For me reading about futurism is a kind of antidote to the suckiness of reality. And in some ways it’s a guilty pleasure. Because I was one of those people who was disappointed when that Stephen Wolfram book sold out and I had to wait two weeks to get one. And because I was one of those people who didn’t just read “The Singularity is Near,” I actually went and bought Kurzweil’s other book — the one where he tries to sell you power shakes.
I read all that crap.
And most of it really is crap, most of it really is bad science fiction.
But the thing is, the numbers are real. Mostly it’s crap because nobody can say anything intelligent beyond the general observation “uh, something is happening here.” As soon as they start to try to predict it, well, they may as well be Jerry Falwell.
Thing is, though, you don’t have to be a televangelist to believe that humanity is going to smack up into some shit we ain’t never seen before. You just have to understand exponents.
Now, the accepted story among the futurati goes something like this: okay, see, we have Moore’s Law, which means that computers get faster and faster. And the getting-faster is getting faster. Which means, well, if you take the derivative of the function you’re plotting of fastness, that function is going up too. Up up, all around.
And then the story inevitably turns to “what is intelligence?” Because, if you have a machine which is hella fast, then eventually you’ll be able to model all those… squishy neurons, as if they were circuits. You’ll be able to assign a bit to represent each neuron in a brain, or at least to enough of them to model a functional blob of gray muck, and then, VOILA PEOPLE, VOILA, intelligence.
Which is of course, so much baloney.
At least, it’s very easy to see that it’s baloney if the people are all also assuming that our current concept of “software” is going to play any role whatsoever in creating these emulations. Lemme tell you right now, intelligence is not going to pop out of a Java virtual machine. Or even Perl 6!
I mean, yeah, there will “programs” going on and software and CPUs and all that, it’s just that people won’t write the programs. The programs will be hopelessly complex, and for all practical purposes, they’ll be organisms. What “programmers” will do (Kevin Kelly has some great stuff about this in his book Out of Control) is sit around trying to figure out ways to kill the software. Mung it up. Because the software will have self-healing capabilities, and the efforts directed at munging it up will result in improvements.
Or at least, that’s what all the software astronauts will tell you.
But that’s baloney too.
(Now I’m getting pretentious.)
See, there’s another revolution, and this one gets less respect, because mostly it’s only ever gotten any public attention in the form of toys and vacuum cleaners. Like this one:
Here’s another one:
Most people aren’t aware of the revolution that’s underlying these things. One was designed by a guy from Los Alamos, the other is from MIT.
The funny thing is, they’re both based on a lack of technology. They don’t depend on complicated programming and processing. They work like animals (the dumb ones) work. Their sensors are tied directly to the actuators. The interaction of the objects with the world “creates” intelligence.
If a Roomba were set loose on the parking lot of Mall of America, assuming the highly impossible scenario that there were no cars on it, it wouldn’t look very intelligent. It would sort of just, uh, go.
But when you see it get stuck in a corner and repeatedly attempt to get it self out — turning, bumping, wiggling — you can’t help but think to yourself, “god, it’s so… dumb, the way it tries so hard to get itself out of the corner.”
What you maybe don’t think about so much is the fact that you called it dumb in the first place. I mean, yeah, it’s dumb — it also sucks up dirt! And besides, what do you want for a couple hundred bucks?
That toy, on the other hand, the Robosapien… that thing costs less than a hundred bucks, and it’s easily as entertaining as one of those fancy schmancy Aibos. It’s fun just to watch it walk around. It’s fun to watch it walk around in the same way that it’s fun to watch a cat walk around. And my cat likes to watch my dad’s Robosapian walk around. And I’m pretty sure she likes to watch it because… well… it’s fun.
Does the cat think that toy is alive?
Well, duh. Of course.
The purest example of this sort of approach to “intelligence” is something called BEAM robotics (which, incidentally, was founded by the Robosapien guy, who got a fair share of inspiration by studying stuff the Roomba guy was doing).
BEAM is about building robots without processors. In fact, as I understand it (and I haven’t succeeded in building a BEAM robot myself, though I’ve tried), they actually design the “circuits” expressly to be slow. Slow enough to function in the physical world.
I think the insight behind this geeky little hobby is a profound one. Because this is what will happen:
- People continue building silly little robots that do amusing pointless things by sending simple signals from one sensor to another.
- Wireless networking devices get ridiculously small and cheap and ubiquitous.
- Somebody figures out how to put the damn things on the internet.
- People start building little robots that do… not so pointless things by sending simple signals to each other.
Then hell breaks loose.
