in price just don't stimulate demand very much. If jeans went 5 for a dollar, would you buy 150 of them?

In the same way, it's entirely possible that further physical improvements in computing might not cause commensurate increases in demand.

Accelerando. Yum. Must buy copies for friends...

Stirling, that's an interesting analogy. But transportation hit an energy wall, I think--technologically, we could go faster, but who wants to pay $8,000 for Concorde tickets to save four hours on a Paris-to-New-York flight? Further improvements in transportation speed would need to be accompanied by declining fuel prices.

Computing power, on the other hand, is limited by density, heat and software parallelism.

As far as density goes, it looks increasingly like we might be on target for the 0.65 node in 2007 and the 0.45 node in 2009. There's an article in the latest Scientific American on immersion lithography, which allows chip-makers to use visible light to etch features a quarter-wavelength in size. This will put off the move the EUV lithography, which is currently an R&D sinkhole.

Waste heat is a huge problem, and might cause computational power to stall (diamond semiconductors would help a lot here, but we don't know how to produce them cheaply). And software parallelism is a hard problem, but we're starting to see steps in the right direction. We'll probably make it several years past your 2010 deadline before the oft-predicted death of lithography occurs. ;-)

Charlie,

the link to the Nightfall chapter in the plain HTML version of Accelerando doesn't seem to work. All the other links are fine though.

Stephen Shevlin

There's a recurrent pattern in SF of exaggerating progress in a field just before it begins to plateau.

The classic instance is top speeds of aircraft and spacecraft, which went up very rapidly until the early 1960's; hence SF then, and for some time afterwards, was full of very fast transport systems.

In fact, of course, speeds levelled off around then and have remained much the same. The DC3 and the 707 were both immense improvements on their predecessors, but since the 707, changes have been marginal.

We have bigger, cheaper but not much faster versions of the first generation of long-distance jet transports using refinements of essentially the same technology. The wings and engines of the latest models wouldn't be mysterious to the Boeing engineers of the late 1950's.

In fact, progress tends to accelerate for a while and then level off. Small arms in 1820-1890, cars in 1890-1940, aircraft in 1905-1960, and so forth.

I couldn't prove that the same will be true of computers and information systems, but on the evidence it's the way to bet. If the modern computer is essentially a product of the 1940's, we'd expect progress to be at its peak from the 70's through about 2010, and then disappointment sets in.

Time will tell.

Wow. Read Scratch Monkey yesterday, Accelerando today. Who needs a singularity? Consuming two Stross novels in as many days has left me feeling transhuman already!

Hm. Who was your computer vision prof (if you don't mind me asking)? I suspect much of the inefficiency he/she sees is actually robustness.

Photosynthesis is only ~6% efficient -- plants vary -- but much of that low number comes from an unavoidable step in carbon fixation. Because the oxygen molecule and the carbon dioxide molecule have shapes and sizes (each half of the CO2 molecule has a dipole moment, but they cancel each other out) there is no good way for the enzyme which attaches the carbon dioxide molecule to the growing sugar molecule from adding oxygen instead.

Plants have evolved several ways to sequester carbon dioxide near the site of carbon fixation in order to boost its local concentration, but the misidentification problem would be endemic to all carbon dioxide fixing enzymes / catalysts / nanomachines working with Earth's atmosphere directly. There's a hidden cost of molecular sorting which is not usually included in these calculations. (Imagine the cost of having to freeze out the CO2 from the air, which is what you'd have to do in a bulk process.)

Now, photosynthetic electrical conversion -- sunlight to electron transfer -- is about 15%. But you can't plug a leaf into a wall jack.

Re: the Blue Brain project, let me copy and edit my comments from James Nicoll's blog:

Markram is sounding a little optimistic, as you'd expect from someone who just fell into IBM's cash pool. His Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, The neocortical microcircuit as a tabula rasa, is a little more guarded.

Peck, on the other hand, is head of the LENS project, the "Large-scale Edge Node Simulator" being put together by IBM. Tracking down his references, looks like he was inspired by various 1980s papers of Gerard Edelman. They didn't have the raw computing power then, though Edelman made a brave start.

(I remember being much more impressed with Edelman's papers back in the day -- jeez, I was just a kid then -- than I am now. On the other hand, his papers from the 1980s could be maybe implemented on a PC nowadays. [checks] From 1987, a 32 by 16 grid, two excitatory and one inhibitory neuron per grid point, mapped to the same size grid of sensory elements, about 100K sensor -> excitor connections. Yeah, doable.)

Incidentally, Markram's interpretation of structure-function relations in the neocortex is a little idiosyncratic. But we'll see.

The infinite precision argument against emulation is a subtle one. I'm not sure whether it's valid or not. But too-limited precision will bite simulations on the ass, every time.

Edited by author 06-12-2005 01:49 PM
There's also a whole bunch of "hypercomputation" links at Wikipedia. Unfortunately, much of this material is marred by the assumption that Turing machines can't solve O(2^N) problems (they can, it just takes a ridiculous amount of time). Oh, and I'm not arguing that discrete systems can perfectly simulate analog systems. I think you can get any arbitrary degree of accuracy, but you obviously have to round off somewhere.

Edited by author 06-12-2005 01:33 PM
Photosynthesis, if I recall correctly, gets something like 6% efficiency (compared to 15% for mediocre solar panels, and 50%+ for the ones we use on satellites). So yeah, chlorophyll isn't all that good in absolute terms, but it does get the molecular biologists all excited, so who am I to argue? :-)

Seriously, you're correct that my neurobiology is pretty superficial--at least outside of the auditory system, which I once studied in some detail. So if I'm treating the brain like a glorified cochlear nucleus, you know where to place the blame. And even there, I'm 10 years out of date.

Update: I referred the reader to interesting papers by Feynman and Deutsch here, but the Deutsch paper doesn't have the proof I'm looking for. I'm going to go get my notes in order before I say anything dumb. Update 2: There's also apparently an ongoing controversy about whether quantum computers can solve the halting problem, which is impossible on classical computers.

Oh, a nice singulatity-themed bit of news: Blue Brain will be used to simulate neocortical columns in real time, with an initial processing power of 2*10^13 operations/second. (For comparison purposes, both SETI@Home and Folding@Home clock in around 10^14 operations/second on a good day.)

Moravec very roughly estimated that the algorithms employed by the human brain require 10^14 operations/second (by extrapolating from the retinal nervous system, which he's been attempting to implement in silicon for years). On the other hand, even a toy neuron model of the human brain should require at least 10^18 operations/second (10^3 firings/second * 10^11 neurons * 10^4 axons/neuron), so Moravec's proposing a factor-of-10,000 inefficiency, which is surprisingly high. (On the other hand, my computer vision professor claimed that every time we've understood a brain subsystem, we've been able to implement it with significantly less processing power than neuron models would suggest.)

I suspect that convincing machine intelligence will require something in the range of 10^15 to 10^20 operations/second.

Um? You're assuming some strange things about what neurons actually are. Even the long axons of motor neurons aren't the equivalent of co-ax cable.

I don't think consciousness is necessarily a sign of a "more powerful" brain, whatever that is. Even idiot savants are still regularly beat by pocket calculators. (I know; I used to be a lightning calculator myself.) I do think that human consciousness is an evolved property that is highly dependent on fine details of brain structure, down to the molecular level. This is not particularly controversial among neurologists. Also, I don't think that any particular human consciousness will be easily transferred without an accurate implementation of those fine details.

(I get the impression that you haven't formally studied molecular or evolutionary biology? And are relying on a computer scientist's precis? Because chlorophyll isn't actually very good. Some of the molecular cascades, on the other hand, are close to theoretical limits.)

Since I am a materialist, I believe the answer to your last question is: you get a perfect replication of your identity and consciousness. But that's simply a restatement of my own philosophical bias.

In general, an optimal solution should use "substrate-dependent properties". A really well-designed nervous system would take full advantage of quantum mechanics. Our nervous system, on the other hand, has a pretty mediocre grasp of 19th-century electromagnetism.

Sure, evolution has done a spectacularly good job with chlorophyll (and, as you point out, the sensory proteins). But lots of high-level biological designs are obviously trapped in local maxima. So I distrust arguments of the form, "A brain which uses quantum mechanics would be more powerful than a brain which doesn't. Therefore, our brains use quantum mechanics in an essential role."

For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that "uploading" is possible. Even ignoring the considerable engineering difficulties, there's a lot of philosophical problems involved.

Let's say I was sedated while a hypothetical machine made an atom-by-atom copy of my brain (collapsing superposition as necessary). Would either of us--the copy or the original--wake up? Could we perform any test which could tell us apart? For that matter, what if we replaced every atom in my brain with a new one? Does it matter if we replace the atoms gradually, or all at once? Since many of the atoms in my brain do get replaced, am I the same person I was five years ago?

Huh? Eric, I'm not arguing that evolution finds optimal solutions at all. Nearly the reverse: that evolution uses substrate-dependent properties that a designer would never bother with.

I say nearly because "optimal" implies a value system of ranking. Evolution doesn't have values beyond progeny.

This might be good news for designers of machine consciousness (if you don't subscribe to the point of view of Chalmers, in which any machine with a sensory feedback loop, even one as simple as a thermostat, might be considered 'conscious', which means we've had the problem licked since the eighteenth century). But for the downloading problem, not so much.

Quantum randomness seems to play a role in vision. There's an interesting literature about the perception of light at the visual threshold -- the single photon case -- and noise. Vision isn't consciousness, but if quantum effects can be perceived -- the speckle flashes your eye 'sees' in pitch darkness are due to 'thermal' rhodopsin transitions in rod cells -- it becomes harder to deny their existence elsewhere in the brain.

Can we plausibly assume that evolution finds optimal solutions? I'd argue no, on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

First, the empirical argument: Plenty of existing neural systems are obviously suboptimal. For example, look at the long neurons which transmit sensory and motor commands between our brains and our extremities. The fastest of these neurons transmit signals at 350 feet/second. Simple copper wiring, on the other hand, can transmit signals at a large fraction of the speed of light.

Second, the theoretical argument: Evolution, as far as we can tell, is a hill-climbing optimization process with a crossover operator. Such algorithms do get stuck in local maxima on a fairly regular basis. Evolution just doesn't have the ability to make design decisions like "let's replace all those pokey long-haul neurons with some fiber optics".

Does the brain rely on quantum mechanics? As far as I understand the literature, there's no credible evidence that quantum entanglement or quantum randomness have any macroscopic effects on ordinary neural computation. You simply can't acheive superposition of something as big as a neuron (never mind the whole brain); there's no evidence of the kind of low-noise systems which would be required to maintain a superposition; and any quantum randomness is, as you point out, absolutely random by all measurements we can devise.

All these theories of "quantum neurology" seem a bit suspicious to me: they explain a profound mystery--one which many people want to be mysterious--in terms of a magical-sounding and difficult branch of physics.

On the qubit idea: personally, I was thinking of the random element involved in the collapse of the wave function, not the qubit properties involved in quantum entanglement (which, as you point out, can be simulated by a non-quantum system of 2^n). As far as I know, that's entirely random, by the best tests mathematics has been able to devise.

Would an otherwise perfect simulation of the brain that used a deterministic process to compute quasi-random numbers be conscious? I really don't know. I do know that even vanishingly small biases within a random number generator can produce non-physical results in a simulation.

I don't remember whether Penrose had this property in mind for his microtubule idea, or if he was thinking of quantum entanglement. It's been too long since I read his book in detail. Charlie?

However, John Eccles, the Nobel laureate neurophysiologist, proposed a form of honest-to-goodness dualism where the mind controlled the outcome of probabilistic quantum events within the brain. Oddly enough, Karl Popper of all people embraced this.

Molecular modeling is a very strange discipline -- not quite a black art, but nothing like a science either. Even the Tinkertoy energy minimization stuff, which looks like it should be no harder than, say, animating a skeleton... hoo boy.

Anyway. The thing is, it's already been demonstrated that some neurons are sensitive to changes caused by one molecule or one photon or -- astonishingly enough -- voltage gradients orders of magnitude below those needed experimentally to open or close ion channels.

Granted, these examples are mainly from sensory neurons. On the other hand, evolution re-uses capabilities. There are organelles found in most eukaryotic cells which are responsive to the ebb and flow of only 20 hydrogen cations. That's tiny compared to the number of atoms in a cell, even assuming a sphere of hydration around each proton.

It's possible that much of this fine detail can be abstracted, whence Charlie's Lobster stories. Still, it's not the way I'd bet. Why would evolution not wring out every last useful property from its substrate?

Carlos, I agree with you about the practical limits of simulation. Although all known quantum processes are computable--in the technical sense of the term--they're nearly intractable in practice. (Storing N qubits on a classical computer requires O(2^N) space, which is basically the definition of "impractical".) I have the deepest respect for anybody who can hack molecular modeling; it's a black art.

Still, there's three obvious hypotheses about human consciousness:

1) Consciousness is fundamentally supernatural.

2) Consciousness arises from a physics based on mathematical laws.

3) Consciousness arises from a mysterious, non-computable physics. I have no idea what a "non-computable physics" would entail, but Penrose seems enamored of the idea. Quantum mechanics, as discussed above, is fully computable, so Penrose needs something more.

If either hypothesis (1) or (3) is correct, then we probably can't build a mind out of software. But if hypothesis (2) is correct, then such a thing is at least theoretically possible.

And if minds can be made of software, even in principle, I'd be quite surprised if the precise details of carbon chemistry matter in the least.

Re yr accelerando copyright metaphor - have you been spending too much time listening to the introductions to 'One song to the tune of another' on 'I'm sorry I haven't a clue'? They have a similarly high level of potential metaphor collapse.

I skimmed through "The Road" at a bookshop and it struck me as an odd (if impressive) book: the level is somewhere between a popular science book and an actual textbook. Penrose is a great expositor, of course: the only chapters that exhibit even a slight crank factor are the last few ones where he lays out his vision of "twistor string theory" as a theory of quantum gravity -- this is not really considered mainstream by most theoreticians at the moment.

Of course, since my thesis is largely inspired by Penrose's twistor work in the 70s, I probably shouldn't complain about his obsession with the damn things. :-)

I'm not a fast reader. (Especially when the equation count per page exceeds 10 and the page count exceeds 1100.) I figure I might get out of the first three chapters by some time next year ...

Thanks, Charlie! Just don't get lost at the Pole.

Nope, Carlos, I'll just sit here happily on the sidelines taking notes. (Just been out swimming. Stopped at Borders on the way and picked up a shiny new copy of "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose, wherein (if the reviews are to be believed) he steers clear of the microtubules and platonism and sticks to a pyrotechnic intelligent lay-being's explanation of modern physics. I may be some time ...

Hey Charlie, let me know if I am monopolizing your forum to an unseemly extent.

You're assuming your conclusion. Actually, two conclusions: a) that mind is computation, and b) that those computations are "many levels above" the atom-to-atom physics of brain function.

I'd be interested in what evidence you have to support these views. Or are they expressions of philosophical bias? (I don't view that as a bad thing by itself, but I do like having them clearly stated. Saves time.)

Edited by author 06-05-2005 12:03 AM
"If one doesn't assume that the human mind is a universal Turing machine process -- debatable -- then the way to emulate the human mind is through simulation of the physical processes which make up the mind. No?"

No, we'd only have to simulate the mind at a level that captures the computations it performs - many levels above worrying about the exact value of g. The simulation computations might not even resemble the computations in wetware at the level of embracing parallel processing.

It's certainly interesting to ask whether "singularitarians" are dualists in the same spirit as religious thinkers. I think singularitarians are borrowing first from computer scientists and their distinction between software/hardware - which is more a matter of dealing with the world through useful abstractions. For example, I don't think singularitarians would claim that computation (and therefor the mind as an instance of computation) can exist without some physical substrate (in the case of the mind, some kind of brain), as a religious person might claim that the spirit/soul can exist without the body.

No, I parsed it correctly. If one doesn't assume that the human mind is a universal Turing machine process -- debatable -- then the way to emulate the human mind is through simulation of the physical processes which make up the mind. No?

That's why I'm "going on" about physical processes. Frankly, I would find it surprising if the human experience of consciousness is a universal Turing machine process. There are far too many b/o/d/y/ hardware-particular quirks. Hell, O'Reilly just published a guide to them.

[Tangent: I find it interesting how many singularitarians have recapitulated dualism, with the mind / soul / program separate from the (unimportant) body / substrate which holds / runs it. I know that the analogy to religious belief annoys many singularitarians, but there are so many, it's really rather striking.]

I also think that much more weight has been put on the Turing test than is philosophically warranted. I've encountered too many people over the Internet who could be emulated by very small programs indeed -- Searle's Chinese Room might as well be a take-out menu -- but somehow, I don't think those programs would be equivalent to the human.

"The question with regards to the singularity, in particularly uploading, is: is consciousness nothing more than a mathematical/computational processes? If that's the case then our uploaded (read: mindware running on some substrait other than neurons) selves will still be merrily self-conscious, since the simulation of a mathematical process IS the mathematical process. If not, then the future belongs to zombies."

There's a fallacy of the excluded middle here.

Edited by author 06-04-2005 09:21 PM
Carlos Yu: I don't think you parsed that first sentence correctly - Eric is saying that when it comes to simulating "any mathematical process", a perfectly accurate simulation is equivalent to what it simulates. Why are you going on about simulating physical processes?

The question with regards to the singularity, in particularly uploading, is: is consciousness nothing more than a mathematical/computational processes? If that's the case then our uploaded (read: mindware running on some substrait other than neurons) selves will still be merrily self-conscious, since the simulation of a mathematical process IS the mathematical process. If not, then the future belongs to zombies.

Borges alludes to this idea, elegantly:

"In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a Single Province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Of exactitude in science": A Universal History of Infamy (1954).

"For any mathematical process, of course, a perfectly accurate simulation is equivalent to what it simulates. It doesn't matter whether I do long division with a pencil or in silicon; the exact same operations take place."

Um. Those two sentences conceal a fair number of assumptions.

First is a practical objection. What goes by the name of simulation nowadays is very far removed from simply plugging in the formulae for physical laws and letting particles interact. I have some practical experience in this, from quantum chemistry through protein dynamics to astrophysics, so trust me here.

A somewhat related point is, even if simulations did operate in that manner, we actually don't know fundamental constants to the accuracy needed to do so on the macroscopic scale. I think we know G only to the fourth place?

But these are technical (though practically, very important) objections.

A more serious one concerns the difference between mathematical and physical operations. Because mathematics describes physics so very well -- what Wigner called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" -- we sometimes confuse one with the other.

But mathematics is, roughly, a very complex set of logical equivalences. Calculation is deterministic.

On the other hand, fundamental physical processes, not so much. The Copenhagen interpretation and Bell's theorem and all that. (No, Charlie, I ain't going to wax mystical about the quantum properties of microtubules.)

(Incidentally, this is partly why Wigner was so interested in the theory of random matrices. Interesting and still fruitful stuff.)

Simulation in these sorts of discussions usually means something that is infinitely exportable. Now, one extropian solution I've seen is to say, well, we'll just incorporate quantum logic into our computing devices.

Fair enough; but this moves one from the level of pure simulation, one that's Turing-universal, to using the structure of the universe to simulate the structure of the universe. Hardware dependent; background dependent. Like the 1950s technique of using RLC circuits and oscilloscopes to mimic the behavior of, say, a shock absorber.

Then there are the problems of even simple physical systems showing a high degree of algorithmic complexity... but I think that's enough for now.

For any mathematical process, of course, a perfectly accurate simulation is equivalent to what it simulates. It doesn't matter whether I do long division with a pencil or in silicon; the exact same operations take place. (Assuming, of course, that I don't make any carry errors, but we all have our failings.)

Whether or not human consciousness is a mathematical operation is an open philosophical question. On the one hand, I can't imagine how my experience of consciousness could arise from math. On the hand, if consciousness is based in physics as we know it--and not, say, a supernatural soul or some kind of Penrosian yet-to-be-discovered physics--I'm not sure what else consciousness could be.

But seriously, if you deny that "the simulation is equivalent to the simulated" in the realm of mathematics, you can't even make sense of Goedel's work.

(As for (1), I agree. I've got nothing against (say) Egan's Luminous or our host's Atrocity Archives, but the notion that pure mathematics could have an affect on physics is a charming fantasy, not a reasonable hypothesis.)

Charlie,

Accelerations Studies Foundation (the root organization behind Acceleration Watch) hosts events both in meatspace (<http://www.accelerating.org/ac2005/index.html>;) and the virtual (in a venue very much akin to Neal's MetaVerse).

ASF is very interested in your participation at Accelerating Change. Please contact them (specifically, John Smart) for more details.

David

[grin] I've seen it.

There are two things that bug me about the Singularity program this morning, and I'm not talking about Drexler's inept chemistry or Kurzweil's recent gosh-wow discovery of neurocomputing.

1) The act of computation/mathematics can itself change the nature of the universe (other than by making it warmer).

2) The simulation is equivalent to the simulated.

In practice, this is a return to magical thinking.

1) is an appeal to esotericism, similar to numerology, the Kabbalah, theurgy, and so on.

2) is actually 'sympathetic magic' in disguise; as the anthropologist J.G. Fraser described it, "the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it."

Like I said, this bugs me.

Carlos, did you by any chance see my tough guide to the singularity last week? (If not, note: you'll need a javascript enabled web browser, preferably firefox.)

Ugh. Too much crank pander in SF as it is.

I see at least three generations of recycled ideas in that website. They're singularity generations, of course, so the turnover is quick. But to my jaundiced eye, it looks like a virtual environment for breeding cliches. Same old names -- I thought Yudkowsky had gone to the singularity from which no one has returned? -- same old sales pitch, but now without the new car dot.com smell.

Strikes me that this would be an excellent time to re-examine the concept from the ground up.

Oooh, they're right on that dividing line between reasonable speculation and outright crank-hood that makes for lovely science fiction.

Thanks for the lead to Acceleration Watch! It looks far better than the World Future Society's web page.

Might have...ran a D&D Campaign for a few years...if your
cleric was killed by Mr Stross, then in my humble opinion
he certainly deserved to die... :)

-- Andrew

Edited by author 05-26-2005 08:12 AM
No-brainer...?

Dunno if this is a suck eggs comment Andrew - but if you've got the old 2nd edition monstrous manual (EDIT:Fiend Folio not MM) and so on; read up who created the Death Knights, Githyanki and a few other choice beasties!

Mr Stross is the man who killed my cleric.

Charlie,

Given that all fiction is moulded by the milieu of the author, then having read the Tough Guide to the Singularity, claiming that you've gone through a D&D phase in the past is a no-brainer...

-- Andrew

The Singularity showed up in sf well before the term was coined, of course. (Perhaps Vinge really did originate it, and the concept then travelled back in time?) The earliest story I can recall which used it: Chester S. Geier's "Environment."

Re: CC-licensed E-book. Wheee! Promise I'll buy the
paperback anyway, just as soon as I can get it shipped
to Australia.

Love the Tough Guide. I'm looking forward to the
Lonely Planet Guide to Post-Singularity Earth.
(summary: Mostly Harmless Now)

-----sharks

No name: ahem: try this ... netrik.

*!@#!@&% - javascript in a wiki. Please no. Uncrawlable. Unlynxable. I thought you knew better.

Edited by author 05-24-2005 06:30 PM
I think I can safely say that the ebook edition of "Accelerando" will be out some time before the paperback, David, so you're safe.

... Oh bugger, Locus are running it on their website. So let me clarify:

A Creative-Commons licensed e-book release of "Accelerando" will happen just as soon as Ace, Orbit, and myself can sort out who's hosting it and what formats to put it out in. This will probably happen some time next month, i.e. a week or two before the hardcover comes out. I'll be providing more detail (and download and purchase links) via my other, new, website: www.accelerando.org (which is still under construction).

Love the Tough Guide Charlie. After reading it however I'm concerned--if I wait until "Accelerando" comes out in paperback might the Singularity have occurred by then (leaving me stuck in some horrible Intel-thingy unable to either purchase the book or even turn the pages) thus forcing me wait for the e-book version?

I say we just disconnect all of Charlie's peripherials (ooer) barring a printer. And then we really can make the poor bastard write for us 24/7.

MWHAHAA...*pop*

Hm. I've heard of small electronic widgets becoming stuck inside of people for various reasons. This is the first I've heard of a person getting stuck inside a small electronic widget.

http://www.geocities.com/marvel_villain/ego/ego1.jpg

That's you that is.

What's this gizmo doing lying about? I know, I'll give it to my sticky fingered 18-month old child to play with.
(If the rapid-fire technowibble leaking from the speakers becomes a problem, I can always let him take a bath with it.)

The heck with the 1 GB Palm Pilot storage card, find yourself a nice 60 GB iPod!

Congrats on the...errr...transformation (it was a hoot of a item on the Locus site)...

Hmm, so that's how my spoons got bent "all by themselves" this morning.

'leet of the leet' - lol, i reckon Charlie's at least 99 by now...

"Well we could go for the one thought that it only takes a stressed weapons loading team, a dark night and an urgent fire command to mix up the health missile with an actual conventional warhead."

I've been fortunate enough to never participate in one, but I'm reliably informed that wars are actually rather dangerous.

Significantly because of "friendly" fire.

Google on "Jet-propelled guided NAAFI"

(Opens page on Google. Click. Your correspondent's brain explodes.)

I'm unclear what point is made by such an obvious observation

Well we could go for the one thought that it only takes a stressed weapons loading team, a dark night and an urgent fire command to mix up the health missile with an actual conventional warhead.

(Scenario one: "It's an incoming medi-cruise. Wave it down wave it..."KRACKOOOM).

That and of course, ambulances aren't MEANT to kill people. They have flashy lights and travel at around 70mph. Doctors generally train to heal people and on a sad occasion don't.

Neither is a self propelled, smart guided lump of metal hurtling at your wounded unit at near the speed of sound :)

Though what a super way to drop much needed aid behind enemy lines to refugee camps (not too close though!) if a nasty dictatorial type is giving the lads in blue hats grief!

This health missile makes me think that the developers have been playing too many FPS games - like Natural Selection where you can send med packs to injured marines...

Trivial site-design feedback: whenever I happen to land on one of your entries without having come through the main blog page, I do what I always do at any favoured blog: I go to look at the main blog page. In your case, I, of course, hit "site index." Because, lovely as you are, I've not memorized your blog idiosyncracies along with those of the other 200+ blogs I regularly read.

And that URL doesn't take me to your main blog page. It takes me away, and to find the blog, I have to hit another button, after looking for it. Might I suggest that a "blog home" or somesuch basic button be on every blog entry page? Of course, it's possible I'm the only one petty and silly enough to want to save a few clicks this way, in which case, never mind. Regardless, it's my two cents.

This reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine about using missiles to deliver food to people who needed it.
"Smart-Fruit"...

"(Anyone willing to place bets on how long it takes before a recipient is accidentally brained by one of these things? Adds a whole new meaning to 'friendly fire'.)"

Presumably one could work out a probability easily enough if we had future-figures on usage.

Of course, people are killed every year when hit by ambulances, and the number of folk accidentally killed by doctors is appalling; I'm unclear what point is made by such an obvious observation.

Isn't this just a reworking of some of the material about life in an expanding universe that those authors put here?

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9902189

Conclusion: We're doomed to live at most for a mere 10^150 years. Doomed. Barring weird strong gravitational effects.

I thought the problem was that once out of it's box, those "in power" are effectively no longer in power, and so the only people who could shut downm the system are paralysied by it themselves.

PC, at 01-28-2004 02:52 PM ET (US):
 
"I hope this will reassure you (hell, I hope it reassures me!) I think Panopticon would first be used by those in power against their rivals in power, and the chaos resulting from the political warfare might bring it all down right away. Evidence: the US law banning access to past video-rental records, to avoid embarrassing S&M-enjoying pols I guess."

The problem is that the Panopticon can be used by those in power against their political rivals, to gain more power, to use against their political rivals.... ad dystopia.

In the case of US video rental records, the law passed restricting access was passed when they were used to embarrass a Republican US Supreme Court nominee. Considering that the US Supreme Court has had a Republican majority for many, many years now, it's clear which side 'those in power' are. And that law is **probably** moot right now - the recent Patriot Act and other laws give the Feds access to a vast range of private records.


"Furthermore, the one scarce commodity at all times, even when we mine the asteroids with solar-powered self-replicating machinery, is attention. Even the NSA cannot keep up with it all, which is why the exemplary nature of punishment (think RIAA's lawsuits) will persist and be a one-in-a-million chance for the average prole like me. Until AI becomes real, and then Panopticon would apply to all, even the AI's backers and creators, because isn't AI by definition autonomous?"

A technique used in the US is the plea bargain. When somebody is charge with a crime, there is ~98% probability that the case is disposed of with a plea bargain - the defendant pleads guilty. In the remaining 2% of cases which go to trial, the conviction rate is well over 90% (IIRC, 95%, or even higher). Prosecutors supposedly load those cases up with as many serious charges as possible, to make it clear what happens if one doesn't cooperate.

Given a legal system in which one is always commiting some crime at any given time, plus an automated evidence collection system which covers most people most of the time, plus a court system which has had decades of stress on reducing the rights of criminals, and things can be very, very nasty. People who attract even minor attention from the police/prosecturs would be very vulnerable.

And we all will eventually attract even minor attention....

Looks like your concerns are spreading, Charlie- check out Stan Schmidt's editorial ("A Billion Big Brothers")for the April edition of Analog.

Point taken concerning ratios versus body movement.

But I liked the idea of people walking down the street in a bizarre way to avoid automatic detection.

I wonder if enough variation exists in the ratio of femur length to torso size to allow this method to function as a unique identifier for persons. Surely people will find themselves clustered in groups?

The point of gait analysis isn't your walking style -- it's about measuring the ratio of the length of your leg bones to your torso. Which is bloody hard to change or hide, especially when compared to the ease with which we can disguise our faces!

Gait analysis?

Will we end up with a Ministry of Funny Walks?

Has anybody done reasonable trials into how effective this is and how easily it might be defeated

Just an off-hand guess...you might find some ideas from the martial arts- things like learning to manipulate your center of gravity, "floating walk', and concealing the movement of one's legs (using hakima-like clothing), etc.

Re: Gait analysis...

Has anybody done reasonable trials into how effective this is and how easily it might be defeated. My partner recently dislocated her knee, and has been getting her gait looked at as part of physiotherapy. Her gait definitely changed, and is now described as normal. Of course you don't need something as drastic as that to change gait - high heels will do it, as will lifts in shoes, a tight knee bandage, leg weights etc.. Perhaps future identity criminals will invest in odd shoes...

You also might want to check this entry on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends site:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/01/29.html#a722

Yep, The Eternal Golden Braid can be found at...

http://theeternalgoldenbraid.blogspot.com/

...where I just updated my posting on this subject again and added your new links, etc.!

You want Foucualt? Here's all the Foucault most of us will ever need:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/journalv1i3.htm
My own research on the history of CCTV in the UK has led me to conclude that when it's expensive, it gets pointed at the political opposition. When it gets cheap, it gets pointed at everyone. But the results are not determined by the technology; rather they are outcomes of interplay between exisitng institutions, social processes, the technology, and shit (that happens).

Fred -- got a URL for your blog?

I placed a link about your "singularity" posting on my blog and have modified it once to include the comments of one of my readers.

We're both bumping "Singularity Sky" up on our reading schedules in the hope of starting a bit of a discussion on it.

I hope this will reassure you (hell, I hope it reassures me!) I think Panopticon would first be used by those in power against their rivals in power, and the chaos resulting from the political warfare might bring it all down right away. Evidence: the US law banning access to past video-rental records, to avoid embarrassing S&M-enjoying pols I guess.

Furthermore, the one scarce commodity at all times, even when we mine the asteroids with solar-powered self-replicating machinery, is attention. Even the NSA cannot keep up with it all, which is why the exemplary nature of punishment (think RIAA's lawsuits) will persist and be a one-in-a-million chance for the average prole like me. Until AI becomes real, and then Panopticon would apply to all, even the AI's backers and creators, because isn't AI by definition autonomous?

No mention of Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"?

On the contrary; the decision to prosecute, especially in cases perceived as trivial, is increasingly automatic. For example, enforcement of GATSO camera speeding tickets in the UK seems to be automatic these days -- as witness the case of the Peugot 106 owner who received a ticket and fine notice from a malfunctioning camera that had clocked her travelling at 406 miles per hour round a suburban ring road!

A common response, as the volume of apprehended offenders goes up, seems to be to automate enforcement/punishment rather than to question the validity of the law itself. That's part of what worries me. (Other signs; a year or two ago a justice ministry in -- was it Brazil? -- was working on a laptop-based expert system to help judges decide traffic cases. Plug in the data, out comes the verdict and sentence.) Too many of us naked apes like automating systems, without actually thinking about what the things we're automating actually do.

Can't help thinking there's a gap in your Panopticon Singularity idea. Imagine the Massachusetts police had a Fornicoscope, which informed them of every sexual encounter talking place in the state. Would you expect more prosecutions for fornication? The decision to prosecute is never going to be automatic, and getting a conviction in court, as opposed to collecting evidence of the crime, is one task that technology isn't going to make much cheaper.

Jet packs? To heck with jetpacks. Where is my flying car? I was **promised** a flying car!

Hi Charlie: the Ken Thompson scheme won't work, if you have a friendly grad student to design a new fablab for you. You can feed the new design to the old one, and suddenly you have an unencumbered fablab strain. Remember, answering the question, "Am I a program for a self-replicator?" is equivalent to answering the question "Will this program halt?" and is hence undecidable.

You might be able to evade this "problem" by turning it around. Require every fablab program to come equipped with a proof that it doesn't encode a self-replicator, and then machine-check the proof before executing the program. This is roughly the approach called (unsurprisingly) proof-carrying code. However, even this scheme is vulnerable to a friendly grad student with an electron microscope, who can cripple the proof-checker for you with a well-placed single-bit memory error. See Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine for an example on how to compromise a Java or .NET environment with a single-bit error.

Basically, the moral is that if a hostile party has access to the hardware, you're screwed. End of story, at least with what current mathematics permits.

Now, if you're willing to accept some fierce handwaving, I'll note that this breach arises from the fact that in classical logic, if you can show (A and (not A)) then you can prove anything. There's a branch of philosophy/logic called paraconsistent logic which studies logical systems in which contradiction doesn't prove everything. Then, you might (and I emphasize, might) be able to design a version of proof-carrying code that requires that all proofs be valid in a paraconsistent logic. Then attacking a tamper-resistant device might actually be difficult. But that's not the way to bet. :)

acb: Nothing so crude. See Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson, and remember, any molecular assembler is also a compiler (insofar as it must needs translate source code in one language into another output format -- in the form of structured molecules).

Charlie: Molecule-scale serial numbers in component materials/chemicals? (Though that depends that only trusted parties have access to the technology to make the materials.)

Edited by author 05-09-2003 04:58 AM
acb: it's noteworthy that the guys I was talking to at the lab were focussing on building a library of open source hardware design patterns to accompany the lab. The lab itself, I suspect, would not be encumbered by IP concerns.

The broader question of the intellectual property industry is a fascinating one that we need to do something about in the next decade or two. Something like the fablab is inevitable -- consider what the implications are for the developing world, for example! (Forget computers and IT for a moment, and think about a village fab turning out simple walkie-talkies, weather stations, and radios or TVs. Think infrastructure, and think bottom-up.)

Incidentally, I can think of at least one way to make fablab products traceable, even if the labs themselves are fully open and fully replicable. Can you guess what I'm thinking?

Open, hackable and self-replicating fablabs would encounter a lot of opposition. If anybody can produce a knockoff, patentholders wouldn't get paid. If the fablab is open and hackable, it would be possible to use it to make circumvention devices. If it's open and replicable, it would be possible to make a fablab which makes untraceable gizmos (as opposed to ones embedded with the lab's license number, in the way that CDs are printed with the pressing plant's IFPI registration number). I can see the "intellectual-property" industry mounting heavy opposition to such an idea, possibly at the international-treaty level, and citing concerns about "terrorism" if they're not emasculated.

Geoslavery... An unpleasant new angle, but not a revolution - after all, anyone who has the power to forcibly implant or attach electrodes to another already has a million opportunities to make a slave of them should they wish it. The difference is in the manner of confinement, and actually, most slavery situations would be improved. I'm sure many state prisoners, too, would prefer pain-restricted freedom and open air to their present 5' concrete cell, beatings and occasional rape.

It occurs to me, though, that this technology has some empowering public potential, if it can be made secure enough. It could be self-inflicted as a form of psychological surgery, giving a boost in autonomy to those with memory problems, poor impulse control, or some dangerously absent instinct. I, for example, could set up a system to make me stop leaving my glasses, keys, and recent purchases behind in every other cafe or bathroom that I visit.

Well, let's say that it seems to me as though there is some force behind technological progress. I know that there's not some actual, physical force behind it, but maybe the collective will of all of humanity to have easier lives could have something to do with it. Or maybe that's too spiritual...

Terry -- you talk about the inexhaustible march of technology as if there's some sort of force pushing progress. There doesn't have to be. You can look at it as a Drunkard's Walk problem: If you start with no technology at all, then over the long run random changes in your level of technology are going to tend to raise it.

There may be a kind of anti-transhumanism/general technology instinct that is not so much based on certain ideological motives as it is the base for them. I say that because allthough when I think about transhumanism, I think it's a good idea, there's something deep inside me that is in some way I can't really desribe emotionally resenting it. I have this feeling under control, but stronger versions of it may well be one of the driving forces behind technophobia in the modern world.

Think about those parts of the left that are technophobic, for instance. One of their major motivations (besides a deep missunderstanding of what science and technology are, what they do, why they do it and what's to do when they have bad side effects) seems to be that science and technology are somehow against their personal sense of asthetics. And the reason for this may well be the emotional resentment that I've described above.

Edited by author 10-08-2002 06:07 PM
Technology seems to me to be an inexhaustable march forward into time. Inexhaustable at least as long as humanity exists. It may sputter and fart and flail, but in the long run it won't be stopped. Those who oppose transhumanism basically oppose technology and should be kindly left in gardens of Eden created by Nano-Santa.

Back before Sputnik lots of people in the US opposed or were apathetic to science education for religious or whatever reasons. After Sputnik the Space Race caused many of those same people to support science education so that "we" would win. I think the same thing may happen with transhuman technologies and transhumanism in and of itself. If the US and the UK and maybe the EU sees China or Japan or some other country cranking out tech that improves humanity, that *might* be enough to silence the critics or at least hush them somewhat.

Who knows?

It'll be fun getting there!

There's one other problem group, I think: the people who don't want to be bothered with trying to understand. They're the people who say "something must be done!". They're the people who don't care to look at evidence, or do anything hard before they reach a decision. Maybe they overlap with a lot of the other groups, possibly even forming the mass of the group, because all these things provide an answer that they don't need to think about.
 
Unfortunately, it isn't so hard to see elected politicians behaving this way. :(

Edited by author 10-03-2002 08:35 PM
Nigel, I think you're spot on, and your last comment leads toward a group that I think, you, Charlie, missed: Science fiction writers who find transhuman futures too complex, expansive, and just plain strange to deal with, and so prefer to avoid the question. Many plots can't survive even a technology as advanced as the mobile phone, let alone a technology that makes the characters several of orders of magnitude smarter than the author.

You've left out plain old envy as a major source of opposition. If everyone can't have it, no one should! It will end all hope of making everyone equal. I've been miserable all my life because of things that brain enhancement would have prevented and besides, they might not have it in time to keep me alive!

Edited by author 10-03-2002 03:58 PM
Paulina Borsook in her 40% spot-on/30% padding/30% wrong book, Cyberselfish has a passing pop at the Extropians - she refers to them as "a fringeware technolibertarian cult" and sez "I kept wondering why all these guys found being human something to be so eagerly transcended.... Why did these folks so hate being human that the fantasy of being transhuman so appealed." I think this is what transhumanism means to most people -- i.e. a bunch of disfunctional freaks who can't deal with the messy vulnerability, uncertainty and distraction of being human. If people believe transhumanism is about becoming less than human rather than more they're going to fear it or just regard it as a silly game.

There's also the fact that most people involved in transhumanism seem to be horrible Ayn Rand-quoting libertarian types who reckon that if you're not running your own high tech corporation by the time you're 21 you're a lost cause....

However, they and their ideas have been a great source for post-cyberpunk SF ideas for the last decade and it's disappointing how few writers have made use of them.

--Nigel E. Richardson, Austin, Texas: The Yes/No Interlude

I really dig the National Review column -- so Nick Bostrom invented transhumanism, and it's really eugenics in disguise?

The mind, she boggles. (This isn't a simple lack of attributions, it's flat-out wrong.)

Are you familar with the work of Virginia Postrel? I think she sort of summed up the argument quite nicely in a book called the "The Future and its Enemies". She also thought the old definitions weren't meaningful and she divides people into stasists and dynamists, which in a message board debate with her I noted that it sounded slightly L. Ron. Hubbardish but she didn't respond...

However, her Ayn Rand ideology makes me think that someone should wrest her terms from her and redefine them. For example, in her world view, people who oppose nuclear energy or question global warming are "stasists", afraid of the radiated heat drenched and/or ice aged future. The cowards. So you might want to rethink her definitions. But her analysis as to who would oppose, say, life extension therapies, or playing with the human genome are on target. Here are several links that you might find helpful.

Here's more about Postrel's book, which you may have already read but it wasn't mentioned so:

http://www.dynamist.com/aboutthebook.html

And here's a recent National Review column where the conservative writer identifies the Transhumanist Ribofunk threat. (Down with the XMEN!)

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-smith092002.asp

Philip Shropshire
www.threerivertechreview.com
www.majic12.com

Going off of point 6 I think transhumanism does pose a serious problem to democratic political philosophies. The phrase "all men are created equal" is the backbone of political belief in the USA. (Ignore for a moment how long it took to broaded men to include more than white males).

If transhumanists can increase their capabilties as much as we suspect may be possible, then this ideal becomes meaningless. If you are a conservative base line human, and your transhumanist neighbor has replaced his brain with some sort of quantum substrate that allows him to think 1000x faster than you, and has a essentially immortal body then you aren't equal.

I think a dim understanding of this problem, and the echo of the Nazi idea that they were entilted to take over other countries due to innate supriority, is going to stir up a lot of people once they begin to understand where technology is going. What sort of political system can encompass both man and overman?

I agree with one of Vinge's ideas that the best outcome is that the singularity happens fast enough that the transhuman minds become so vast and capable so quickly that they can devote an insignificant amount of attention to taking care of the people who don't want to upload. From the humans perspective they are now being served by almost omnipotent beings, from the other side the Powers have an ant farm.

it happens or it doesn't, c'est la vie :) life's too short!

oh, oh and there's also "the clan of the cave bear" argument: you don't want to be the neanderthal do you?

Whoops, Phil: you seem to have missed my online short-story collection!

See this page for details.

By the way, the story at Locus Online is already up. That link is:http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Reviews/ShropshireOnEllison.html

You are quoted in footnote 16. But you're welcome to add anything that I've missed. Harlan's attorney already has...

Philip Shropshire
http://www.threerivertechreview.com/
http://www.majic12.com/

You do realize that if you're quoted in a story in opposition to a certain sci fi legend who will brook no free postings of his stories and you yourself are offering no free postings of your own stories then, well, someone might think that's an inconsistency...Can't you at least show us "Lobsters"? Something? I've heard some real good things about your style. I'd like to read something...Egan posts a lot of his stories for free on his site..Be a sport..


Philip Shropshire
http://www.threerivertechreview.com/
http://www.majic12.com/

And where can I get the electrodes so I can start stimulating my and/or other persons pleasure centers? Without surgery I would hope...

Steelydan: I tend to recycle threads, so messages 1-4 relate to an earlier story. (The common theme is "the singularity".)

Larry Niven used this technology as a major ingredient in his Known Space books and stories, during the 1960's and 1970's.

As for Lobsters ... that's going to be on www.asimovs.com soon; the other stories may have to wait. (They're part of a novel in progress. OK?)

What does this have to do with the ratbot story? Anyway, what actually interested me about the ratbot story is how you can stimulate pleasure centers with electrodes. Can people do that without intrusive surgery? Can they do it with intrusive surgery? If it can be done unobtruselively, like with one of those spidery web things that folks put on their heads in the film Strange Days, then I'd like it to give to a few former girl friends, who will then become enslaved by my hot static charms...(And could you explain the wire head Larry Niven reference...?)

In re defining conservative: Welp, over here in America, land of the brave, home of the free etc. etc., I sort of define conservatives as folks who always think that the state is the executive committee of the ruling classes. In other words, any policy, even if it's long held and probably beneficial--such as aid to college students or hanging by a thread abortion rights--should serve the interests of the Ruling Classes.

In re Fukuyama: Welp, over here in America, land of the brave, home of the free etc. etc., we're very close to making it illegal not just to create clones, but even to do research in certain areas, which is horrific. Do cell research and go to jail for ten years. I suppose this will be a boon for the British biotech industry, but I'm vaguely patriotic and kind of like the idea of the United States leading in cutting edge tech, not forcing our best techs to Britain and Europe...I guess my main beef with Francis is that if he doesn't want the magic pills that will enlarge your privates or give you mentat like intellectual abilities or longer life then he should just abstain and die. Or as I put it over at Fly Bottle: May You Die When You're Supposed To. That's my proposed motto/mantra for the anti biotech crowd...

Philip Shropshire
http://www.threerivertechreview.com/
http://www.majic12.com/

PS: Charlie, will you please put your "Lobsters" series of stories over at Fictionwise in unencrypted formats so that I can buy them or do an Egan and put them on your site for free...By the way, that story I quoted you on should be appearing in Locus soon. I put your quotes in my footnotes. Prepare to write a letter. I expect some responses.

Re the conservative party: you're looking through the wrong end of a political telescope. The present-day conservative party has veered a long way off its historic course -- arguably it was taken over in an internal coup by libertarians and neocons during the 1970's, and hasn't recovered. These days the real small-c Conservative party in the UK is the Labour party, who have very successfully stolen the Tory party's clothing (and managed to win two consecutive election terms for the first time ever).

Apropos the distortion of ideas, the term "liberal" in US political discourse doesn't seem to correlate with civil libertarian views these days: it seems to have come to mean paternalism. That's not where I'm coming from. (There's a big difference between offering a safety net and compelling people to use only the services the state provides.)

As for the industrial core ... its success may not ultimately depend on the poverty of the rest of the planet, but it developed from the previous imperial system and that explicitly relied on manufacturing or sustaining inequity. Whether or not the modern system can do better is still an open question; the examples of Korea, Thailand, and a few other countries suggests that the answer is "maybe". I hope so. But I'm not putting any money on it, and I don't think it's the best possible solution to the problem.

Some comments, in no particular order:

1) From what I know of the Tories they want to trim back the UK's welfare state. Given that the thing in its present form is now half a century old, I'd expect a conservative (in the opposition-to-change sense) would be very unhappy with that idea. So to me, it looks like conservatism and Conservatism are two different ideas even in the UK.

2) I certainly agree with you that Fukuyama is nuts to think the modern version of liberal democracy is the last system.

3) "Socialist libertarian" is indeed a "liberal" in the US sense. Having strongly civil libertarian views plus wanting a healthy dose of government regulation of the economy is in fact the stereotypically US-liberal viewpoint. Perhaps you confuse people because they expect a UK-liberal to be a US "libertarian" or "classical liberal"?

4) I disagree that the success of the industrial core is predicated on the poverty of the rest of the planet. I don't think the facts support that claim. I think that creating an economy that can be part of the industrial core requires a market economy, and that we don't yet have a good idea of how to transplant the needed institutions into new societies. We (meaning everyone in the world) are a lot better at it than we were, say, 30 years ago, but the unavoidable image is still that of chimpanzees in a chip fab. This is largely due to the IMF and World Bank being vastly more competent than they were back then. Yes, this fact should scare you shitless -- the current rate of a major financial crisis every two years or so (Mexico, LTCM, Asian flu, Russian default, Argentine default) is in fact a major improvement over what we had in the 1970s. Then we had a crisis every two years, and we reliably botched handling every single one of them. Now, we still have the crises, but only around 1/3 of the responses are botches.

Remember, I come from a different political culture to you. Conservativism where I come from is an ideology
of opposition to change -- none of this so-called "neoconservative" stuff, or the association with Christian fundamentalist beliefs, or whatever. (This is partly why I tend to confuse Americans when I refer to myself as a liberal. Maybe "socialist libertarian" would fit their universe of discourse better, but I'm not going to adjust my self-identity just for someone else's convenience.)

Back to Fukuyama: I think he's incredibly short-sighted in thinking that historical evolution ended, and that the liberal democracies are the height of development. These power structures are already visibly suffering from certain worrisome types of decay. Plus, the current order of society in those states is predicated on the propagation of a global system that produces much less pleasant results for the vast majority of people on this planet. Bluntly, I think we need to invent something better: something that takes the enlightenment values liberal democracies were based on and pushes a step further out.

I think you misunderstand Francis Fukuyama. He is a philosophical conservative but not a political conservative.

That is, he likes society ordered as it is now, and dislikes the prospect of change -- but that means he really likes the modern democratic welfare state. The premise of The End of History and the Last Man was that historical evolution ended with the invention of the liberal democracies. He wants to defend the present against the future, but has zero interest in restoring the present to an imagined past.