cosmodelia:
Perhaps the most interesting recent (relatively)
novels featuring IA, with a healthy dose of warning about the dangers of
the said tech, is the long, but definitely worth reading, four-book set by Dan
Simmons: /Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of
Endymion\. I thought that these were very rich books, with new
technology, interesting characters, thoughtful situations, and neat
conflicts.
In classic SF, true AI is very rare, and when
done, kind of a throwaway. The exeption is robots, like Isaac Asimov's
positronic brains, which probably count. The two short story collections
/I, Robot\ and /The Rest of the Robots\ are worth reading, if only to help you
understand what people who refer to the Three Laws of Robotics are talking
about.
For the most part, computers in SF are almost as
primitive as those in the Star Trek shows, or, like those in the Verner Vinge
novels, updated, star-faring versions of whatever technology was hot the year
the book was written (in Vinge's case, Internet usegroups). I suppose
that's one reason Arthur C. Clarke's HAL was so noticeable. Heinlein did
come up with a talking skycar in /The Number of the Beast\, but that's
from his later, practically unreadable, period.
I remember reading an out-of-print and
little-regarded book from the fifties called "The Rocket Ship," which was
a usual space opera kind of story of a super agent and his trusty companion
flying saucer. The character of the ship was very feminine, so this
naturally kind of stuck in my 13-year-old memory. But I don't remember
the author (not noted for anything else) and there's no reference in Amazon to
anything like this.
The dangers of computer technology (including AI
-- ref /The Matrix\) are treated much more often in movies and
tv than in SF literature. That's because movies and tv treat all
technology as dangerous.
As I said, AI is rare, so that's all I can
remember. I stopped reading SF regularly twenty years ago, though, so
others can no doubt recommend more.
C. David Noziglia
Object Sciences
Corporation
6359 Walker Lane, Alexandria, VA
(703) 253-1095
"What is true and what is not?
Only God knows. And, maybe,
America."
Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi, Special to Arab News
"Just because something is
obvious doesn't mean it's
true."
--- Esmerelda Weatherwax, witch of Lancre
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 9:18
AM
Subject: RE: [agi] Jane
hey cosmodelic one,
As you read further in the series, you'll find that Jane didn't
exactly just *emerge*; she was created -- although she did grow into
something very different from her originally-created form. (Sorry to
spoil an element of the plot for you ;)
But Jane is an interesting portrayal of an AI as arising from a
kind of "communicational brain". This concept is related, but
not identical, to the idea of the "global brain",
see
But the conjectured global brain is *composed of* communicational
elements, whereas Jane is in a way parasitic off them...
One of the great things about Speaker for the Dead and its two
sequels, is the depth with which Card portrays the different
psychologies and cognitive abilities of the different alien races (the
pequeninos, the buggers, and Jane). Although jane is clearly smarter
than the others, the intelligences of the other three races are in a way
incommensurable -- just *different from*, not better or worse than each
other. This is a lesson worth learning as we move toward creating
digital intelligent beings: intelligence is multidimensional not linearly
scalable. This is true among humans but far more true in a
cross-species sense. Narrow AI is already teaching us this in a way,
of course.
Of
course, I think Card's novels are WAY off as futurology, in the sense that
technology advances hardly at all over 3000 years in his universe. The
ansible (superluminal communication) and other tech is borrowed from the
buggers, but humans don't invent much that is new and significant during
3000 years!! This works well for the story he wants to tell, but seems
phenomenally unlikely...
--
Ben G
I'm reading Speaker for the Dead by
Orson Scott Card. I'm finding the IA character "Jane" interesting because
Jane emerged, Jane was not created. It seems Card thinks IA will emerge as
human intelligence emerged.
" Jane first found herself between the stars,
her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the
ansible net. The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes
and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to
computers and read every book in every library on every world."
Card consistently treats Jane not as a tool
or device but as a character and he describes as Jane has feelings that
shape her relations to the information she gathers and processes. In the
book we read as Jane uses the extraordinary communication power of the
ansible to scan universes of information and quickly respond to every
need. The chapter "Jane" is a good
explanations of superhuman life of this IA. If you read that chapter,
do you think it is something close to your projects?
I know Jane character follows during the next
two books: Xenocide and Children of the Mind, but I have not read them, and I don't
know how Card imagines the continuation of "his" IA.
By the way, do you know some work on SF'
IAs?
Cosmodelia
