Mayne, an acquaintance from Florida, who we didn't even know would be on this flight. As it happens, he is going to San Francisco for the same reason we are: To plot the annihilation of humanity.
That's an oversimplification, but true in essence. No matter how you
slice it, we expect that most of the men and women we shall encounter
this weekend will agree that humanity (at least in its
fleshy/hormone-addled/war-mongering present state) is on the way out.
What's debatable is whether we're going to be 1) destroyed utterly, 2)
gradually, pleasantly replaced by technology-enhanced, better versions
of ourselves, or 3) experience something even weirder less
predictable.
Such are the subjects of conversation at The Singularity Summit.
The Singularity is a thing debated passionately by those who love or
fear it; seldom agreed upon by those who are supposed to know about it,
and callously dismissed by people who ought to know better. What the Singularity is,
basically, is a hypothetical moment in the (relatively) near future when a
computer (or computer program) achieves ever-so-slightly-greater-than-human
intelligence.
thinking goes, just about anything could happen. This non-human intelligence --
or its hyper-intelligent children -- may emerge as the salvation of Western
Civilization; the embodiment of our most treasured humanistic ideals, bearing
us onward into progress, peace, and plenty. Or it could spawn a species of
self-replicating nano-machines that turn the planet and its creatures into so
much hot goo.
There are other
possibilities, too.
The one
of us sitting next to Andrew Mayne has spent the last three hours discussing precisely
these contingencies. Sample snippet, from Mayne: "People have this idea that
we're going to have this computer-brain in a box, like something out of Isaac
Asimov. It's very 1950s -- this stand-alone machine, you talk to it, you
tinker, you make improvements. But that's probably not how it's going to be.
Well before we have a smarter-than-human computer, we're going to have thousands
of these computers with almost-human intelligence, each designed with very
particular tasks in mind, and each one enormously powerful. So what if a
slightly smarter one emerges and goes haywire? There will be extraordinary
computational resources available to combat it."
Mayne -- who is known internationally as the founder of iTricksand WeirdThings.com --
is an optimist. Many of those at the Summit are greater optimists than he. Some are much, much more pessimistic. But none doubt that the era of computer-level human intelligences is nearly upon us.
The
gradual mainstreaming of the idea is exemplified by the presence, somewhere on
this plane, of James
Randi.
Randi is himself a retired magician. (He prefers the term
"conjurer.") Now 82, he has spent the past 40 years pursuing a second career as an educator,
warning the public away from the uncritical acceptance of "extraordinary
claims." Originally, he embarked upon this career to combat the ascendant New
Age movement, with its fraudulent psychics, spoon-benders, faith healers and
mind-readers -- most of whom, Randi well knew, were tricksters passing off
stunts as miracles. Randi still goes after supernaturalists, but in recent
years has turned his attention increasingly to pseudoscience. In particular,
Randi has publicly locked horns both with homeopaths and the anti-vaccine
movement.
says something that he's traveling to San
Francisco to address the Singularity Summit. Mostly,
that the idea of understanding, modeling, and replicating something as nebulous
"consciousness" doesn't seem so crazy as it once did. Humans accrue knowledge
quickly, after all, and the more we accrue, the faster we accrue it. Avoid
dying long enough and you'll see certainties upended and the impossible made
possible. Ask Randi: He's extremely old. He knows better than most that the
speed at which sci-fi becomes non-fi (or whatever) can fail to exhilarate only
those who are really, really not paying attention.
The Summit runs all weekend.
Randi co-headlines with Ray Kurzweil; Wunderkind Michael Vassar,
president of the Singularity Institute (the group responsible for the
proceedings on Saturday with a meditation on the increased importance of
skepticism and rationality in a world where irrational little monkeys have the
power to create new kinds of minds. If the world's still here come Monday,
we'll let you know how it went.
Follow us on Twitter at @TheSnitchSF
and @SFWeekly
