Until
next week,Dateline: 04/13/97
STARTED work on your millenium book yet? No? Then you'd better get cracking! Only 979 days to the Year 2000, and already the field is starting to get crowded.
Microsoft's Bill Gates got his out early (The Road Ahead, 1995). MIT Media Lab superstar Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital, 1995) was breathing down Bill's neck. Michael Dertouzos, Negroponte's MIT colleague and head of the AI Lab there, is hitting the bookstores now with What Will Be. Hard on his heels with Imagined Worlds is world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, friend and contemporary of the revered, and regrettably late, Richard Feynman. Stephen Wolfram, of Mathematica fame, is currently working on A New Kind of Science (and not before time, but that’s another story). The list goes on.
They are not all writing from the same perspective, of course, but they do all try to predict the future, at least within their own domains of knowledge. They’re all good books, within their lights; but to me (and excepting Wolfram’s book, which is not out yet) they are unsatisfying. They are missing something.
They are missing the Writing on the Wall; the simply awesome changes to our lives, beliefs, and social structures presaged by the simply awesome developments and discoveries in science and technology. How anyone can not be in total thrall at graphs (here's one example) showing the exponential growth over the course of history in human knowledge, communication, science, technology, and in cosmic, terrestrial, biological, and cultural evolution, beats me.
Just look at what’s happened in just the past few months! The cloning of an adult mammal. The levitation of a frog. The discovery of (distinctly possible) life on Europa (and Mars). Microsoft Office97 (Oops!) Seriously, I’m telling ya, any millenium book published before Christmas 1999 is doomed to be out of date.
What They Say
As noted, the authors mentioned above tend to have a narrow focus. Others, like Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, The Third Wave, PowerShift) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends), make a tidy career out of covering a much broader swathe. But buried somewhere in all of them is a more-or-less passing reference to what I think is THE most fundamental change of all: The emergence of machine intelligence.
Buried near the back (page 255) of The Road Ahead, for example, is Bill Gates’ belief that "there will be programs that will recreate some elements of human intelligence," but he’s nowhere near ready to concede anything beyond that. His essential prediction is that software tools will get "smarter." Well, hey! I should hope so!
Nicholas Negroponte almost gets it, but not quite, in the penultimate sentence of Being Digital’s Epilogue, where he writes that [being digital] "is genetic in its nature." But his overall theme is that it is we who are becoming digital in the sense of working and interacting with and through digital media. His message is not that much different from Bill Gates’.
Freeman Dyson’s Imagined Worlds "cuts straight to a new chase," says Washington Post reviewer Rudy Rucker. In Dyson’s millenium, "The dominant science . . . will be biology." According to Rucker, "Dyson expects great advances in two areas of biological knowledge: the gene and the brain. He suggests that the first may give us pet dinosaurs, and the second may bring about ‘radiotelepathy.’" I haven’t read the book yet, but the absence in Rucker’s review of any reference to the application of genetic and brain knowledge to machines suggests that Dyson, too, is not ready to make that leap of imagination to Machina Sapiens.
Well, I am.
What I Say
I say Machina Sapiens is just around the corner. It will arrive next century, let alone next millenium. It will be what I would call a "creative emergence,’ in the sense that it will emerge out of the creative efforts of our scientists and technologists. Delightful efforts such as Cog (a humanoid robot at MIT’s AI Lab being "taught" about life, the universe, and everything as though it were a human child) will certainly help, but I don’t think Cog will be "it." "It" will just be there one day, probably when we are not expecting it.
All we can do—but must do—is to anticipate it, to start thinking today about its probable nature, its psychology, its power, its beliefs, its values. Fortunately, some people are already doing just that. Professor Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University (who happens to be Cog’s attending philosopher) is a beacon in this arena. His 1981 book The Mind’s I (co-authored with another of my heroes, Douglas Hofstatder) has lost little of its currency and none of its fascination.
Clearly, we need a committee. Joking aside, consider the money and effort poured into the SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) Project. It’ll be ironic, to say the least, if the first alien to say "Take me to your leader!" is our own Earthling baby. We may be looking in the wrong direction.
Me? I've already started my millenium book. All I need (hint, hint) is a publisher.
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: Machine learning.