8 thoughts on “Charles Stross Versus Michael Anissimov”
I can see exactly how you could predict the next 91 years.
Remember how good they did in the 40’s and 50’s with 1980 or the 21st Century? Flying cars, space stations, moon bases, home robots, medical advances, no more hunger, world peace, etc.
We’ll be lucky if our grandchildren aren’t living in caves in 91 years IMHO.
That complaint about “where is my flying car” can finally get put away.
Terrafugia Transition has a roadable flying car. You just have to buy it instead of your Cessna or your Ferrari. Plus get your pilots license.
There are also flying cars for adventurers and military. If you don’t mind self-insuring. Fabric wing (rectangle parachute on a dune buggy). fuel efficient.
The future is here if you have the money or the balls.
My concern with the concept of “friendly” AI is that there’s no such thing (really) as friendly. Not in this Darwinian dog-eat-dog universe of scarce resources. There’s just mutual cooperation under enlightened self-interest. And that’s based on mutually beneficial exchange.
I can think of lots of things that AI could do for humans, but (once manufacturing is fully automated) what can humans offer AI that’s of value? I can’t think of anything, but I can imagine them wanting to turn all that nice sunlight and midwestern plains we’re using to grow crops to collect solar energy instead.
This whole Singularity thing has destroyed SF. The idea of spending eternity as a piece of software in some gigantic server farm may appeal to the effete (and often British) geeks who write modern science fiction, but in America (and Japan) that sort of future just does not appeal to anyone in their right mind. And people wonder why science fiction is dying. Who in the hell would want to live in the inhuman utopiae of which the current crop of SF writers dream?
No, what people want is not the hi-brow, mainstream SF future, where we’re all gods “living” a disembodied existence inside a computer, but the future as presented in “low-brow” anime — in other words, the world we live in now, only with commercial space flight, flying cars, and friendly robots that look like adorable teenage girls. The Singularity is a future only an autistic could love — but everybody loves the anime future.
I’m always amazed at the fact that the Cult of the Ominpotent Machine is populated by capitalists. I guess I just don’t see the market for an incomprehensible, unpredictable artificial intelligence that’s going to exterminate the human race, then disassemble our corpses, the Earth, and the solar system for use as raw materials. Yeah, I want to invest my money in that.
Finally, a note on flying cars: a roadable airplane is not what the average person is talking about when they say “flying car”. To the average Joe (and to me), a true flying car is a car — a wingless VTOL aerodyne that can hover, zoom around, and maneuver like the ones in BLADE RUNNER and the STAR WARS movies do. That is the “flying car” we were promised in the 1960s — not a hang glider mounted on a go-kart.
B Lewis –
If you think that your description is the majority view of the post-Singularity world then you’ve been reading the wrong books.
There are many views. Many of them are basically normal life with the limits taken off; one future worth looking at is the world of Ian M. Banks’ excellent Culture series.
As for living in an “inhuman utopia”; well, maybe. However, it’s a heck of a lot better than not living at all – which will be the only other choice for each and every one of us, sooner or later.
One more thing; if you upload (and it isn’t necessary – the same could probably be achieved by add-on hardware) then you might get the chance to be one of the apparently omnipotent AI gods yourself.
Mr. Christian:
I disagree that “living” as software would be better than not living at all. I think that “living” as software would be precisely the same as not living at all. There is, after all, no real evidence of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of computational activity.
And as for being offered the chance to be a god: as I recall, things didn’t work out so well the last time that offer was made to mankind.
Thanks for your reply.
“There is, after all, no real evidence of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of computational activity.”
I don’t see how consciousness or intelligence could be anything *but* an emergent property of the interaction between unconscious and unintelligent functional components. Rodney Brooks’ ideas about subsumption architecture, Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind”, and Bart Kosko’s work fuzzy cognitive maps all point toward this sort of emergent property. Stephen Wolfram’s work also supports this view.
The only counterargument I have seen is Roger Penrose’s “Emperor’s New Mind”, which ignores the signal transformation (i.e. computational) capability of neurons and attempts to find consciousness through a quantum mechanics handwaving process – basically giving up on actually explaining consciousness as anything other than magic.
I can see exactly how you could predict the next 91 years.
Remember how good they did in the 40’s and 50’s with 1980 or the 21st Century? Flying cars, space stations, moon bases, home robots, medical advances, no more hunger, world peace, etc.
We’ll be lucky if our grandchildren aren’t living in caves in 91 years IMHO.
That complaint about “where is my flying car” can finally get put away.
Terrafugia Transition has a roadable flying car. You just have to buy it instead of your Cessna or your Ferrari. Plus get your pilots license.
There are also flying cars for adventurers and military. If you don’t mind self-insuring. Fabric wing (rectangle parachute on a dune buggy). fuel efficient.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/01/14/flying.car/index.html
The future is here if you have the money or the balls.
My concern with the concept of “friendly” AI is that there’s no such thing (really) as friendly. Not in this Darwinian dog-eat-dog universe of scarce resources. There’s just mutual cooperation under enlightened self-interest. And that’s based on mutually beneficial exchange.
I can think of lots of things that AI could do for humans, but (once manufacturing is fully automated) what can humans offer AI that’s of value? I can’t think of anything, but I can imagine them wanting to turn all that nice sunlight and midwestern plains we’re using to grow crops to collect solar energy instead.
This whole Singularity thing has destroyed SF. The idea of spending eternity as a piece of software in some gigantic server farm may appeal to the effete (and often British) geeks who write modern science fiction, but in America (and Japan) that sort of future just does not appeal to anyone in their right mind. And people wonder why science fiction is dying. Who in the hell would want to live in the inhuman utopiae of which the current crop of SF writers dream?
No, what people want is not the hi-brow, mainstream SF future, where we’re all gods “living” a disembodied existence inside a computer, but the future as presented in “low-brow” anime — in other words, the world we live in now, only with commercial space flight, flying cars, and friendly robots that look like adorable teenage girls. The Singularity is a future only an autistic could love — but everybody loves the anime future.
I’m always amazed at the fact that the Cult of the Ominpotent Machine is populated by capitalists. I guess I just don’t see the market for an incomprehensible, unpredictable artificial intelligence that’s going to exterminate the human race, then disassemble our corpses, the Earth, and the solar system for use as raw materials. Yeah, I want to invest my money in that.
Finally, a note on flying cars: a roadable airplane is not what the average person is talking about when they say “flying car”. To the average Joe (and to me), a true flying car is a car — a wingless VTOL aerodyne that can hover, zoom around, and maneuver like the ones in BLADE RUNNER and the STAR WARS movies do. That is the “flying car” we were promised in the 1960s — not a hang glider mounted on a go-kart.
B Lewis –
If you think that your description is the majority view of the post-Singularity world then you’ve been reading the wrong books.
There are many views. Many of them are basically normal life with the limits taken off; one future worth looking at is the world of Ian M. Banks’ excellent Culture series.
As for living in an “inhuman utopia”; well, maybe. However, it’s a heck of a lot better than not living at all – which will be the only other choice for each and every one of us, sooner or later.
One more thing; if you upload (and it isn’t necessary – the same could probably be achieved by add-on hardware) then you might get the chance to be one of the apparently omnipotent AI gods yourself.
Mr. Christian:
I disagree that “living” as software would be better than not living at all. I think that “living” as software would be precisely the same as not living at all. There is, after all, no real evidence of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of computational activity.
And as for being offered the chance to be a god: as I recall, things didn’t work out so well the last time that offer was made to mankind.
Thanks for your reply.
“There is, after all, no real evidence of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of computational activity.”
I don’t see how consciousness or intelligence could be anything *but* an emergent property of the interaction between unconscious and unintelligent functional components. Rodney Brooks’ ideas about subsumption architecture, Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind”, and Bart Kosko’s work fuzzy cognitive maps all point toward this sort of emergent property. Stephen Wolfram’s work also supports this view.
The only counterargument I have seen is Roger Penrose’s “Emperor’s New Mind”, which ignores the signal transformation (i.e. computational) capability of neurons and attempts to find consciousness through a quantum mechanics handwaving process – basically giving up on actually explaining consciousness as anything other than magic.
i miss preview