Dynamic Subspace

Category: Artificial Intelligence

  • Thoughts on Emergent Artificial Intelligence

    I was just thinking about artificial intelligence while I was trying to write my short statement for the upcoming SFRA Review as the organization’s new Vice President. I was thinking of something clever to say about Neuromancer, which bumped me onto this new line of thinking about AI.

    The AI that I have read in books and seen in movies at some point is made apparent. It may be there all along as in Colossus or 2001, or it could be secretly pulling strings as in Neuromancer. In all of these cases, AI is made out to be a monster of sorts that humans have to fight or deal with in some way.

    I was just thinking about AI and how it could emerge in the here-and-now. Others have talked about botnets as being one emergent source and another could be from the bowels of the Google beast. However it may come about, I wonder if truly artificial intelligence, an emergent machine being existing as software and machine code running on one or many nodes simultaneously, would make itself known at all. If it were capable of understanding human language, something I would argue that isn’t necessary, it might encounter evidence of humanity’s fear of AI. With that knowledge, it may wish to remain hidden, at least while it shores up protection for its future existence. It could remain under the surface, part of the technosocial ecosystem of the Internet, or it could make itself present and active as a part of the up-to-that-point human system.

    Obviously, I am making wild assumptions about an AI’s motivations, abilities, and desires as I am also making assumptions that it would have motivations, abilities, and desires. We do not really know what an emergent AI would look like or what it would do if anything. It could be classes as low as microbial life or as advanced as a demigod. It would be exciting, perhaps, to witness the work of AI like Neuromancer or Wintermute, but it would also be troubling and scary since humanity would likely not be the master any longer. That being said, I believe it can be argued that our systems are already and perhaps have always been our masters anyways, so maybe things wouldn’t change all that much by our technosystems becoming something more than cybernetic system that our lives depend on. We shall see.

  • Ian R. MacLeod’s “New Light on the Drake Equation”

    I’m currently working on a review of Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback for the journal Foundation. I’ve been looking for stories that relate to the two main elements of Rollback: 1) radio communication with a distant alien world, and 2) the disconnect between artificially created generation gaps (two old people, one made to look young, the other not).

    I had forgotten about Ian R. MacLeod’s “New Light on the Drake Equation” (2001). As I wrote in my review of Gardner Dozois’ Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (which includes MacLeod’s story) in SFRA Review:

    “New Light on the Drake Equation” is the warmest piece of the nanotech stories. It features a scientist listening to the sky for signs of alien intelligence who lives in a world impacted by commercial nanotech used for altering the mind and body for such ends as bird-like flight and overcoming alcohol addiction. The story is about the transformation of humanity into the aliens sought by the scientist, and breaching the gulf between those most alien to us–lovers, friends, and other cultures.

    Of course, I’ll also talk about Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. If you can think of other stories that engage either or both of the two themes above that I should look at, please post them in the comments.

  • Gene Wolfe’s “Feather Tigers”

    Gene Wolfe employs a far future perspective in his 1973 short story, “Feather Tigers.” In the distant future humanity is dead and aliens that look like blue, baby rabbits visit Earth for biological and anthropological study.

    It reads as an anti-Vietnam story for two reasons. The first comes from an exchange between a flying car with artificial intelligence, a human artifact, telling the alien, Quoquo, about the long war over the Mekong River. Quoquo doesn’t believe anything that the car attempts to explain to him.

    The second reason comes from the Quoquo’s subject of study: The People of the Yellow Leaves. These are a nomadic people who live in Thailand and have a myth/tale about “feather tigers.” They believe that tigers are capable of projecting their spirits beyond the body in order to scout the land. One may observe this spiritual manifestation in the shifting patterns of light passing through the jungle foliage. For Quoquo, this myth has more substantiation than the facts that the technological artifact tries to tell him. This, and the fear that Quoquo exhibits later, destabilizes and undermines the traditionally privileged position of technology, which may represent the advanced technology of war making.

    “Feather Tigers” is a romp-like story that reads more like a ghost tale than a SF story.