Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?

[groovedaddy]

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.

Dr. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards and earned good reviews even from engineers analyzing its technical plausibility. He can write space operas with the best of them, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Dr. Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Dr. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.

The Singularity is often called “the rapture of the nerds,” but Dr. Vinge doesn’t anticipate immortal bliss. The computer scientist in him may revel in the technological marvels, but the novelist envisions catastrophes and worries about the fate of not-so-marvelous humans like Robert Gu, the protagonist of Dr. Vinge’s latest novel, “Rainbows End.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26tier.html?th&emc=th

[ixion]

1. as soon as we make a computer that is capable of repairing itself and reproducing

we will effectively have invented our replacement, and rendered ourselves obsolete.

[Hydra]

2. Assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion

That's likely to happen.

On the other hand, this fledgling machine race may not be a match for us- despite our recent complacency, we are still the most dangerous species on this planet on every measurable level, and there is no way to build that kind of adaptability into a system.

[The Inquisitive]

6. even more so if it sets out on the task of creating its own successor

think about the infinite loop it would create, the end result would be nothing less than some sort of omnipotent god like intelligence.

[Odin2005]

3. We will merge with our technology, not be replaced by it.

At the same time super-sapient AI appear we will be also enhancing our own brains.

[Swede]

4. Vinge and Kurzweil have been ahead of thier time in predicting the singularity.

It will be an awesome and terrifying time.

[arendt]

5. Too bad VV is an extreme libertarian. His novels reek of it. They are good; but the POV...

takes away from the scifi.

Like in "A Fire Upon the Deep", where he goes on at great length about some computer-based virus that zombifies people. And these zombie people spout platitudes that sound like liberal slogans when they are really evil incarnate.

Then, in "Beyond Realtime" its all about some libertarian hackers overcoming the evil plot of some government bureaucrats run amock.

I refuse to read the stuff anymore, even though the scifi is rock solid. The societies he envisions are ugly crap.

arendt