Australian Greg Egan is the best SF author currently writing about AI. Indeed, the joke is that Greg Egan is himself an AI, because he’s almost never been photographed or seen in public.
I first noted him a dozen years ago, when, in a review for The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper, I singled out his short story “Learning To Be Me” as the best piece published in the 1990 edition of Gardner Dozois’s anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction. It’s a surprisingly poignant and terrifying story of jewels that replace human brains so that the owners can live forever. Egan continues to do great work about AI, but his masterpiece in this area is his 1995 novel Permutation City.
Greg and I had the same publisher back then, HarperPrism, and one of the really bright things Harper did—besides publishing me and Greg—was hiring Hugo Award-winner Terry Bisson, one of SF’s best short-story writers, to write the back-cover plot synopses for their books. Since Bisson does it with such great panache, I’ll simply quote what he had to say about Permutation City:
“The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.
“The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.
“The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down…
“The bad news is that it doesn’t work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.”
Well, how cool is that! Read Greg Egan, and see for yourself.
Of course, in Egan, as in much SF, technology often creates more problems than it solves. Indeed, I fondly remember Michael Crichton’s 1973 robots-go-berserk film Westworld, in which the slogan was “Nothing can possibly go wrong…go wrong…go wrong.”
But there are benign views of the future of AI in SF. One of my own stories is a piece called “Where The Heart Is,” about an astronaut who returns to Earth after a relativistic space mission, only to find that every human being has uploaded themselves into what amounts to the World Wide Web in his absence, and a robot has been waiting for him to return to help him upload, too, so he can join the party. I wrote this story in 1982, and even came close to getting the name for the web right: I called it “The TerraComp Web.” Ah, well: close only counts in horseshoes…
But uploaded consciousness may be only the beginning. Physicist Frank Tipler, in his whacko 1994 nonfiction book The Physics of Immortality, does have a couple of intriguing points: ultimately, it will be possible to simulate with computers not just one human consciousness, but every human consciousness that might theoretically possibly exist. In other words, he says, if you have enough computing power—which he calculates as a memory capacity of 10-to-the-10th-to-the-123rd bits—you and everyone else could be essentially recreated inside a computer long after you’ve died.
A lot of SF writers have had fun with that fact, but none so inventively as Robert Charles Wilson in his 1999 Hugo Award-nominated Darwinia, which tells the story of what happens when a computer virus gets loose in the system simulating this reality: the one that you and I think we’re living in right now.
Needless to say, things end up going very badly indeed—for, although much about the future of artificial intelligence is unknown, one fact is certain: as long as SF writers continue to write about robots and AI, nothing can possibly go wrong…go wrong…go wrong…
Science Fiction and Social Change
Calgary, Alberta, is near and dear to my heart; I have many great friends there. So when an offer came for a trip there to give the keynote at an academic symposium, I jumped at the chance, even though they couldn’t afford my regular speakers’ fee. The symposium, entitled “Future Visions: Science Fiction and Social Change,” was presented at Mount Royal College in February 2004.
I was too busy working on my novel Mindscan to write a speech, and so I spoke off-the-cuff. Once the event was over, Randy Schroeder and Donna-Lee Ost, two of the symposium’s organizers, decided the proceedings should be published, and they wanted to lead off their book with the text of my speech—of which there was none. Undaunted, they transcribed what I had to say from tape, and what you’re about to read is an edited version of that transcript.
Let me set the stage a little bit by reflecting on what is remarkable about what we are doing here over the next couple days. It is almost inconceivable to think of a seminar entitled “Mystery Fiction and Social Change,” or “Romance Fiction and Social Change,” or “The Western and Social Change.” But science fiction is indeed relevant to the concept of social change. Why? Well, Kim Stanley Robinson, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for CBC Radio in 1990, says the basic thing about science fiction stories is that they are set in the future. Now, we can all think of hundreds of examples where that is not the case, but in general, if you are looking for something that would be applicable to about ninety percent of the things that I am pointing to and calling “science fiction,” they are, in fact, set in the future. And getting to the future implies starting in the present and extrapolating forward. That means the writer must enumerate events that have passed so that we can recognize that we’ve moved ahead in time.
Now, in classic pulp-era Gernsbackian science fiction, the events denoting change are technological. However, more frequently and certainly in most of the works that we consider worthy of serious academic attention, it is sociological change that has taken us into the future. Once you grasp that science fiction has innate to it a discussion of societal change, you realize that one can’t do science fiction without asking the question, “How did we get there from here?” In fact, I am going to argue that sociological and societal changes are the only kinds of events from which we can extrapolate forward any appreciable amount of time and for which we are still able to do valid thought experiments.
To explain this argument, I want to start with Vernor Vinge, who is a computer scientist and a science-fiction writer, and who has won the Hugo Award for best novel twice: once for A Fire Upon the Deep, and later for the sequel A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge has become famous in science fiction circles lately for promoting the concept of the singularity. By singularity, he does not mean the heart of a black hole; rather he means the fact that what we have is an ever-increasing rate of scientific progress. We have a graph that has been going up very slowly over for the last 10,000 or even 40,000 years during which we have been making serious scientific progress. We have seen it slowly, slowly ramping up. There were whole millennia where the fact that you were born in this particular century versus that particular century made no real material difference in what was known about science and technology. We have learned in the last couple of centuries that the rate of change is increasing our knowledge of science and our ability to do things with technology.
In fact I firmly believe that we should look back a hundred years, back to 1904, an era of horse and buggy here in the Calgary area, a time when the American West was still open. That era had no antibiotics, no computers or universal literacy. Only a hundred years ago! Now, look at all the changes that have happened in the ensuing hundred years. We just celebrated a couple of weeks ago the hundredth anniversary of the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk. In a hundred years you can do an enormous amount: you can go from Kitty Hawk to having Spirit and Opportunity tooling around on Mars.
We’re going to see a lot more in the next hundred years than we saw in the previous hundred. Essentially for the first half of the last century we didn’t have computers, and we didn’t know the structure of DNA. But we start this century with both those things, and our knowledge will continue to grow at an accelerating rate.
In fact, Vinge believes that because the curve of technological progress is getting steeper, we are going to hit the singularity, where the curve asymptotically approaches vertical—as close to vertical as you can measure it. At that point, the curve becomes a wall; it becomes a conceptual wall where nobody on this side of it is able to predict what our science and technological knowledge will be on the other side of it. The wall becomes literally a conceptual barrier making it impossible to know what comes next.
The big question is when will this point be reached? In five years? Fifty? Five hundred years? Vinge and other strong proponents of the singularity believe it will happen certainly by 2020, what with our rapid progress in nanotechnology, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Everything that we can think of doing will be doable, if it is physically possible in the confines of this universe. For instance, we will very soon reach the point with biotechnology that if you don’t like the hand genetics dealt you, we will simply rewrite your DNA. But there’s even more to come, on an even grander scale: on the other side of the Vingean singularity we might be able to say, “Wow, I really hate how the laws of physics work in this universe”—and be able to change the laws of physics, making them more congenial to the things we want to do, such as time travel and going faster than light.
I always say at science fiction convention panel discussions when someone brings up Star Trek as an example, you know you have reached rock bottom. You can’t imagine P. D. James and Peter Robinson being at a Mystery convention, and Peter turning to P.D. to say, ‘That reminds me of that time on Murder She Wrote when…’ It just wouldn’t happen. Still, we SF people always fall back to the on-going phenomenon of Star Trek. And there is one great line in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a moon is going to crash into a planet and Q, this omniscient being, has lost his powers and has to become a member of the crew of the Enterprise. Q asks, “What’s the problem?” Someone says, “The moon is going to crash into the planet. How do we stop it?” And Q replies, “Just change the gravitational constant of the universe and move it.” Geordi, the engineer, says, “We can’t do that.” But we may well have that God-like power on the other side of the singularity: everything that is technically possible will become reality. How do we predict as predictors, which is what we as science-fiction writers try to be to some extent, what is going to be on the other side of that singularity? We can’t.
And yet, a lot of science fiction attempts to write about the very far future. This is certainly what H. G. Wells was writing about in his novella The Time Machine, set 800,000 years in the future. Even one of my favorite movies, the original Planet of the Apes, is set two thousand years in the future. Both of these are inconceivably far away in time, if the singularity is really, as Vinge would have it, just twenty years away. Even the most pedestrian of thinkers about the rate of scientific and technological change feel that within a hundred years, we will have breakthroughs that will so redefine what we can do as technological beings as to beggar our imagination. We simply cannot think farther ahead than that in terms of science and technology.
Luckily, long before we were a technological animal, we were primates, and primates are social beings. We have been social entities far longer than we have been technological entities and social interactions ultimately, fundamentally, at the core of our beings, interest all of us, and, ultimately, it is the social that has a bigger impact on our life.
Science fiction has this opportunity to deal with projecting change in social structures because that is a thought experiment we can still do, whereas trying to say what computer technology is going to be like 500 years from now is something Vinge tells us we can’t; we will reach that wall of not being able to predict. So, let’s ask what’s going to happen in terms of social structures, family and human relationships? Setting aside the possibility that we are all going to upload into some virtual reality, we still have interesting subject matter to play with.
Remember I said I like science fiction and I am not really a fantasy fan. The reason is—and it is embodied in this idea of the singularity—magic. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction writer who lives in Sri Lanka, is famous for Clarke’s Three’s Laws, the third of which states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he means here is that we will reach a point at which we can’t tell whether some fantastic thing in a story is grounded in reality because our scientific abilities have gone through the roof, or whether it’s just actual abracadabra magic with no basis in science. Well, I lose interest at that point; if it feels like magic, it’s fantasy, and has nothing meaningful to say about reality. (Incidentally, Clarke formulated this law for a talk he gave to the American Association of Architects’ annual meeting in New York in 1965. It presages Vinge by thirty-odd years.)
But sociological thought experiments are valid as long as there is a future in which beings at least somewhat like us still exist. By “somewhat like us,” I don’t necessarily mean constrained to three score and ten years, as the Bible would have it, or beings necessarily defined in rigid gender roles. Those are open fields of play.
No, the two things that define humanity as we know it are consciousness and individuality. If you give up on individuality, you have a collective consciousness, a fascinating thing to explore, but ultimately a reader loses interest at this point. Also, if you give up on consciousness, self-awareness, the sense that the lights are on and that somebody is home, you also lose the interest of the reader. As a form of literature, the story disappears. The sine qua non of literature is individuals who have consciousness. From that point on, you can go wherever you want. So, I think science fiction remains a very fertile ground for exploring sociological change amongst people who are like us, and people who will be the recognizable descendants of people like us; we’ll still be able to make valid sociological predictions, and not just for the next couple of decades, but conceivably well past Vernor Vinge’s singularity.
For example, most of us in Canada are proud that Canada has taken a very positive attitude towards same-sex marriage. What is the next step? How liberal and how far do we want to go on this? Same-sex marriages are great, but what about multiple marriages? Is the union of multiple individuals in a marital structure going to be the next thing that Canada will legally recognize? Are we going to start recognizing the legal union of people and things that are not Homo sapiens? Where are we going to go with this? What degree of sociological and change in family values are we going to countenance as a country that has always been cutting edge in social virtues? I think it is going to be a fascinating question to look at with the tools of science fiction.
Science fictional extrapolation has always been a game of “what if?” Well, this is a perfect example: what if this tendency towards recognizing wider and wider definitions of what constitutes a family goes on? I defy the advocates of the romance genre to provide examples of how romance has gone further ahead with the exploration of human relationships than science fiction has in terms of looking at gender roles, gender identity, what constitutes a person, what constitutes family, what constitutes sex, what constitutes love, what constitutes interpersonal relationships. We have done an enormously good job as a literature in dealing with these sociological issues. And all of this is indeed extrapolation, and that sort of future historical thinking Kim Stanley Robinson was talking about: if science fiction is set in the future, then how does that future differ? What legal, moral, ethical, scientific, and cultural events let you recognize that time has passed and that we have moved into the future?
At this point, I am going to fall back again on Star Trek as an illustration because Star Trek—the original and only truly good Star Trek—is, or was, in the 1960s, a significant cultural phenomenon.
There was a great black actor named William Marshall. He was most famous in the seventies and eighties for a one-man touring show where he played Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist slave. William Marshall is best known to film buffs for play
ing a black vampire in the Blacula movies. But prior to that role, he appeared as Dr. Richard Daystrom in an original Star Trek episode called “The Ultimate Computer.” In this episode, Dr. Daystrom has come on board the Enterprise to install the M5, the latest and greatest in computing technology. I read an interview a few years ago with Marshall, in which he talked about what was significant about this role. Marshall said that nowhere in the script did it specify that the Daystrom character was black. He said, “The casting director chose me for the part, and I showed up on the first day of rehearsals, and none of the actors knew that they would be acting with a black man. The character was a Nobel Prize winner, a man greatly revered. Throughout this episode, all the other white actors had to call me ‘sir.’”
In the sixties, the image of a black man being treated in a color-blind way was significant. Mr. Spock would say things like, “I don’t mean to disagree, sir, but it appears as if your computer was showing signs of human emotions.” Now, not only is William Marshall a very good-looking, vibrant black man with an incredibly expressive face, but he is six foot five, whereas William Shatner, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, is only about five foot nine. Marshall’s character not only towered over the other characters figuratively, but also literally. Captain Kirk and Spock had to look up to him, which was an enormously powerful image to come out of 1968.
My personal view of the future has always been multicultural, and I owe this to the bridge of the Enterprise where there is Lieutenant Sulu who is Japanese, Uhura who is black, Chekov who is Russian, and Spock who is Vulcan, the most alien of all. It was inspiring to see members of all these groups working together as a unit. It was important in 1968, in an era of social unrest, for America to see a shining example of a peaceful multicultural tomorrow.