WHY A.I.?

So much has been said and written about artificial intelligence (not to mention movies with Haley Joel Osment). What is it, really, and do we even want it? You’d be content with just finding some human intelligence once in a while, right?

Computer scientists seem obsessed with trying to create machines that can think as well as human beings can. It sounds like a lot of trouble to create…a lot of trouble.

Back in June I blogged about a chatbot named Eugene that had supposedly passed the Turing Test by fooling a panel of judges into thinking they were conversing with a human being. It was a very clever trick, but surely not real artificial intelligence in the sense of a synthetic processor that is the mental equivalent of a human. Engineers and programmers can create specialized machines that can outperform humans in any number of areas, except it’s our very non-specialization that makes us special. Any given day we can get ourselves cleaned and dressed, cook and eat breakfast, drive a car to work (and fix a flat on the way, if necessary) where we might teach a class of students about literature in another language. We can discuss geopolitics in the lunchroom, shop for groceries on the drive home, all the while humming a favourite song or even imagining a Stones hit as it might be sung by Frank Sinatra, just for fun. Computers can have software installed to perform a task. Humans use evolved software (memes, instincts) to learn new software (skills) and adapt it to changing needs in ways that might never have been foreseen.

Some experts insist that, as computational power increases, machines are bound to be able to outdo the processing power of the human brain, maybe very soon. Such claims depend on estimates—no-one really knows how much processing the brain accomplishes. Reputable scientists have speculated that the human brain might be a type of quantum computer, in which case potential processing power increases enormously.

We should also make the distinction between intelligence and consciousness. Raccoons are smart (damn them) but we don’t know if they’re conscious. The thing is, no-one knows how consciousness works either, so how can we reproduce it in a machine? Many researchers just seem to assume that, once processors finally get fast enough, consciousness will appear. Maybe it will. But also maybe not.

It’s not impossible to imagine conscious machines—heck, when we’re kids we imagine that our teddy bears have personalities. We anthropomorphize all kinds of things, convinced that our car somehow knows when we get paid a bonus at work, and that storms deliberately target our picnics out of pure malice. The Cog artificial intelligence project at M.I.T. involved a humanoid robot, based on the idea that a machine intelligence could become more human-like through a very large number of interactions with humans, and that a human-looking robot would be more natural for humans to interact with. They might have been right about that, but the project is no more.

We know that every single human being we encounter has a rich inner life of desires, regrets, expectations and speculations, fears and dreams. Is that really what we want from our machines? What purpose would it serve? In fiction, when machines have desires and aspirations it becomes inevitable that those desires will eventually conflict with our own. That’s when the trouble starts. Skynet and its henchmen…er, henchrobots. So why go there?

Let’s be content with producing computers that process information very quickly and problem-solve within carefully thought-out limits. And let sleeping cogs lie.

WHEN SPACEFLIGHT IS ROUTINE

I mentioned in my last post that the human race now has the ability to create our own future, for good or for bad. That means we have to decide the kind of world we want in the years to come and figure out what needs to be done to make that world come about.

It was ten years ago this week (October 4, 2004) that SpaceShipOne, manufactured by Scaled Composites, LLC made its second flight within two weeks to the edge of space to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize. In my future world, travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is virtually routine. Sure, I wanted to be a space cowboy as a kid (with all the poise and composure of Buzz Lightyear, no doubt) but the adult in me can justify it in lots of rational ways. The biggest reason is that, in a universe with planet-killing asteroids and globe-scorching weapons of our own devising, we don’t dare entrust all the forms of life that we know about to one vulnerable planet. We owe it to Life to spread its eggs beyond this basket, whether that means terraforming Mars or building space arks to other solar systems.

There’s also abundant free energy out there. It may not be possible to safely transfer it to the surface of the Earth, but we should at least be taking advantage of it to perform manufacturing tasks that are energy-intensive and use huge quantities of finite and polluting energy resources when carried out down here. The same argument goes for resources of other kinds: minerals and rare earths that we know are available in asteroids and moons, and can be mined without despoiling the environment of the Earth.

It may take significantly more time to accomplish, but the ability to colonize other planets, near and far, would relieve a lot of the pressure on our home world all by itself, as well as providing opportunities we can’t yet imagine on whole new frontiers. Individually and collectively, humans have always been inspired to improve our lot by pushing against boundaries and seeking greener pastures.

To do all of these things we need spaceflight to become cheap and routine. How do we do that?

Government programs aren’t the answer. There is a place for public money to support technological innovation, but bureaucracies and shifting political winds are the enemies of real progress. That leaves private ventures or publicly-traded companies, of which there are now many that are directly involved in space exploration and exploitation (see these lists thanks to The Space Settlement Institute). Among the highest profile examples are SpaceX (with a number of successful supply missions to the International Space Station) and Virgin Galactic (more than five hundred people have booked their sub-orbital flight aboard SpaceShipTwo, hopefully beginning next year). But many of the other players are serious, well-staffed, and well-organized. If you want to do your part to bring about routine spaceflight in your lifetime, consider investing in these companies, either by buying stock or making a donation. Some may invite you to volunteer your time and talent. All would appreciate you urging governments to smooth their path with friendly legislation or funding or both.

Maybe you and I will never get to be space cowboys, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help to put things in motion. Onward and upward, that is.

FUTURE BUILDING 101

Science fiction authors are expected to have a crystal ball. Not with the precision focus of a fortune teller’s, thank goodness, but able to see the broad strokes of the future, mainly from observing social and technological trends. Because, we humans now have the power to shape our bodies, our minds, even our planet, for good or bad. We’re building our future world.

Personally, I’d like a Star Trek future (the optimistic Gene Roddenberry vision) as opposed to, say, a Neuromancerfuture, or a Blade Runner future, or a MaddAddam future. But if we don’t truly understand what we want, how will we know what to build?

This blog is as good a place as any to look at the future we want and the things we’ll have to do to make it. So I’ll be doing that in coming weeks. Just don’t hold me to any predictions. And don’t ask me for a personal reading.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that one of the most critical needs for our future is clean energy. Coal and oil burning pollute the air and do scary things to the climate. Nuclear fission produces waste that’s radioactive for thousands of years, and its accidents could give us all cancer. Solar and wind energy sources are becoming more efficient, but may never meet all of our needs. So the best bet looks to be (drum roll please)…nuclear fusion.

Wow, I just broke some news that’s been around for a hundred years.

OK, so just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Nuclear fusion reactors use fuel that’s in great abundance (usually hydrogen isotopes made using seawater and lithium), produce waste that loses its radioactivity within a few hundred years, not thousands, require few safety measures because the reaction can’t sustain itself, won’t poison the environment with long-lived radio-isotopes in the event of a leak, and produce a lot of energy. Fantastic, right?

Unfortunately the pin that bursts the nuclear fusion bubble is that so far we haven’t been able to produce a sustained fusion reaction that doesn’t use as much energy to keep it going as the amount of energy it produces. Not such a profitable equation. However, many scientists believe the problem is just a question of scale: build a reactor big enough and the thing will work without needing large amounts of energy to keep the flame lit. Based on that theory, a huge facility in Cadarache, France called the ITER Project is being built by a partnership of the European Union (as hosts), the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, India, and South Korea. It is a mega-project, after all. Mega as in: an original budget of about 5 billion euros but now projected to reach 16 billion. And that’s just for an experimental reactor that isn’t intended to generate electricity, but simply prove that the concept is viable!

If you get heart palpitations thinking about all of the other worthwhile things 16 billion euros could pay for, remember that if fusion can be made to work on a commercial scale, it could solve nearly every problem related to energy production that we face today, and then, thanks to cheap and abundant energy, go on to solve many other problems (running plants to turn seawater into fresh water, for example).

Fusion energy is the future we want. So the monetary investment is what we need to do to get it.

That’s the way this future-building thing works.

MAKE YOUR OWN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

Even if you’re not a science nerd or a science fiction reader you’ve probably heard of the “many worlds” theory, “alternate universe” theory, the “multiverse” or one of its many other names. The idea is that there might exist a very large, or even infinite number of universes very like this one but slightly different because something happened there that didn’t happen here. It’s a part of quantum theory, which can get very weird, but it’s not fantasy. The theory has been around since the late 1950’s, credited to American physicist Hugh Everett. The simplest explanation is that, if a particle in motion is able to go left or right it actually does both. Of course, it can’t be in two places at the same time in one universe, so a second universe is split off. In one of them the particle went left, in the other it went right. The two universes had identical histories up to that point, but are never quite the same afterward. Taking a left turn instead of a right might make a big difference, and the differences will grow greater as time goes on. Since these splits could be happening all the time, you can imagine that the number of possible universes is vast.

If a tiny micro-particle has the ability to do that, imagine what a human being could do? We’re not only a lot bigger, and able to exert a lot more influence over things, but we do it consciously: we make choices.

Imagine creating a new universe with every decision you make? Do you feel the godlike power?

Better than role-playing games. Even better than being an author. Because these universes are real! And I’d like to think that all of us (with the possible exception of psychopaths) would choose to create a universe that’s better than this one, even if only by a little bit. That would just mean choosing to take an action that would make the universe a better place.

Although the many worlds theory has terrific fiction potential, and I’ve used it a few times in stories (including my first published story “No Walls”)…I don’t actually believe it. Sorry. Just too complicated and unlikely from my point of view.

However, I know it’s possible to change this universe, creating an alternate future from the one that would have happened. It’s what we do every day. We go to work in appropriate clothes and on time, thereby preventing the alternate future where we’re out of work and on the street. Every decision we make affects the future, which means that our every choice can make the universe a better place or a worse place. Maybe we’re not gods who create a new universe every time we make up our minds, but with every action we do steer the universe we’re in.

News came this week that the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere increased at a record rate over the past year. This, when we’re supposed to be taking action globally to stop the greenhouse effect. Sunday September 21, 2014 people all around the world will be marching to draw attention to climate change, hoping that world leaders will actually do something meaningful about it before it’s too late. A simple web search will provide details about the event nearest you. Why not take part? Sign a petition? You’re a universe-changer with godlike power, remember? Or even if you don’t march you can make a choice to walk to the convenience store next time, turn the furnace down or the air conditioner off.

Make the right choices. Create the universe you want.

TO BE, OR NOT TO BE...LITERARY

In my last post I mused about the plight of SF magazine On Spec losing some significant grant money, and whether or not it was partly due to a seemingly eternal stigma borne by genre fiction as compared to literary fiction.

I’m a fan of both. I love literary fiction for its deep insight into Life and the evocative language of its prose. I love SF for its startling ideas and the breadth of its imagination. And I especially love it when I discover both “genres” displaying the qualities of the other. That’s happening more and more. There may have been a time when the prose of SF was a bit rough and tumble and the characters somewhat flatly sketched. Even now there’s a lot of space opera that’s basically action/adventure and doesn’t pretend to be anything more (though there exceptions to everything). There’s also a growing wealth of fiction that sets out to do everything literary fiction does, but with more flash.

In Canadian literary circles the immigrant experience has been very big for a few decades. Why not? There’s a lot to be learned about the human condition through the story of the outsider—it reveals the new, while shining fresh light onto the old. I can’t think of a genre that has more stories of the outsider than science fiction. Are the observations somehow less profound, the emotions less valid, the insight less sharp because the outsider is an extraterrestrial among humans, a human among aliens, or a man/woman out of his/her own time? Certainly not. In fact, I would argue that the revelations can be even more enriching, since they not only explore the vagaries of life as we know it can be, but also life as we can barely imagine it to be.

I’m blown away by the exquisitely well-chosen words and phrases of writers like David Mitchell and China Miéville. But recently reading Bowl Of Heaven and Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, I found many tasty passages there too. And they’re considered hard science fiction writers. While literary authors are praised for opening our eyes to both the sweeping vistas and the exquisite minutiae of our world, are such descriptions less magical because they involve objects that only exist in the mind’s eye? Are observations of human nature less poignant because the mirror being held up is a creature of scientific extrapolation or complete fantasy? I don’t see why.

Maybe bookstores will always need to restrict certain kinds of stories to specific shelves for the sake of efficient commerce. For book readers to allow their minds to remain forever bound by such artificial constraints would be a sad state of affairs indeed.

Let’s rejoice in the richness of all fiction, and leave the labelling behind!

ON SPEC--GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

Good news this week is the release of the anthology Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories: An On Spec 25^th Anniversary Retrospective by Tyche Books. It includes my story “A Taste Of Time” (in fact, the blueberries in the bottom right corner of the cover would be mine, I believe). To have a story chosen as one of the best representatives of such a high quality magazine from the past twenty-five years is an incredible honour. Once I’ve had a chance to read the anthology, I’ll certainly put a detailed review on my Goodreads page, but frankly, as a reader, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy this book sight unseen. It’s guaranteed to be a showcase of Canadian speculative fiction without many equals, and that means a juicy read, to say the least.

That brings me to the bad news of the past week, the news that the Canada Council for the Arts has turned down On Spec’s application for funding for 2015. This means a loss of up to $25,000 to cover production costs (including paying writers). Certainly a shock to the Canadian SF community (and very unfortunate timing, to have the elation over the launch of the anthology punctured by such a disappointing decision). But even harder to understand was the jury’s criticism of the magazine’s quality of writing and production values.

On Spec holds a special place in my heart because my very first short story sale was to them, a story called “The Wind Man”. That was a tremendous validation because I had great respect for the quality of writing that On Spec consistently displayed. In fact, “The Wind Man” didn’t end up being my first published story because On Spec’s commitment to thorough proofing and editing took more time than other publications. On Spec doesn’t just supply the mind-expanding ideas and lustrously-imagined landscapes of good science fiction and fantasy, but also the richness of literary prose. For the Canada Council jury to criticize the quality of writing in the magazine is mystifying. Some of my compatriots in Canadian science fiction have suggested it’s because of an age-old prejudice that genre writing of any kind cannot rise to the level of “literary fiction”. I hope it isn’t that. One would think that in light of work by David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and so many others, such a bias would once and for all have been put to rest.

I haven’t submitted to On Spec in some time because I’m concentrating on long fiction these days, but I would do so again in a heartbeat, and my subscription to the magazine is my best endorsement. If you’re not familiar with On Spec or Canadian SF in general, give it a try. A year’s subscription is a bargain. Or buy the anthology. Or both.

I don’t want to envision a future without On Spec.

THE BEST FUEL IS NO FUEL, IMPOSSIBLE OR NOT

There was quite a stir a week ago as NASA confirmed the success of an engine that runs without fuel. Your first reaction will be, “Where can I get one of those for my car?!” So perhaps I should call it a propulsion method with no apparent propellant. And it might be usable for spacecraft, but your Chevy is going to have to keep on sucking gas.

The first version of this system was something called the EmDrive by its British inventor, Roger Shawyer. The EmDrive produces thrust from electrical energy by bouncing microwaves inside a sealed container. Physicists said such a thing was impossible because it violated the law of conservation of momentum: to get something moving, you have to exert a force, whether it’s feet on pavement or hot rocket exhaust sprayed in the opposite direction—you gain momentum by taking it from something else. But Shawyer wasn’t deterred. He even got support from a Chinese team that built an EmDrive in 2013 and found that it produced enough thrust to potentially move a satellite around in space.

Non-Chinese physicists still weren’t buying it until an American named Guido Fetta built a microwave thruster of his own, persuaded NASA to test it out, and on July 30^th, 2014 the NASA team unveiled its results: impossible or not, the microwave thruster did produce thrust using electrical energy alone—no propellant. The amount of thrust was much less than the Chinese results (Shawyer blames this on Fetta’s design) but still undeniable. The NASA scientists only reported their methods and results—they did not choose to speculate about how the thing works. But as Wired magazine points out, they implied that the microwave thruster may be pushing against the “quantum vacuum plasma”: a froth of the universe’s tiniest particles that, according to quantum mechanics, pop into and out of existence constantly in empty space. In that case, it’s not violating any laws. It’s also not impossible.

This is big news. One of the greatest challenges involved in space travel is the mass of propellant needed for any type of rocket engine. To be able to do without propellant is huge. An EmDrive thruster could be powered by solar energy or presumably, for interstellar travel, a nuclear reactor. The thrust produced is small, but steady, and over the vast distances of space it’s steady that wins the race.

To me, the aspect of the news that’s even more delightful is that it’s yet another instance of someone proving that the “impossible” is no such thing. I realize that the discovery of the laws under which the universe operates is at the core of advancing human knowledge. But when will people stop using the word impossible? I couldn’t begin to list all of the “impossible” things that have proven to be not only possible, but sometimes the next law against which other impossible things are measured.

For now, our best scientists still believe that such things as faster-than-light travel and time travel are impossible. As a science fiction writer, I don’t dare accept that because it would spoil too many great stories! But more than that, I’ve come to see that “impossible” just means “not yet” or perhaps “not within our current understanding”. I’d strongly urge scientists to remove the word from their vocabulary—there’s just too good a chance that they’ll eventually have to eat it.

APOLLO: THE LITTLE CAPSULE THAT COULD

Remembering humankind’s first landing on the moon forty-five years ago this week stirs a mix of emotions. To an SF-geek-from-birth like me it was a dream come true. I watched the landing “live” on TV (it was also the first time my parents let me drink wine!) It seemed like the human race’s colonization of the solar system had begun. In lots of ways we now live in a science fiction world of personal communicators, video conferencing, laser weapons, and stun guns (tasers, not phasers), but we haven’t colonized any other planets. No-one’s even been back to the moon since 1972. Space travel hasn’t ground to a halt, but it has stayed close to home.

It’s been said that the real impetus for the moon landings was political. These days, other than a small number of purely scientific probes, ventures into space are increasingly for economic reasons, with private enterprise becoming more and more involved. That’s not a bad thing, except that it’s bound to the vagaries of fickle market forces. Still, I’m grateful that there are entrepreneurs with enough vision to take such risks, knowing that returns on their investment are far from guaranteed. There are vastly greater amounts of money being pumped into technology to give your smartphone a bendable screen, or to let you instantly share pictures of your cat’s latest antics with thousands of your closest friends, because that’s where the profits are. Much has been made of the fact that the USB stick you use as a keychain is more powerful than the computers that navigated Apollo 11 to the moon and back. Think how much better we could do these days if we really wanted to.

Too expensive? Detractors have always pointed out that the money spent on the space program (more than $100 billion in today’s dollars for Apollo and its predecessors) could have been put to better use alleviating poverty and sickness on Earth. I find it far more objectionable that six members of the Walton family (Walmart) have a net worth of more than $140 billion.

It’s become a cliché to compare the cost of space exploration to the amount of money spent on weapons, but it’s an important comparison. Because the conquest of space is about life, not death: ensuring a future for our planet and all of its inhabitants. Transplanting manufacturing and resource extraction to the asteroids and moons to ease the stress on a depleted Earth wracked by climate change. Offering new frontiers for those oppressed by overpopulation. Maybe most of all, making sure that earthly forms of life are preserved for the future. There have been at least five mass extinction events since life began on Earth—we don’t want to still be stranded here for the next one.

Politics or not, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the dusty surface of the moon, we felt that the human race had achieved something truly momentous. Was that the last time we felt that way? Is it because of changing priorities, or have large scale problems brought on a global crisis of confidence?

We need the big dreamers to come to the forefront again. Instead of “how do we keep from backsliding?” we need more “I think I can, I think I can!”

HOW SMART SHOULD OUR APPLIANCES BE?

It’s pretty cool to think that someday soon our fridge will detect that we’re low on milk and alert us about it, or even order more on its own. What if it also alerts our doctor that we’re eating too much cheese and not enough veggies? What if that information gets to our insurance company? Or if the government can tell we’re cheating the employment insurance system with an unreported job, because we’re buying expensive cuts of meat?

How smart do we really want our appliances to be?

Two stories got me thinking about that this week: Google just announced that it will join with Samsung and a number of other players to form the Thread Group, a means to establish a standard protocol for the “internet of things” (IoT). Which makes excellent sense—imagine the headache if our Proctor Silex toaster can’t tell our Whirlpool fridge that the bread is stale! And a new Telus/IDC study shows that 30% of medium and large businesses in Canada plan to deploy IoT in some way within the next two years. Since the internet of things could incorporate everything from your pacemaker to health monitors on cattle to traffic sensors to home smoke alarms, and countless more devices, there’s no question that within another ten years we’ll be surrounded by “smart” objects.

My SF writer brain thinks this is outstanding. Then my everyday brain slaps me upside the head and reminds me that I can’t even keep up with all the settings on my iPhone. Am I going to actually allocate time to decide whether or not my microwave should have “Location Services” enabled and if my bathroom soap dispenser should be able to talk to my treadmill? Not going to happen. Default settings will reign, meaning someone else’s idea of what information my personal belongings should collect and who they should send it to.

Yikes. I don’t think even George Orwell would have imagined being ratted out by his electric toothbrush. Although the more likely result is that I’ll start to brush my teeth and an ad will pop up on my bathroom mirror, assuring me that I can get even more whitening power for less money if I switch to new Galaxy toothpaste with Quantumcleen®.

The purpose of the internet of things is to make the products we use more efficient, and more useful, to make us better informed for the choices we face, to make our lives run more smoothly. It certainly has the potential to do all those things and more. As long as we know what we want and make our desires clearly heard. Right now, it’s big business that’s driving the move toward IoT, with the cooperation of governments, and we have a pretty good idea that what they want isn’t always what we want.

I don’t dare think about what could happen if our devices become even smarter. ‘Cause if my vibrating La-Z-Boy and my entertainment system decide to go on strike until I upgrade my cable subscription…I’m turning Amish.

TURING TEST PASS IS A FAIL

I’ve been amused this week to read the news that a computer program passed the famous “Turing Test” for artificial intelligence. The program presents itself as a 13-year-old boy living in Ukraine named Eugene Goostman, and it was able to carry on text conversations well enough to convince one-third of a panel of judges that they were chatting with a human being. It happened during a regular Turing Test event being hosted by the University of Reading in the UK on the 60^th anniversary of the death of mathematician Alan Turing, who devised the test as a way of measuring artificial intelligence: if a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations, it passes the test. This is being touted as the first successful test, although NewScientist magazine points out that others have succeeded too, depending on the criteria used for the judging.

Detractors claim the fact that “Eugene” is presented as a 13-year-old boy with limited English-language skills coloured the expectations of the judges enough to render the test results less meaningful than they might otherwise be. Have you heard thirteen-year-olds talk lately? The fact the judges could understand Eugene’s answers at all should have been a tip-off that they weren’t speaking to a real teenager. Did he pause in the conversation to answer a few texts on his phone? Did he drop f-bombs, use spelling that looked like alphabet soup given a stir, or rely on the word “like” every other sentence? Were there any mistakes obviously caused by autocorrect? Dead giveaways, all of those. (Actually, Eugene does text like that on Twitter.)

Personally, I think the limitations of the test itself make it of little value. Certainly it shows that superfast processors fed with enough data about likely questions, colloquial language, general knowledge and other parameters can simulate a humanlike dialogue. It says nothing about self-awareness, self-motivation, creative problem-solving, psychological empathy, or many other things that we would expect of an intelligent being. So we’re still a long way from the Skynet days of the Terminator movies, or even HAL from 2001:A Space Odyssey.

If you spend much time on Facebook, or even watching reality TV, you’ll know that speaking like the average human being isn’t exactly a shining display of intelligence anyway—quite the opposite.

There are efforts to create a more universal artificial intelligence test, involving more visual cues, among other things. I expect that within another few generations of computing progress, that test will also be found wanting. The truth is, we’ll probably never know when the first truly intelligent, sentient, artificial mind is created.

Because it’ll know that the smartest thing it can do is to keep that little secret to itself.