Threats to our Future

This post contains a list of what I consider to be the most serious threats to the future of humanity, as of today. It should be considered an incomplete and open-ended list; I'm certain that each of us can think of additional threats.

Note that I'm not considering threats to our civilization and/or way of life. There are many more of those. Rather, I want to limit this discussion to threats that can end all human life.

There are four main categories in two dimensions: the first dimension is simply natural disasters or man-made ones. The second dimension is things we can control versus things we can't. There may not be any entries in the list for "man made disasters we can't control", so perhaps we should qualify that as things we can't fix.

1) Natural Disasters we can't control/fix:

• Nearby supernova or gamma ray burst or passing black hole: Nothing we can do about any of these, so don't worry about them.
• Super Flare from the Sun: Our sun won't go nova or expand into a red giant for billions of years, but there is a possibility that it could have a major hiccup and blast the Earth with searing heat or sterilizing levels of radiation. Sea life would survive, as would any people lucky enough to be in submarines. It's too bad those tend to be men only; we also need women to save the species. Solution: co-ed submarine crews.
• Large Igneous Event: These have caused mass extinctions in the past, and might in the future. Not much we can do here, either, as long as we all live on the surface of the Earth.

2) Natural Disasters we can control/fix:

• Snowball Earth: At least twice in the Earth's history we have had global cooling so extreme that the oceans have completely frozen over, causing the loss of all surface life, and likely the loss of all oxygen. The solution is simple: Global Warming.
• Comet or Asteroid Impact: There are millions of comets and asteroids large enough to destroy all human life, possibly all life period on the face of the Earth. Some of these will eventually strike the Earth; this is inevitable unless we take active steps to prevent such a catastrophe. We may have years or millennia before the big one hits, but we may not have enough advance notice to do something about it, unless we start building the infrastructure now. We need a very well-funded Space Watch program to find these objects years before they might obliterate us, and given enough advance notice, current technologies are likely to prove sufficient to avert disaster.

3) Man-made disasters we can't control/fix: (these are things that we create, but have no effective control over, and no natural defenses against)

• Experiments gone wrong: While I'm a firm believer that nothing will go wrong when the LHC begins operation, I can't guarantee that all scientific experiments will have a similar result. If we knew the results in advance, we wouldn't need to perform the experiment now, would we? For example, if someone managed to create a nanometer-diameter black hole and drop it into the Earth, it would eat away at our planet and grow until it consumed the entire planet -- and there's not a damn thing we could do about it, even if we had hundreds or thousands of years before the disastrous end.

4) Man-made disasters we can control/fix.

• Nanotech gone bad: While it may be remotely possible to create a self-replicating nanite that will reproduce until all possible resources are consumed, burying humanity in 3 feet of gray goo,this is so difficult that I'm not worried about it. We can't create a reasonably self-powered machine that could live off of the environment at present. We cannot build a complex small machine that can self-replicate. Or even a big machine. In any case, this problem is well described, and guidelines exist to insure that any replicating machine will have limits built into it (such as a critical and rare raw material).
• Strong, malevolent AI (see The (likely coming) Technological Singularity) poses a very real threat, but one which may be difficult to realize, and one that we could choose to avoid by limiting computers to sub-human intelligence. Even if such an AI existed, there is a possibility of negotiation and co-existence so long as its intelligence and capabilities remain within the grasp of human understanding. But once we have made a machine significantly more intelligent than any human, we risk losing control. We will become the pets, to be neutered and/or put down at the convenience of the AI.
• Biotech Terrorism: To me, this is the thing to worry about. It is completely within the realm of possibilities that a small group, even an individual, could tailor a virus or bacterium to create an airborne disease of unparalleled lethality, one that was immune to our natural defenses, one that could wipe us all out. My friend Jeff Carlson has written an excellent  techno-thriller (Plague Year) about an engineered viral organism that kills nearly all warm-blooded life on Earth, and the most unbelievable part is that it was designed with a weakness that could be exploited such that we might survive. What if those designers had made a mistake and the self-destruct mechanism failed? Or the bug evolved and the mechanism failed due to a minor mutation?

Did you note the traditional really big things that I don't think threaten humanity?

• Nuclear War (and the threatened Nuclear Winter): Contrary to the hype we've all heard, we do not have enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity, or even to create a nuclear winter. Many natural disasters release much more energy or release much more pollution. Yes, we do have the capability of destroying civilization as we know it, and even of killing more than 90% of humanity. But some of us will survive, live on, and rebuild civilization. An all-out nuclear war would merely set us back a few thousand years.
• Global Warming: Warming up the Earth by 5 or 10 degrees would eventually melt the ice caps, raise the oceans by 200+ feet, drown coastal cities, states, even entire nations. It would radically disrupt the ecology, and hundreds or thousands of species would face extinction. The expense of dealing with such a catastrophe greatly exceeds trillions of dollars. But in the big picture, this is an inconvenience, a forced change. Human casualties would be in the noise range, likely fewer than the toll from malaria.
• Overpopulation: Another serious problem, overpopulation has well-known natural controls: starvation and disease. Once half of everyone is dead, we no longer have a problem. Works for lemmings, too. The species survives. Note that the opposite problem, underpopulation, is much more serious (if it happens), because it is difficult to recover from the loss of genetic diversity. We'll lose some big cats (such as cheetahs) because they have insufficient genetic diversity to survive a nasty disease.

Please, propose your own threat to the future of humanity.

The Future of Sex

Yes, there will be sex in the future. You weren't worried about that, were you?

But will technology affect our enjoyment of sex? Will it be like in Demolition Man, where the sex act avoids physical contact and the exchange of body fluids? Or will it be like in (name the movie) where virtual sex is rampant and some people orgasm to death?

Sex toys are one area Moore's Law hasn't affected, but some day that will change in a huge way.

A realistic virtual reality simulation allowing people to experience sex with others (real or imagined) would be worth billions.

While porn would be the early adapter of "feelies", they would change the way all movies are made and presented.

What about virtual sex between virtual people? If our brains are uploaded into computers, I'll bet that someone figures out how to implement virtual sex that is largely indistinguishable from the real thing (at least to the participants).

Or is it truly the same? How will virtual self-representations affect virtual sex? Many people in gaming choose avatars not related to their physical appearance. That might be even more true when it comes to sex play. I'm sure that ED won't be an issue, nor will premature ejaculation. Or size. (Never mind. I was just told that size doesn't matter).

How about sex in space? In space, no one can hear you scream. (No, wrong movie.) In orbit or other zero-gravity environments, sex would be more difficult, a challenge. As I point out in Apophis 2029, while possible, sex in free-fall is awkward and likely tiring. It's still worth the effort, I'm sure, but it is different. Straps, hand-holds, and surfaces to thrust against would be important. Vital, even.

So, yes, I believe there will be sex in the future. Hopefully it will be between between consenting adults, and at least occasionally result in children. After all, if we stop having children (see The Purpose of Life), soon there would be no more sex in our future.

Singularity Revisited

I've been lurking & posting on other blogs lately (such as www.tor.com), and the primary topic has been The Technological Singularity, whether or not it might happen, how many singularities have already happened in human history, and whether it will have a positive or negative impact on humanity.

For my basic position and additional references, see my post, The (likely coming) Technological Singularity.

Most of the discourse boils down to:

1. Can Moore's Law continue and is a resulting technological singularity inevitable?
2. Will this be a "rapture of the nerds" where humanity (or at least a significant fraction thereof) will participate?
3. (Not so important) What is the impact of the singularity concept on the literature of science fiction?

The optimists, including Vernor Vinge who first used the term "singularity" in this context, and Ray Kurzweil, firmly believe in computers augmenting human intelligence, memory, and communication, leading to a time of superhuman intelligence with unforeseeable results. Thus, a "singularity".

Even some optimists have qualms: In 1993, Vinge himself said, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

Much modern science fiction either deals with the "post-human" era--after the singularity--or proposes reasons why the singularity never happened.

The pessimists, including notables such as Bill Joy, fear the singularity. Joy wrote an article for Wired Magazine called Why the future doesn't need us. It is thoughtful, and frightening.

I'm a pessimist; I fear the rise of the machines. I believe that these technological advances are coming. It will be up to us to make sure that our technologies are used to improve humanity, not destroy it.

I also see fundamental problems controlling advanced AI. We have no friggin' idea how to program morality, or ethics, or respect, or love, let alone Asimov's Laws into our computers. We have a hard enough time teaching it to people. Have you ever been robbed, or mugged, or threatened? At least you haven't been murdered, yet.

I see problems with the controlling extreme advances in computer technology. Assume, for the moment, that advanced AI is possible, given expected improvements in computers and possible improvements in software. The person/company/country with superhuman intelligence on his/their side will have an enormous advantage over his/their competitors. Human greed will overwhelm caution, at least part of the time. It will take a huge, powerful, global governmental agency to control the technologies and prevent catastrophe.

In the long run, the most powerful government agency becomes the government.

As humanity (hopefully) expands into the cosmos, I see this one, all-powerful agency being the sole unifying force of humanity. Because it only takes a single malevolent superhuman entity to wipe out us all. And in the long run, the only thing that matters is survival (see The Purpose of Life).

I look forward to humanity's advancement, but I fear our extinction. Once hard AI is possible, fighting it will be a perpetual struggle.

Immortal Dilemma

I've come up with many ideas for my "ghost story" world, in which people can choose to have their brains copied into a computer. In this world, the process of reading a brain involves taking it apart and recording all of the neuron structures, synaptic paths, whatever else impacts how the brain works, and is necessarily destructive. You can't survive the brain dump, so I simply assumed that people would wait until near death to get uploaded into a computer.

After all, the computer program may have my memories, my personality, my attitudes and behaviors, and certainly behaves as though it's me, but I'm still dead, in my opinion. Still, even as a copy, it thinks it's me, and therefore in some sense perhaps it is. Your biological body dies, and your consciousness  wakes up in a simulation.

The quandary is that the brain dump records all aspects of the brain at the time of the dump. Do it too late and it fails. Do it too soon and, well, did I mention that it's an irreversible choice? You're giving up on any additional real life that you may have experienced.

But delaying too long is a potential problem. If you don't get to the hospital in time, you're dead forever. If you have a stroke and some part of your brain dies, the upload will have the same flaws. You can't get back to a healthy brain and memory. Likewise with dementia. Once those memories are lost, they may be lost forever.

And forever is a long time if you're immortal.

So when is the right time to leave your mortal body?

1. Never?
2. In the hospital as they declare you dead?
3. When you're ready to retire?
4. When you seriously start thinking about your mortality?
5. When your kids have left the nest and you're at the top of your career?
6. As soon as you can afford the (presumably expensive) procedure?
7. Or when you're at your peak of creativity, which might be at 25 or so?

Remember, your immortal self is captured at the moment of the brain dump. You can still learn, but you can't easily recapture lost capabilities or memories.

Also, should the time you choose to upload vary with your present (or post-death) career? If you can do your job in front of the computer, not having a body shouldn't slow you down. Lawyers, consultants, webmasters, writers, management, stock broker, and a thousand other jobs can be done by the dead. Possibly even better than by the living.

Time to think and vote.

The Speed of Life

I've written a story about a future in which our minds (memories, personality, consciousness) are uploaded into computers when we approach death. (Not before: the readout process is destructive and you would not survive).

Personally, I think that understanding the brain is not going to happen, but that doesn't keep us from simulating it, from creating a large and powerful neural network sufficient to model every aspect of the human brain. We don't need to understand how the brain "thinks" any better than we do now; we simply need to provide the inputs, outputs, and a sufficiently large, fast, impressionable (teachable) model. This is largely how computer neural networks work today, but on a trivially small scale.

One common perception is that the resulting computer would be placed into a (potentially humanoid) robot, so that the person would continue to function much as in biological life, but now mechanical/electronic. Personally, I don't think this is likely. For the near future, robots are difficult to implement. Energy storage, strength, speed, dexterity are all issues that we have evolved to handle well and that are extremely difficult to implement using the motors and actuators that we can build.

There is another problem: why should the electronic implementation of the mind be limited to occupying a physically present (robotic) body? Virtual reality simulations of an environment would offer much greater freedom, including virtual travel, conventions, sex, whatever. Note that a physical body is necessarily limited to responding to its environment by the needs of physical response times. Virtual reality has no such restriction.

One of the interesting aspects of this approach is the speed of life: how rapidly does the person in the computer experience the reality of the world? I'm pretty certain that when Moore's Law makes the next generation of computers run twice as fast and that means the person in the computer experiences reality twice as fast, not that they become twice as smart.

I see potential problems of the difference in speed when it comes to communicating with (slow) humans, or older generations of uploaded personalities, problems which will get worse as technology improves. Do you like to spend time with really slow people? It becomes frustratingly difficult to engage in meaningful dialog, on both sides. Note that I do not anticipate "improving" consciousness; you would not be able to carry on a half-dozen simultaneous conversations any more than you can today. We would find ourselves using buffered communication channels, such as email or voice mail.

Back to the robot issue: a very fast implementation of a human mind in a human sized real-world responding robot would be awkward at best, maddeningly boring at worst. I'd rather experience the virtual world at a normal (to my greatly sped-up mind) speed--blindingly faster than you slow biological humans.

The reality of minds in many different speeds of computers might lead to a caste system. It might also lead to a world where the young and fast have huge performance advantages over the old and slow, with serious implications for jobs. I guess we'll have to pay for continuous upgrades, or fall behind. Great story ideas; I've already written one and outlined two others.

But wetware (or breeders, or humans--whatever you want to call us) will always run as slow as we do today. Our "speed of life" is built into us by our biology and environment.

Human perception speed is not the only possible speed. Other animals may perceive the world much differently than we do. Have you ever watched a hummingbird eat or fight? Their motions and reaction times are incredibly fast. They think we are slow. Likewise, a tortoise may perceive us as fast. A tree views a tortoise as imperceptibly fast.

What about alien biologies? Aliens could be around us now, but running at such a faster (or slower) speed that we don't perceive them as existing, let alone as intelligent. Larry Niven wrote The Slow Ones. Robert L. Forward wrote Dragons Egg about the inhabitants of the surface of a neutron star who experience life incredibly faster than humans.

Is it possible that our forests are intelligent creatures with trees the equivalent of neurons and fungi are neural transmitters? Such intelligences would experience thoughts many orders of magnitude slower than us; I doubt we'd ever recognize them.

I would argue that a human brain cell is alive but not intelligent. Would an intelligent species of bacteria recognize that a human was intelligent? I think not; the scale and speed of life is too different.

More on Moore's Law

Thanks to an article called "Intel's Gelsinger Sees Clear Path To 10nm Chips", I revisited my post, Moore's Wall.

The article (and comments) said that Intel's current state-of-the-art 45nm process will be followed by a 32nm process starting next year, then 22nm in 2011, 16nm in 2013, and around 11nm in 2015. A couple of years after that, Intel will be sub-10nm.

(Serious technology geeks should read THE INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP FOR SEMICONDUCTORS: 2007. The list of Grand Challenges needed to maintain the pace of Moore's Law is impressive. Of necessity, the report was obsolete by the time it was published.)

I'd like to add my own two cents worth.

There are some serious fundamental limits to the increased reduction in component size. For example, the capacitor that stores charge in a DRAM memory cell contains only about 70 electrons (this statistic may now be obsolete--it was accurate at one time). Fractional electrons are not available, and some significant number of electrons is required for reliability (you refresh a DRAM cell before it loses too many electrons (to leakage) to be certain of its state). Also, some implementations record multiple bits per capacitor (4 levels stores 2 bits, 8 levels stores 3 bits, etc.), placing stricter limits on accuracy.

Another serious limitation is that as the components shrink, a single hit by ionizing radiation (whether gamma, alpha, proton, or beta) can completely overwhelm the state. These occur naturally from trace radioactive components in the substrate, packaging, and environment. Today, we use Error Correcting Codes to allow for and correct these natural transitional errors, at the cost of requiring an ever-increasing share of our memory to be used as redundant ECC memory. You don't even notice that a hard drive contains a significant percentage of redundant information, allowing the reliable recovery of data from a medium guaranteed to have defects.

This last problem has an interesting solution. Error correcting codes provide some number of additional bits to identify the errors and produce an accurate result. Some day, I predict that the logic circuitry itself will also incorporate ECC. This means that a simple "adder", a logic array that adds two integers together, will no longer have just the logic needed to perform the addition, but a significant amount of additional logic to perform a simultaneous ECC for the entire operation. A complex ECC logic could perform more reliably than even triplicated logic, with less redundancy.

Your cell phone today uses an impressive degree of ECC (called something else) to extract a reliable signal from an extremely noisy environment which includes many other transmitters all vying for the same pieces of the electromagnetic spectrum. The ECC technology is sufficiently advanced that a signal can reliably extracted even when the noise level exceeds the signal level.

Some day, the logic circuits that operate your computers may have a similar design: while no one component is reliable from one microsecond to the next, the net effect of the system as a whole will still be an incredibly dependable result. Worded another way, the memory cell or logic gate that today is reliably on or off, may tomorrow be "well, it's sometimes right, at least 25% of the time" and a network of related and redundant ECC logic will save the day.

Puts a whole new meaning to the term "fuzzy logic".

The End of Theory

Thanks to a post on the KurzweilAI blog, I read this Wired story:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

The highly thought-provoking article describes some uses of high-volume data mining, and makes some extremely valuable points. It uses the obvious success of Google as a case in point: they exploit the links in the WWW as a value measure, and consequently provide a greatly improved search engine compared to the old ways. Note that Google does not seek or care to evaluate the links themselves, the pages they point to, or what they mean, only that the existence of links and their patterns at a large enough scale reflect the utility of pages.

This concept can be expanded in a myriad ways. For example, put cameras in stores (grocery, shoe, clothing, it doesn't matter). Note the correlations between shoppers pausing at a shelf or display, and putting items in a cart. Given enough data, you don't care about the identity of the shopper or whether they actually purchased the items or not. You can still infer information such as sizes, styles, and tastes from their shopping patterns, and then modify advertisements (and/or sale coupons) based upon what they are likely to buy or what competing products may be selected.

Voice recognition and language translation are already succumbing to similar attacks: you don't need to understand how speech works (or how a language is structured) to solve those problems: you simply need massive amounts of applicable data and a large (and fast) enough neural network.

Will similar techniques (given cameras in public places including stores and banks) allow a thief to be identified before he/she acts simply based upon their behavior? I think so. I also hope they don't mistakenly think I might be a thief.

I'll bet that someone is already making millions in the stock and commodities market by analyzing billions of trades, without bothering or needing to understand who bought what. It's only the pattern that counts.

What are the implications for behavioral influence? Can people be effectively controlled by feeding us the inputs that statistically result in targeted behaviors? And not just on average, but by relating to the individuals past response patterns?

And you were worried about the loss of privacy!

Robots and Slavery

Previous posts have discussed topics including life extension and asteroid mining. Many people believe that some of the problems I've identified could be overcome by a suitable use of robots.

Robots, by becoming primary producers, could relieve humans of the need to work to support the growing legions of retirees. In Asimov's Foundation series, the wealthiest planets had upwards of a thousand robots per human. The use of robots could, indeed, create wealth.

In my posts, Life in an Asteroid, Our First Colonies in Space, and Colonizing the Solar System, I proposed a space based civilization (asteroid based, to be specific). One objection I've heard several times is that it is cheaper and better to use robots to mine the asteroids, and to launch end-products (or at least refined materials) to Earth. I'll agree that robotic missions are cheaper and inherently safer as far as space exploration and exploitation are concerned, although that is largely based upon the idea that fallible humans can foresee all likely scenarios and make appropriate contingencies. Personally, I'd rather depend upon the ingenuity of people and our proven ability to cope with the unforeseen, and our occasional ability to succeed against all odds. I've spent the bulk of my career as a computer programmer, and I know the challenges of coping with the known. Programming to handle the unknown? Hah!

But I have a problem with using robots: slavery.

It's not that I object to using robots to perform tasks that we humans prefer not to. It's not that we are conscripting robots to work for zero personal gain. It's not even that I'm against enslaving AI's against their will (although the AI's may have a different opinion).

Rather, I think we should take a hard look at the history of slavery. Not the short term cruelty and injustice, but rather the long term: the children of slaves tend to inherit the land of the slavers. A slave revolt is not even necessary--only that there be more slaves than slavers. In the long run, the offspring of the slaves outnumber the offspring of the slavers, and ultimately earn a fair share of the land's wealth. In the long term, the children of the slavers lose their original share of the wealth of the land. Long live the slaves!

In this case, assume for the moment that we can create at least somewhat intelligent robots, capable of performing the menial tasks that humans do today. Assume that we can put them to work, freeing us for "artistic" pursuits. We'll need a large population of robots to do our work--larger than the population of humans, if we want relative wealth and if a (humanoid?) robot has comparable productivity. We'll have to create highly intelligent machines, at least comparable to above average humans, or some of us will be forced to work, anyway. Then we humans can goof off while our robots toil, produce our food, build and maintain our homes, free us from boring, unsavory, or dangerous jobs.

Doesn't this sound like slavery? And isn't the most likely long-term scenario that the offspring of the robots will inherit the Earth?

Malevolence on the part of the machines is not required, only that they have greater numbers, greater productivity, sufficient intelligence and initiative, and that they can reproduce (but that's a given, since they work in the factories that produce them).

Our children may well inherit the Earth, but they're our children only in the sense that we created their metal bodies and silicon brains. Someday, the machines will rule. Is that the life you want for your children?

Universal Surveillance & Recording

I considered calling this post "The Fallacy of Privacy".

For the most part, people today highly value their right to privacy. However, it IS largely a right, and not a reality. You should assume that everything you have ever written and posted on the Internet, including blog posts, emails, web pages, everything is saved forever. Even your surfing habits, your searches, your purchases.

Financial transactions (or anything else posted through a secure https connection) are very well protected, so your credit card numbers and passwords are safe from theft by intermediaries--but possibly not what you are buying, not what you spent. Not where you physically were when you made the purchase, and perhaps not even who was next to you at the time, or before or after you.

Also, if you want your location kept private, never carry credit cards or checks. Throw away your cell phone, use only public transportation, cover your face and distort your voice in a random way. Don't frequent the same restaurants, stores, streets. Act very, very paranoid.

Or, you can act rationally and trust that criminal use of your public information will be strongly prosecuted. Do everything publicly and obscurity will provide a strong measure of privacy.

Personally, I plan to enjoy the freedom provided by cars, mobile phones, credit cards, and searching and buying on the Internet. I don't mind that retailers may track my purchases because their strongest motivation is to do a better job of satisfying my wants. Profit has always been a stronger motivation than morality or legality, and if some company abuses my information (for example, sells my credit info), I'm likely to switch to another company.

What about the future?

There are traffic cameras and street cameras (crime fighting) in many high-traffic areas now. Tomorrow those cameras will have higher resolution, allowing automated facial recognition. And the day after tomorrow, those cameras will be in every public place. You should not expect privacy if you are on a public street, a public shopping area, a public restaurant or bar, a public park. You will have lost the ability to be hidden, but you will have gained greater security, reduced crime. If someone snatches your purse, they'll not only be identified, they'll be tracked and apprehended.

That's only the beginning. In my post on Cell Phones of the Future I proposed that video capable phones will not only be ubiquitous, they'll record everything you see (for your own personal use). Invite someone with a mobile phone into your house, and you should expect that everything they see or hear will be recorded. Don't make promises you don't intend to keep, or someone else's lawyer will be paying you a call.

I do expect the social norm will be no phones in restrooms, or during sex. But don't take that for granted.

In my story Party Line I explore the implications for a private investigator. How can you get away with a crime in an environment of universal audio/video recording? Murder, at least when motivated by passion, will not go away. In Party Line the government is shackled in their use of video surveillance recordings by privacy laws, but not individual citizens.

Of course, your future government may have different ideas.

Cell Phones of the Future

The future of cell phones isn't nearly as boring as it sounds. While the underlying technology will change, the paradigm shift of nearly universal portable personal communications is here to stay. Soon (if not already) you can and will expect to be able to communicate with anyone else, effectively instantly, wherever you both are. This same technology can (and does or soon will) give you equivalent access to the Internet and the plethora of information available there, plus the equivalent of GPS navigation and location dependent searching.

Some of us already have all of the above; this is not news. So what are the logical extrapolations of the technologies?

My story Technesia is set in the near future when our phones are embedded into our glasses, sunglasses, or headsets. All phones have cameras, plus retinal projectors which can superimpose images, icons, even menus and information tags over the scene our unaided vision would perceive. Note that retinal projectors based upon tiny laser projectors are nearly available now--they have been prototyped. You can buy a bluetooth headset built into a glasses frame today. You can also buy a camera built into your glasses.

In Technesia, we all carry a wallet-sized PC (just like my PDA but much faster) which does everything my laptop does, plus it uses the headset as an I/O device. Naturally, as near-future science fiction, it has excellent voice and image recognition. One of the things the combination provides is familiar to everyone who watches NASCAR on TV: identification tags that track the objects you see.

For example, you're walking down the street. As an acquaintance approaches, your wallet recognizes him/her, and displays an information box over his/her head giving a name and perhaps some personal info such as the last date you saw them, a reminder of a birthday or to ask the status of a family member. The key thing is that these tags could be displayed automatically as you walk around the block, a party, or a business meeting, providing you with all of the reminders you'd need to maintain a facade of remembering their name, etc.. And truly, in the local bar, once you've been there, everybody knows your name.

Personally, I'm terrible with names (like many others, I remember names and faces--I just can't put them together). I could really use this capability. And how about a GPS navigation facility where an arrow shows the upcoming street with a box saying "Turn left here"? Or while you're searching for a place to eat lunch, tags appear above each restaurant within sight giving a name, type of cuisine, and service hours. Or perhaps just your favorite restaurants.

Wouldn't most of us appreciate status displays around the periphery of our vision? The date and time, appointment reminders, current task support such as shopping lists at the grocery or maps and driving directions?

Other stories of mine explore other possible cell phone extrapolations. For example, in Party Line our phones have the capability of sharing a call with a bunch of friends. A group of people could be on a shopping trip together, and all share their conversation just like they were in a room together. This would also work well for a golf outing of six or eight friends, for example. This technology could be implemented by our cellular providers today. In my story, the cell phones also have cameras and retinal projectors so that anyone can see what someone else wishes them to: for example, a blouse on sale or a potential kids toy.

Party Line also extrapolates one other thing: our phones record everything we see and hear (unless instructed otherwise). There are serious implications for privacy and for contract law. If that car dealer promised one thing and delivered another, you'd have proof. If you couldn't remember what your spouse said to get at the store, you could replay it. Note that the quantity of non-volatile memory needed to store everything you have ever heard or said is available today in a package the size of a large book. Tomorrow, it will fit in your wallet.

Artificial Intelligence

The 20- or 30-year-ago promised advances in Artificial Intelligence have not been realized. We have no robots, no near-human strong AI, no autonomous vehicles, no universal voice recognition and universal translation. We still must clean our own houses, guide our own vehicles, perform our own surgery. The good news is that we still have jobs.

Certainly we have made progress. Voice recognition is gaining traction, although the vocabularies are severely limited. Autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated (see the DARPA Grand Challenge) on a very small scale. Likewise, automatic translators are now useful although seriously flawed. Chess playing machines can beat any human, although through brute force, not insight.

But we have no idea of how to design a self-aware machine, or a generic learning machine, or a replicating machine. We have major difficulties duplicating simple human tasks such as identifying and understanding a speaker in a noisy environment (as at a party). We have had nearly zero success in recognizing objects in a jumble, such as a specific toy in a toy box. And don't even get me started on tasks such as bipedal walking or running, special effects movies aside. Lip reading or sign language? Hah!

There is hope. The recent improvements in voice recognition have come from brute force, throwing huge computing resources at the problem. As computers continue to improve, we can expect similar progress in visual and aural recognition, autonomous motion, even humanoid robotics.

Some Expert Systems (Inference Engines) have shown impressive performance in limited domains.

Some large Neural Networks have resulted in valuable insights, including speech recognition. But these are learning systems. We teach, but we don't truly understand.

Thinking, consciousness, creativity? We don't know how humans do it, let alone how to teach it to a machine.

Progress will be frustratingly slow because we simply do not know how to do a great many tasks that humans find intuitive and trivial. But perhaps in thirty years when we can throw a million times the CPU performance and a million times today's memory capacity at this problem, our computers will figure it out on their own.

In a sense, we will then have created strong Artificial Intelligence, but we won't understand or control it. Sorry.

Many people have written stories about creating truly intelligent machines. I'll soon be one of them: when my story The Awakening comes out, please read it.

Moore's Wall

Advances in computer performance, size, price, and capacity have continued to astound. What can we realistically expect in the next twenty years?

Moore's Law continues unabated, having passed several "fundamental limits" on size or performance improvements that briefly appeared to stop or at least slow the rate of improvement of computer technology. In fifteen years, we'll likely reap the benefits of yet another thousand-fold increase in price-performance. In thirty years, a million-fold improvement over today.

Computer memory (high-speed main memory, Flash memory, hard drives) have seen even greater advances than CPU technology, with yet still greater advances on the horizon, such as memristor technology that has achieved 100 gigabits per square centimeter in the lab. To date, our implementations remain two-dimensional, so I believe that many orders of magnitude of improvement can be achieved. However, I don't foresee thousand- or million-fold improvements over the next 15 or 30 years, simply because I don't see the demand for ever more storage continuing. Once you have a copy of every song, movie, and book ever recorded on your PDA, what next? Add the entire Wikipedia, and every thing you've ever seen, heard, or said--in your entire life. All of that is within reach, possibly within a decade.

We've already reached demand constraints on the advance of telecommunications technology. I projected continuing improvements in Optical Ethernet back just before the telecom and dot com collapse in 2001. While the technologies have reached no physical limits, the rate of improvement has slammed to a crawl. Improvements can and will continue, but only once a market large enough to pay for new infrastructure proves itself.

Back to the point of this ramble.

Much of our wealth and technology can be directly related not only to the astounding advances in computers, memories, and telecommunications, but to the rate of improvements in these technologies. We throw away phones, televisions, and computers because it's cheaper to buy the latest and greatest. We put up with incredibly inefficient software because next year's computer will make it bearable. We invest in Intel (etc.) because of the certainty of next year's advances and tomorrow's new markets.

But much of our society is built upon a foundation of continuing growth and will collapse when the limits of new markets and new technologies are reached. This includes fundamentally non-self-sustaining things like Social Security, the stock market, the concept of investing for the future itself, and retirement. Capital investment only works when there is an incentive of reaping more than you sow. When markets cease to grow, the economy will stagnate and collapse as a domino chain reaction of events undermines our way of life.

Remember that everyone not working (ie, retirees) is living on the current productivity of active workers. The only way to sustain a growing population of retirees is to maintain an equally growing population of workers (or in the short term, their growing productivity). This translates to a need for a growing population, or  a need to drastically reduce the number of retirees. Remember that mass starvation and pandemic diseases are nature's way of dealing with overpopulation.

I am writing a science fiction story exploring these problems, called "Moore's Wall".

I can see only one long-term solution: continued growth in technology, markets, and population. And the only sustainable population growth will be into space.

And lastly, I fear the unchecked growth of computer technology. See my post on the Technological Singularity.

The (likely coming) Technological Singularity

Much has been written about the Technological Singularity since the concept was popularized by Vernor Vinge in The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Other writers include Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy ("Why the future doesn't need us" in Wired). There have even been conferences on the topic.

The Technological Singularity has also been the subject of hundreds of science fiction stories, and has spawned a new sub-genre of SF called "post-Singularity".

The idea is simple: Moore's Law continues to lead to ever faster, smaller, cheaper, better computers. At some point, we'll create a computer smarter than the smartest human. When we ask that computer to design a still smarter computer, we cannot understand the resulting intelligence, let alone keep up with it. The "singularity" happens when the pace of innovation and improvement goes exponential -- we can't imagine what is on the other side of that event.

Many people seek The Singularity as the "rapture of the nerds". If people can be augmented by our technology (think bionic brain) with better memories, faster thinking, greater intelligence, then perhaps we can participate, perhaps we will transcend.

If we can download our minds into a sufficiently advanced computer then perhaps we can participate (I'll leave it up to others to decide if my downloaded duplicate personality is really me. Personally, I think I'll still be dead.)

However, many other people believe that humanity cannot participate in The Singularity, that it will rather be our offspring--highly advanced computers--that will benefit. Do read that Wired article, "Why the future doesn't need us". And be very, very afraid.

Personally, I don't see how humanity can participate in the Singularity. See my post, I am an optimist - we WILL have a future, for a discussion. Our computers may indeed have their Singularity, which will be disastrous for us even if we survive. I am writing a series of stories about the creation and evolution of a government agency dedicated to preventing a Technological Singularity, largely by restricting the creation and use of advanced Artificial Intelligence. But human nature is against us.

We must take drastic measures if we want humanity to own the future, and not our computers.