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I just read yet another great essay at edge.org. George Dyson discusses his visit to Google:
For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn’t be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”
He also has a follow-up essay that I have yet to read.
Update: The second essay is shorter, but also an interesting idea: a Universal Library. It’s the Lexicographic Universe: something like a librarian’s answer to Wolfram’s Computational Universe. Fun idea. My response to Wolfram would be something like Dyson’s response to the Universal Library:
Even in the Age of Search, we still need authors to find the meaningful books!
Ditto scientists.
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Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
