Abstract
Within thirty years, we will have the technological
means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be
ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be
guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible
answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
What is The Singularity?
The acceleration of technological progress has
been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on
the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise
cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with
greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may
achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that
the event will occur):
- There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly
intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can
create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can",
then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed
shortly thereafter.)
- Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a
superhumanly intelligent entity.
- Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably
be considered superhumanly intelligent.
- o Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.
The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements
in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly
steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I
believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during
the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts
have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I'm not
guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I'll be surprised if
this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)
What are the consequences
of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that
progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress
itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a
still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary
past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster
than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own simulator in
the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the
world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands
of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute
those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically
different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.
From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all
the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway
beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only
happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.
(In [5], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter
of hours.)
I think it's fair to call this event a singularity ("the
Singularity" for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models
must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it
will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a
commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a
greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28]
paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:
One conversation centered on
the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human
life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in
the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not
continue. Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it
appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman
intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without
that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see
[25]).)
In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications
of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:
Let an
ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the
intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of
machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine
could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
"intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man
need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
keep it under control.
...
It is more probable than not that, within the
twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
the last invention that man need make. Good has captured the essence
of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any
intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind's "tool" --
any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.
Through the '60s and '70s and '80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread
[29] [1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first
concrete impact. After all, the "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who
try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and
more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put
such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their
most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon. Once, galactic
empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary
ones are.
What about the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, as we slide
toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the
human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will
have good press. After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain
it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human equivalent (or
greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make
a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up
speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally
slow [30]. But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky
process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the
arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of
hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.)
But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by
science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have
heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects
when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We
will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right
now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level
drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of
a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the
Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of
true technological
unemployment finally come true.
Another symptom of progress toward the
Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most
radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing science fiction in
the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to
percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like
eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I
get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible
flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.
And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of
its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will
probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The
precipitating event will likely be unexpected -- perhaps even to the researchers
involved. ("But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking
some parameters....") If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous
embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly
wakened.
And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I
have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the
Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think
I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one
thousand years remove ... instead of twenty.
Can the Singularity be Avoided?
Well, maybe it won't happen at all:
Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the
Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of
Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the practicality of machine sapience. In
August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the
question "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks" [27]. As you might guess from
the workshop's title, the participants were not especially supportive of the
arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement
that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of
central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate
about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt
that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the
power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec's
estimate [17] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet
there was another minority who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the
computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally
believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as
ten
orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this
is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we
might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early '00s we would find our
hardware performance curves beginning to level off -- this because of our
inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware
improvements. We'd end up with some
very powerful hardware, but without
the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be
awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing
would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is
the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age ... and
it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by
Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [25], Stent explicitly cites the
development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his
projections.
But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat" and be
in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there
have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of "a machine in
the likeness of the human mind" [13]. In fact, the competitive advantage --
economic, military, even artistic -- of every advance in automation is so
compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely
assures that someone else will get them first.
Eric Drexler [8] has
provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go. He
agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future -- and
that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues
that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be
examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good's ultraintelligent machine, with a
dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the
case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only
limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at
a rate -- say -- one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that
over a period of years (your time) you could come up with "helpful advice" that
would incidentally set you free. (I call this "fast thinking" form of
superintelligence "weak superhumanity". Such a "weakly superhuman" entity would
probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. "Strong superhumanity" would
be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It's hard
to say precisely what "strong superhumanity" would be like, but the difference
appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a
thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind
were cleverly rewired and
then run at high speed, we might see something
different....) Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the
weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the
post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong
superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)
Another
approach to confinement is to build
rules into the mind of the created
superhuman entity (for example, Asimov's Laws [3]). I think that any rules
strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was
clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would
favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov
dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your
capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe
wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other
activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled
with benevolent gods (though one of
my wishes might be to become one of
them).
If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad
could the Post-Human era be? Well ... pretty bad. The physical extinction of the
human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology:
Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide
that they no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the
scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to
animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet.... In a
Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent
automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices,
self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly
superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very
competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing
more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans.
Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a
dedication
that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these
creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in
the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say
about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed
a "Meta-Golden Rule", which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you
would be treated by your superiors." It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and
most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard
to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say
something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)
I
have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an
inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the
possibilities inherent in technology. And yet ... we are the initiators. Even
the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to
establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical
than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what
the right guiding nudge really is:
Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification
When people
speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an
AI project. But as I noted at the beginning of this paper, there are other paths
to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more
mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this
contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something that is
proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers
for what it is. But every time our ability to access information and to
communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase
over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a PhD human and good computer
workstation (even an off-net workstation!) could probably max any written
intelligence test in existence.
And it's very likely that IA is a much
easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the
hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within
ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then
building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural
precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological
life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on
crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong
arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.
Note
that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on
with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that
we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as
profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we
may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface
and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity
along the IA path.
Here are some possible projects that take on special
significance, given the IA point of view:
- Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered
for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems), and design programs
and interfaces that take a advantage of humans' intuition and available
computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional
hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for
their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control
tools provided to the human team member.
- Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation
capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of
course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer
aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim
for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the
cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work
in this direction.
- Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs
that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done
on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If
such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the
positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for
the corresponding niche in AI.
- Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without
requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer.
(This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that
lots of effort is already being spent on it.)
- Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular
research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This
is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much
as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user
giving the program guidance.
- Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more
effective than their component members). This is generally the area of
"groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in
viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination
organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of
inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance,
group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings.
Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such
that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project.
And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in
conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team
operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the
automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons
making the rules!)
- Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all
the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run
us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even
the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our
contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own
complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the
system administration and support people! The very anarchy of the worldwide
net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth
and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like
Lynn Margulis' [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated,
but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent
agents (ourselves).
The above examples illustrate research
that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science
departments. There are other paradigms. For example, much of the work in
Artificial Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection
with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand
biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation
of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance or for the
providing features we don't understand well enough yet to implement in hardware.
A long-time dream of science-fiction has been direct brain to computer
interfaces [2] [29]. In fact, there is concrete work that can be done (and is
being done) in this area:
- Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to
silicon transducers can be made [14]. This is an exciting, near-term step
toward direct communication.
- Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given
human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to
be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to
stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.
- Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1
Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture
of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite
precision. If we want our high bandwidth connection to be in addition
to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly
more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a
brain certainly won't do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were
present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo
develops. That suggests:
- Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the first
years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex
simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study
how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run, such experiments might
produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual
abilities.
Originally, I had hoped that this discussion of IA
would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all, IA
allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.) Alas, looking back over
these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they should be considered,
that they may give us more options. But as for safety ... well, some of the
suggestions are a little scarey on their face. One of my informal reviewers
pointed out that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We
humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard
competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in
today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted into
the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built
de novo might
possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel based on fang and
talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all
mankind can be viewed as a nightmare [26].
The problem is not simply
that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but
that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look
at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.
Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for
Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant
hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans themselves would become their
own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge
of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment
(perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike
slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress (overleaping Stent's
barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe
survive [10] [4]) would be achievable.
But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves
become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever;
after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than
a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live
indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough,
and looks back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was
originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original was,
but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or
Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still
be valid.
This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion
of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism
of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack
from the Artificial Intelligence people ("self-awareness and other delusions").
Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction.
The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking.
A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability
to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech
or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged,
when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the
problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity
and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially
strange and different the Post-Human era will be -- no matter how cleverly
and benignly it is brought to be.
From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending,
where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From
another angle, it's a lot like the worst- case scenario I imagined earlier in
this paper.
Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different
to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the
idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links.
But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of
change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of
biological life). I think there are notions of ethics that would apply
in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve
this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good's
Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others
on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly
more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought)
need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: "God
is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson
of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]
Annotated Sources [and an occasional plea for bibliographical help]
[1] Alfve'n, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, The End of Man?, Award
Books, 1969 earlier published as "The Tale of the Big Computer", Coward-McCann,
translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English
translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollanz, Ltd.
[2] Anderson, Poul, "Kings Who Die", If, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted
in Seven Conquests, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.
[3] Asimov, Isaac, "Runaround", Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942,
p94. Reprinted in Robot Visions, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes
the development of his robotics stories in this book.
[4] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,
Oxford University Press, 1986.
[5] Bear, Greg, "Blood Music", Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact June,
1983. Expanded into the novel Blood Music, Morrow, 1985.
[6] Cairns-Smith, A. G., Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
[7] Conrad, Michael et al., "Towards an Artificial Brain", BioSystems,
vol 23, pp175-218, 1989.
[8] Drexler, K. Eric, Engines of Creation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.
[9] Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions, Harper && Row,
1988.
[10] Dyson, Freeman, "Physics and Biology in an Open Universe", Review of
Modern Physics, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.
[11] Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine",
in Advances in Computers, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds,
pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.
[12] Good, I. J., [Help! I can't find the source of Good's Meta-Golden Rule,
though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s.
Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items.
G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate
to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, "How to Get along with Extraterrestrials
... or Your Neighbor", Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction, February,
1980, p39-47.]
[13] Herbert, Frank, Dune, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was
serialized in Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact in the 1960s.
[14] Kovacs, G. T. A. et al., "Regeneration Microelectrode Array for
Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation", IEEE Transactions on Biomedical
Engineering, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.
[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of
Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, Summit Books, 1986.
[16] Minsky, Marvin, Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
[17] Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, Harvard University Press, 1988.
[18] Niven, Larry, "The Ethics of Madness", If, April 1967, pp82-108.
Reprinted in Neutron Star, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.
[19] Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press,
1989.
[20] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.
[21] Rasmussen, S. et al., "Computational Connectionism within Neurons:
a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks", in Emergent
Computation, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp428-449, MIT Press, 1991.
[22] Searle, John R., "Minds, Brains, and Programs", in The Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted
in The Mind's I, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett,
Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an
excellent critique of the Searle essay.
[23] Sims, Karl, "Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems", Thinking Machines
Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in Toward a Practice of Autonomous
Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life,
Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.
[24] Stapledon, Olaf, The Starmaker, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the
date on forward, probably written before 1937).
[25] Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of
Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969.
[26] Swanwick Michael, Vacuum Flowers, serialized in Isaac Asimov's
Science Fiction Magazine, December(?) 1986 - February 1987. Republished
by Ace Books, 1988.
[27] Thearling, Kurt, "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks", a workshop
at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.
[28] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp1-49.
[29] Vinge, Vernor, "Bookworm, Run!", Analog, March 1966, pp8-40. Reprinted
in True Names and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.
[30] Vinge, Vernor, "True Names", Binary Star Number 5, Dell, 1981. Reprinted
in True Names and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.
[31] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, Omni, January 1983, p10.
[32] Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ :-) ].
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