Dynamic Subspace

Tag: 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.

  • Cyberspace and the New Mind

    Neil Easterbrook recently sent an email to the SFRA listserve regarding The Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, which is available here.  Neil was using this article as a prompt for his inquiry for SF works that address the neurology of reading and how the act of reading changes the way people think.  I suggested Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 as a possible text, because the AI, Helen, evolves over time as she learns the literary canon from the fictional “Richard Powers.”

    I argree with Carr that Google and the Internet are changing the way we think.  As are cell phones and other digital necessities such as the iPod.  What I’m concern about is how something like Google can be employed to shape the way we think.  This is an idea that comes from thinking about Chomsky’s work on the self-censorship in the media, because of such effects as the increasing usage of government press releases in place of real reporting (which costs money and cuts into the bottom line).  In the case of Google, companies can sponsor links so that they appear higher in search results.  Also, as Carr’s article states, Google eventually wants to give users of its service just what they’re looking for.  Combining these two things together may not be exactly what a user is looking for, but an approximation based on the shaping of results toward capitalistic ends.  I fear the future won’t be about a Google AI supplanting our way of thinking, but rather about the buying and selling of our way of thinking.  I believe that capitalism already shapes our thinking, our consciousness, but in the Google model, where users don’t pay for services, but are given a service in exchange for the implicit agreement that advertising in some way pays for their access to Google’s services, users can’t pay to opt out of this new form of consciousness shaping.  They don’t want users to engage in the system in this way, because the system’s thought shaping serves corporate interests, including their own, which are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive with an empowered user/individual/consumer.