Science Fiction Scenarios

Today we'll play catch up with a raft of science fictional items, some of them plausible! And some almost as weirdly implausible as the world we're living in.

== Living with AI ==

How will humanity keep up with AI? Many Big Thinkers foresee AI outstripping organic humans and rendering us obsolete – at-best patronized-beloved old farts and at-worst disposable.  There are some potential soft-landings, though:

1 – Merge with the machines, the dream of Ray Kurzweil and other cyber transcendentalists. There are many reasons to doubt the possibility, but none are yet decisive. So I portray it working very well, in a post-singularity society, in my story “Stones of Significance.”

2 – Augment organic brains and people to keep up.  Of course my Uplift Universe is all about this, as are the “augments” in The Postman.  And the “dittos” in Kiln People. And several stories like “Transition Generation” and “Chrysalis” in my collection Insistence of Vision. Those who believe our brains are “quantum” think that we have time, before cybernetic entities cross a threshold to high consciousness. We probably don’t.

3 – Emphasize the one thing that works well in humans – our ability to get more done in groups, and even (sometimes) show collective, positive-sum wisdom. In Futurism, Louis Rosenberg suggests that our chief hope will come from a developing "hive mind."  Nor is he the first. After all, this is what Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, a century ago and it’s a recurring theme/prescription in the futures of both Isaac Aimov and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as Theodore Sturgeon and many others.  (It really was cult-like, amid the despair following the atom bomb.) 

In fact, I portray a “Macro Mind” in my novel EARTH, but it’s different than any of those. More loose and flexible and willing to accept the individuality of her human components, the way any sane person admits “I am many” and listens to the cacophony, within.  Indeed, even looser — this kind of synergistic "mind" made up of hundreds of millions of autonomous citizens is the key underlying the successes of Enlightenment Civilization… and it is the thing targeted by its enemies to be destroyed.  (If they succeed, we’re all doomed.)

Machine intelligence and AI are explored more fully in the recently released The Sentient Machine: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence by Amir Husain, as well as in Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barat.

4 - Raise them as our children. We already deal with creating new intelligences who are smarter than us!  We know how to do it, such that only a very small percentage of human adolescents in each generation actually try to carry our their loud threats to “destroy all humans”!  I portray this in EXISTENCE.

And yes, I’ve thought about this very problem, from a myriad angles, for a very long time.  Here’s video of my talk on the future of A.I. to a packed house at IBM's World of Watson Congress - offering big perspectives on both artificial and human augmentation.

== Science Fiction cinema ==

YouTube's sorting algorithms can offer you an endless supply of "short science fiction films," such as the site DUST. Some are very well made, and it's good to see such verve and creativity. The special effects available to small groups of amateurs are amazing... though alas, there's almost never much in the area of plot. Very few have a decent story arc, and the obsessive reliance on gloomy post-apocalypse premises is downright tedious. What? you can't fish around for cool old SF stories?

Still, if you take into account Sturgeon's Law, it's a great trend! And some of these shorts really stand out.

I've mentioned one of my favorites: Einstein-Rosen by Olga Osorio. A lovely, whimsical and endearing little flick about two brothers, who take their genius for granted with child-like grace as they mess around with a fluke of physics.

Counterpart. Looks unusual. A fresh take on an old idea. I hope it's well done.

Fascinating -- Out There was a short-lived science fiction television program broadcast on Sundays at 6 on CBS Television from October 28, 1951 through January 13, 1952. It was one of the first science fiction anthology series, and one of the first shows to mix filmed special effects with "live" action. It only lasted twelve half-hour episodes before being cancelled. The awkward time slot may have led to its failure. In its short run, the program featured episodes adapted from stories by (and in some cases written by) authors including Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, John D. McDonald, Murray Leinster, Frank Belknap Long and Milton Lesser.  

We gave the TV Time travel show TIMELESS a chance, watching 4 episodes from a disk. Alas, the premise and plot conceits are ancient. The actors are captivating and the dialogue okay. But the historical aspects -- actual, loving attention to historical detail and events? Horrible. Truly atrocious. Every episode was rife with howlers, sometimes almost every ten minutes. Just a wee bit of professionalism could have fixed that. What a pity.

== Science Fiction criticism ==

It was a privilege to have been one of Ursula Le Guin’s students, long ago. The ready acceptance of her brilliance by most in science fiction proved the genre was ahead of its time - even back in the 60s – and she was a leader keeping it on the cutting edge for many years, predicting many of the passionate causes of our rambunctious, ever-dynamic time. See this reflection on her life from the Los Angeles Times. In her final publication - No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters Le Guin offers personal reflections on life, aging and writing. 

UCR Lit Prof. and science fiction legend Nalo Hopkinson explains “afrofuturism” in this excellent interview on CBC.

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff offers an uncensored look at a unique individual, with amusing anecdotes, ongoing controversies and extensive - unfiltered - interviews with Ellison as well as numerous friends, colleagues and fellow authors.

For decades the Eaton Conference was the premier site for academic discussion of the boldest and most pertinent genre of literature. Now available for you science fiction scholars, a collection of the best papers - including one of my own.

Voices from beyond: In this article from The Washington Post, author Brad Meltzer asks if a person can leave a message inside his body before dying, a plot device the author used in his thriller, The Escape Artist. A bit of book promotion that stands alone as both fascinating and inspiring.

== and... ==

A sci-fi-ish disturbing video depicts near-future ubiquitous lethal autonomous weapons, or “slaughterbots.” Of course, as always, the makers of the film point to a dangerous tech-possible trend… and prescribe rules to limit it, never considering the question of how those rules will apply to the worst and most deviously secretive forces in the world.

Watch the video! Be disturbed, as the makers intended! Then watch it again and note that the evil deeds happen precisely because of asymmetry of light. And the only solution… the only possible solution… is to concentrate on shining light on villains, including villainous elites. It is how we got the relative freedom and safety we have now! It is the only way we can keep it. See The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

Peering into the Future: AI and Robot brains

In Singularity or Transhumanism: What Word Should We Use to Discuss the Future? on Slate, Zoltan Istvan writes:

"The singularity people (many at Singularity University) don't like the term transhumanism. Transhumanists don't like posthumanism. Posthumanists don’t like cyborgism. And cyborgism advocates don't like the life extension tag. If you arrange the groups in any order, the same enmity occurs." 

See what the proponents of these words mean by them...

...and why the old talmudic rabbis and jesuits are probably laughing their socks off.

==Progress toward AI?== 

Baby X, a 3D-simulated human child is getting smarter day by day. Researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute Laboratory for Animate Technologies in New Zealand interact with the simulated toddler, reading, teaching, smiling, playing games, even singing into the computer's microphone and webcam. The blonde youngster mimics facial expressions, laughs, reads words, even cries when he is left alone.

"An experiment in machine learning, Baby X is a program that imitates the biological processes of learning, including association, conditioning and reinforcement learning. By algorithmically simulating the chemical reactions of the human brain— think dopamine release or increased oxytocin levels— and connecting them with sensory digital input, when Baby X learns to imitate a facial expression, for instance, software developers write protocols for the variable time intervals between action and response. Effectively "teaching" the child through code, while engineering such a program is no cakewalk, the result is an adorably giggling digital baby with an uncanny ability to learn through interaction," writes Becket Mufson, in the Creators Project.

This is precisely the sixth approach to developing AI that is least discussed by “experts” in the field… and that I have long believed to be essential, in several ways. Above all, by raising them as our children – even fostering them to homes in small robot bodies – we will gain many crucial advantages – that I lay out (somewhat) in Existence.

Meanwhile, Cornell's Robo Brain is currently learning from the internet -- downloading and processing about 1 billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos, and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals, all being translated and stored in a robot-friendly format, accessible to 'helper' robots who will function in our factories, homes, and offices. “If a robot encounters a situation it hasn’t seen before it can query Robo Brain in the cloud,” said one researcher. Follow its progress on the Robobrain website.

It's coming. "You can call it a Virtual Personal Assistant, an Intelligent Agent, an Intelligent Interface or whatever you wish. We call it inevitable," writes Dag Kitlaus in A Cambrian Explosion in AI is Coming in TechCrunch. An interesting assessment of the era of the digital assistant and the likely tsunami of new variations, building upon variations.

Meet Jibo, advertised as "the world's first family robot." Kinda creepy but attractive too…

Ever hear of “neuromorphic architecture?” Silicon chip design that uses transistors — (5 billion of them in the latest IBM chip) - to create analogues of the nonlinear response patterns of biological neurons. The latest version, from IBM, is called “True North” and it is simply spectacular. Its prodigious pattern recognition capabilities are only matched by its stunning (by four orders of magnitude(!)) power efficiency. This is where Moore’s Law, augmented by new neuronal and parallelism software, may truly start delivering.

Now… How to keep what we produce sane? And where on the chip - pray tell - do the Three Laws reside?

Ah, well… I have explored the implications (yin and yang) of the Asimovian laws in my sequel which tied up all the loose ends in Isaac’s universe – Foundation's Triumph. Meanwhile, serious minds are grappling with the problem of “how to keep them loyal." For example…

==Creating Superintelligence==

Nick Bostrom has published the book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," that is well-reviewed by Andrew Leonard in Salon.

"Risks that are especially difficult to control have three characteristics: autonomy, self-replication and self-modification. Infectious diseases have these characteristics, and have killed more people than any other class of events, including war. Some computer malware has these characteristics, and can do a lot of damage...

"But microbes and malware cannot intelligently self-modify, so countermeasures can catch up. A superintelligent system [as outlined by Bostrom would be much harder to control if it were able to intelligently self-modify." writes Bostrom.

Nick Bostrom makes a persuasive case that the future impact of AI is perhaps the most important issue the human race has ever faced. Instead of passively drifting, we need to steer a course. Still, his litany of “be careful what you wish for” parables is taken straight from the pages of a century of science fictional “what-if” scenarios. Geeky sci fi archivists need to be present, during the programming, to point out: “you may want to rephrase that… cause way back in 1947 Leigh Brackett showed that it could be misconstrued as...”

== and more on "intelligence..." ==

When did homo sapiens become a more sophisticated species? Not until our skulls underwent “feminization." Interesting article! In fact the mystery of the First Great Renaissance... the burst of human creativity around 45,000 years ago... is discussed in EXISTENCE!

But -- if I may mention it -- the real correlation with this notion… that sexual selection resulted in gentler, more “feminized” males, was presaged by this paper of mine… Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution.

==Developing Brains==

Researcher Talma Hendler has found evidence for two types of empathy, each tied to a different network of brain regions. One type she calls mental empathy, which requires you to mentally step outside yourself and think about what another person is thinking or experiencing. Parts of the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortex that make up this network. The other type she calls embodied empathy; this is the more visceral in-the-moment empathy you might feel when you see someone get punched in the guts. Very cogent and thought provoking.

This interesting article in Wired explores how movies exploit both of these networks to make you identify with the characters. Only the manipulation is now going scientific!

And veering a bit... When did modern humans arrive in Europe, and by how much did they overlap with our fading cousins, the Neandertals? New studies suggest it all happened earlier than most had assumed, perhaps around ...45,000 years ago.

Now throw in.... Children and adolescents with autism have a surplus of synapses in the brain, and this excess is due to a slowdown in a normal brain “pruning” process during development.

Hmmmmm.

==and organs==

Scientists have for the first time grown a complex, fully functional organ from scratch in a living animal by transplanting cells that were originally created in a laboratory to form a replacement thymus, a vital organ of the immune system.

By deciphering the detailed gene expressions by which a lizard regrows its tail, scientists hope to re-ignite regrowth processes in mammals like us, that have been dormant for 200 million years.

 Both of these stories are straight from my story “Chrysalis” in this month’s ANALOG! Have a look and see where all this may lead!

==Miscellanea==

Scientists report using laser light in ultrafast pulses to control the quantum state of electrons contained inside nanoscale defects located in a diamond, and also observe changes in that electron over a period of time. The findings could be an important milestone on the road to quantum computing.

Another team has devised a way to make microscopes magnify 20 times more than usual. This magnification allows scientists to see and identify substances and matter as minuscule as or even smaller than a virus.

Direct synthesis of ammonia from air and water? At low temperatures and pressures? If this membrane method can bypass the usual harsh processes, the news can be significant for liberating poor farmers everywhere to make their own fertilizer.

Looks plausible… if amazing! A transparent luminescent solar concentrator developed in Michigan can be used to cover anything that has a flat, clear surface. Visible light passes through. But organic molecules absorb invisible wavelengths of sunlight such as ultraviolet and near infrared, guiding those packets to the edge of the solar panel, where thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells pick it up and convert it into energy. Fascinating… another potential game changer.

Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on ordinary AAA battery.

Recommended: what if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe (of the brilliant xkcd).

Researchers from UC San Diego's structural engineering department are using drones to capture unique views of the earthquake damage to Napa's historic landmarks. Our own Falko Kuester explains how this new tech is helping.

How to tell if a Chelyabinsk style meteorite came from an asteroid? Here's the basic rule of thumb. “The speed of whatever collides with Earth’s atmosphere depends on its orbit, which in turn depends on its source. The impactor’s entry at 19 km/s means that it came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, not from a ballistically launched missile, whose speed is less than 11.2 km/s; a short-period comet, with an average speed of 35 km/s; or a long-period comet with an average speed of 55 km/s. As investigators began retracing the path of the meteor that blazed across the sky, their reconstructed orbit bore out that provenance.”  

Oh, anything much faster than 60 kps either fall naturally from outside the solar system... or was accelerated by someone with boojum powers and maybe ill intent!

And finally:

Don’t bogart that puffer, my friend. Dolphins pass around a puffer fish — apparently to get high off its toxins. After a few chomps, you no longer give a fugu.