My Computer is My Friend

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtwmqNB2gyk


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZEZzqJaA9E

We've talked before about Kurzweil's Singularity, and the Transhumanist movement: both are examples of a belief system which says technology will eventually lead us to our salvation, perhaps even to immortality!

On the other hand, we all have days when computers just seem to not want to co-operate, and it would seem that trusting our futures to these obstinate beasts is a recipe for disaster. Did my computer just crash on purpose to show me who's boss?

That's the tongue-in-cheek viewpoint of this song about that love-hate relationship all of us have from time to time with technology, in a world where just about everything has some kind of a chip in it these days. Bob Evans takes the lead vocals on this foot-stomper, while the video above shows some vintage footage from a time when the computer in my cell phone would have filled an entire room, and might have been used to start World War III.

My Computer is My Friend
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Oh whenever I need something in a hurry
And whenever I need something done right now
When those deadlines have got me oh so worried
There's one thing on which I can always count

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end

And whenever my files have not been backed up
My computer knows to put me in my place
That's the time my hard drive's gonna pack up
My reputation's gone without a trace

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end

Everything takes longer than it used to
Nothing's ever simple any more
By the time I've booted up to Windows
Can't remember what I turned the thing on for

Every month I'm spendin' all my money
On more RAM, more drives, more speedy CPU's
But the faster my computer says it's runnin'
The slower my bloated software seems to move

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end


So, in the last couple of weeks we've looked at music videos for Crop Circles, Forty Below, Greetings from the Grids, Gimme the News, and now My Computer is My Friend. These five songs have been a bit of a diversion from the usual fare here at this blog, I hope you enjoyed them and accept them in the "just for fun" spirit in which they were offered. Next time around, we'll return to our discussion of how reality is not continuous with More Slices of Reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

PPS - As I've said in previous entries, this music comes from a set of ten songs I performed "live-to-tape" with my friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol back in 1997. If you'd like to purchase high-quality mp3s it's only five dollars for the whole collection, go to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested. And just another reminder while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Gimme the News

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-Azgc7Lf4

In my most popular blog entry of all time, Jumping Jesus, we talked about the constantly accelerating flow of information that each of us have to deal with. More recently, in entries like Monkeys Love Metallica and Placebos Becoming More Effective, we've talked about how this acceleration might be changing us. Nova Spivack calls it The Stream: and tools like the Semantic Web and Mr. Spivack's Twine are part of the ongoing efforts to provide us with tools to filter out the signal from the noise. In Connecting It All Together, I said this:

Like predictions of the end of the world, predictions that change is happening more and more quickly are really not unique to today, people have been saying such things throughout history (this is where we can cue a sound montage of parents through the ages complaining about "kids today, where do they get these crazy ideas"). This is not to say that accelerated change is not happening now, but rather to say that this has been an ongoing process of slowly accelerating growth for thousands of years which we may or may not see the culmination of within our lifetimes.

My song Gimme the News, written as a satire back in 1997, encapsulates today's 140-character Twitter world quite effectively, even though it predates that service by a decade. As the old saying goes, "the only thing that stays the same is nothing stays the same", and no matter where you are along the curve that is always more true today than it was the day before.

Gimme the News
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Gimme the news and make it real quick
Keep it simple, that's the trick
Give me a soundbyte I can call my own
And quote to my friends, show 'em I'm in the know

Gimme the news, and make it real short
Want the world's events in a two minute report
Got no time for facts that just slow me down
Already feel like I'm about to drown

In an ocean of info that I don't want to see
Got way too much input, more than I need
Everywhere I look, every place I go
It's information overload
Information overload
Information overload

Gimme the news, don't make it real deep
I've got miles to go before I sleep
Banal and superficial, that'll suit me fine
Edit it down until it fits on a sign

At the edge of the highway like a wonderful ad
That sticks in my brain, just another quick fad
A jingle to rattle round inside my head
Like "Big bomb, 200 dead
Big bomb, 200 dead
Big bomb, 200 dead"

Gimme the news
Don't give me the blues
Just gimme the news


Next: What Happens if Kurzweil's Singularity never arrives, and the Transhumanists are wrong, and Mike Judge's Idiocracy becomes a chillingly real vision of the future? We're going to look at one more Rob Bob and Roberta song from that ten-song collection next time that talks about our love-hate relationship with modern technology: My Computer is My Friend.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - Don't forget, this is just one of a ten-song collection of songs, if you'd like to purchase these ten songs as high-quality mp3s it's only five dollars for the whole collection, go to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested. And while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.

You should follow me on twitter here.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

The Very Model of a Singularitarian

In entries like Making New Connections, The Stream, Computers and Consciousness, Suffering in the Multiverse, and Jumping Jesus, we've talked about Ray Kurzweil, his concept of the approaching Singularity, and the transhuman movement. Now check out this charmingly strange video:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hKG5l_TDU8

You will recognize the music, of course, from "The Pirates of Penzance" by Gilbert and Sullivan. The lyrics to this new version of that song were written and performed by Charlie Kam. Admittedly these words do go by a mile a minute, so here's the lyrics, which are copyright 2006 by Mr. Kam.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I'm combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I'm changing all my body's biochemistry
Because my body's heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it's here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body's where there's continuity,
I'll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
("But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes...")
I'll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology

And with our new technology, renewable clean energy,
Remove our pathogens and overcome hunger and poverty
In short I am a Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
In short he is a Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
He is the very model of a Singularitarian

Knowledge in all forms music, art, science and technology,
Our brains and bodies all precious and any loss a tragedy
Important recognitions and insights are what we should retain
While we destroy all of the useless information that remains
And when a person dies we lose a profound pattern tragically,
And the part of ourselves that interacted with them lit'rally
Religious folks may rationalize that death is really something good
("Something Good? Something GOOD? Eh?)
I think they'd change their minds if Singularity were understood
I think they'd change their minds if Singularity were understood
I think they'd change their minds if Singularity were understood
I think they'd change their minds if Singularity were understood

I create and appreciate all of the knowledge that I know
Toward greater order even though complexity I know may grow
In short I am Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
In short he is a Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
He is the very model of a Singularitarian

The purpose of the universe is that of all our human lives
Since no aliens have come forth this much we can now rationalize
We'll spread our thoughts with nanobots that know how to self-replicate
Through solar system, Milky Way or anywhere we designate
Ideas are our products that will solve the problems of our fate
And new ideas for the problems we can't yet articulate
Let's leverage all our knowledge from the returns that accelerate
(Returns that accelerate? Sounds familiar. Ah yes, the law of accelerating returns by Ray Kurzweil, of course, OF COURSE!)
So the outcome of universe is something we can contemplate
The outcome of universe is something we can contemplate
The outcome of universe is something we can contemplate
The outcome of universe is something we can contemplate

The singularity is near but I won't be indifferent
In case something should go awry I'll do my bestest to prevent
Because I am a Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
Because he is a Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian
He is the very model of a Singularitarian

(Yes! Singularity! Woo hoo! Singularity is here! Singularity is near! Singularity!)

Wasn't that fun? According to the Charlie Kam bio, IEEE Explore magazine favorably compared the lyrics of this song to Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near, and suggested (amusingly) that persons in a hurry could listen to the song if they felt they didn't have time to read the book.

Last blog, we talked about serious scientific approaches to time travel. Here, we're talking about the possibility of uploading or merging our consciousness with some form of technology. Let's continue blending those ideas together in the next two entries: Reality's a Dream, and Time is in the Mind.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Life is But a Dream

Jumping Jesus

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1drvP3Y3E8

Image from wikipedia:Belgian surrealist René Magritte's famous painting, subtitled "This is not a pipe"

In The Map and the Territory, we looked at this thought-provoking painting, and we talked about Alfred Korzybski, who gave us this simple but profound quote: "the map is not the territory". He is responsible for a science he called General Semantics, which wikipedia sums up as follows:

Korzybski's work held a view that human beings are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" (nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). Sometimes our perceptions and our languages actually mislead us as to the "facts" with which we must deal. Our understanding of what is going on sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually going on. He stressed training in awareness of abstracting, using techniques that he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, "consciousness of abstracting". His system included modifying the way we approach the world, e.g., with an attitude of "I don't know; let's see," to better discover or reflect its realities as shown by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he called, "silence on the objective levels".

Korzybski's work has influenced a number of deep thinkers, including Robert Anton Wilson, who we'll get to shortly. It was Wilson who coined the term "the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon".

In Computers and Consciousness, we talked about the conundrums we are bound to encounter as computers become more and more powerful - if a computer is able to map and seamlessly re-create all of the mental processes of a human being, is that computer conscious? Here's the video for Computers and Consciousness:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRiYQuisqPM

As you're watching this video, you're seeing scenes from a movie which in YouTube has been called The Singularity is Near. But after further research I see that the scenes are actually from a 2006 three-part documentary series on the notion of transhumanism by Belgian visual artist and filmmaker Frank Theys, called TechnoCalyps. Here's what it says on his website:

The accelerating advances in genetics, brain research, artificial intelligence, bionics and nanotechnology seem to converge to one goal: to overcome human limits and create higher forms of intelligent life and to create transhuman life.

Frank Theys conducts his enquiry into the scientific, ethical and metaphysical dimensions of these technological developments. The film includes interviews by top scientists and thinkers on the subject worldwide, including Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Terence McKenna, Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, Margaret Wertheim, Rael, the Dalai Lama and many more.

This looks like it would be a great DVD set to own, but it appears the program is not available in a format that will play on North American players - too bad! Still the entire series is available on Google Video, so here's all 3 parts. Each of these clips is over 50 minutes long, so make sure you're comfortable!

Here's a direct link to the above video - Part One.


Here's a direct link to the above video - Part Two.


Here's a direct link to the above video - Part Three.

We've talked about the transhuman movement a few times now, in Suffering in the Multiverse and in Computers and Consciousness. And we've talked about the idea that our reality is accelerating in ways that seem entwined with our awareness in numerous entries, including Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe, Google and the Group Mind, The Stream, Evolution's Fast Lane and Boredom and Consciousness. The images I showed behind me in my video for Computers and Consciousness come from Part Two of Technocalyps, which after some shots of scientists working in clean room suits, shows a visualization of our history as a moving landscape - from fire, to agriculture, the wheel, and so on, we start with the innovations very far apart, but as we move through the landscape they become closer and closer together. Futurist/novelist Robert Anton Wilson appears and talks about this concept:

"The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon is my name for the acceleration of information throughout history. I first heard of that through Alfred Korzybski, a Polish mathematician who invented a scientific discipline called General Semantics. Korzybski noted that information was doubling faster and faster, every generation. And he said we've got to be prepared for this, we've got to train ourselves to be less dogmatic and more flexible so that we can deal with change. He took the year 1 A.D. as his basic unit to calculate how long it took for the information available to human beings to double, and it took 1500 years... which brought us up to the Renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci was in his forties, and the Renaissance was at its height.

I decided to call this unit a "Jesus": so, in 1 A.D. we had "one Jesus", in 1500 we had "two Jesus". The next doubling only took 250 years, so already you can see the acceleration factor, and by 1750 we had "four Jesus". The next doubling took a hundred and fifty years and by 1900 we had "eight Jesus". The next doubling only took fifty years and by 1950 we had "sixteen Jesus". In 1960 in only ten years we had "thirty-two Jesus", by 1967 we had "sixty-four Jesus", and by 1973 we had "128 Jesus", and the latest estimate I've seen is by Dr. Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist who says that knowledge is doubling every year. But I heard that estimate, oh, five or six years ago. I saw something on the net recently, somebody estimated it's doubling about twice a year now."

How can we possibly deal with such an overwhelming deluge of new information? I've talked about the need for quieting our "narrator voice" in a number of previous blogs, including Logic vs. Intuition, Daily Parrying, Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional, in my book, and in my song "Automatic". Korzybski's work seems to have an interesting connection to the idea that we do better when we can achieve "silence on the objective levels", and it seems clear that the goals of meditation and mindfulness training, as ways of dealing with the dizzying amount of change we are now experiencing, can be tied together into Korzybski's theories of General Semantics.

Quiet your mind, stop the needless loops, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: O is for Omniverse - New Book!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Suffering in the Multiverse

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38seBd3ptm8

Does the multiverse really exist? In a recent blog entry about the question, we celebrated the fact that well-known physicists like Brian Greene have finally come around to saying that the other universes of the multiverse are not just theoretical, but as real as our own. Read this article from arstechnica which says we could see evidence of the answer to that question of whether the multiverse really exists within the next month:

Early in our Universe's history (before the mulitiverse's inflation pulled things apart), it was possible that the Universe bumped into a neighboring one. If that's the case, there should be remnants of that event buried in the cosmic microwave background. Less than a month from now, the ESA's Planck mission should arrive at the L2 Lagrange point with instruments sensitive enough to pick up this signal.

Many Worlds, Many Choices
Embracing Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics requires us to accept that there are branching timelines possible for our universe where each of us make the bad choice, do the wrong thing, have the unlucky twist of fate, and so on. In my project, I try to make it clear that there's a big difference between knowing that such potentials exist, and actually choosing to participate in those timelines. The version of the universe where I got out of bed this morning and killed all my neighbors must exist within the wave function of all possible versions of our universe, but that's not the version I chose to observe. Having not observed it, I can accept that the potential for it to exist was there but I will never be able to conjure that particular version of reality into existence now that this morning is passed. This is what I mean when I talk about the fifth dimension being a probability space - the probability of me entering a parallel universe where I killed my neighbors this morning is now zero per cent. Such universes continue to exist within the sixth dimension, but those outcomes have nothing to do with me, because I can't (and don't want to!) get to those versions of the universe: they're inaccessible (or decoherent, as physicists say) to the probability space of the quantum wave function that I'm currently navigating within.

Today is Michael Jackson's public memorial service. In the same line of reasoning, the versions of our universe where Michael Jackson is still alive today do not even exist as potential from within our fifth dimensional set of causally related outcomes, and that's true from the quantum level right out to the biggest, most macro picture of them all. According to the way of visualizing the dimensions that I'm proposing here, those versions of our universe exist only within the sixth dimension, and that's why "we can't get there from here" as we choose from our fifth dimensional probability space one planck frame after another.

Abolishing Suffering
Here's a link to an amazing essay by philosopher David Pearce, co-founder of the Abolitionist Society:
http://www.abolitionist.com/multiverse.html

In Computers and Consciousness, we touched on the transhuman movement, and David is a key proponent of those ideas (as we said then, transhumanism is about finding ways to use technology to improve our lives, up to and including approaches which increasingly blur the line between the technology and the person). Abolitionism is a related movement which proposes transhumanist solutions must work towards the abolition of all involuntary suffering in the world. In that sense, this relates to a fanciful blog entry I published not long ago called News From the Future.

Let me quote a few sections from the David Pearce essay, but I do invite you read the entire piece: this is a thought provoking exploration of the ideas that we deal with regularly in Imagining the Tenth Dimension. First, let's read a section where Pearce sums up all the different multiverse scenarios where suffering takes place:

...contemporary theoretical physics suggests that even the multiverse of Everettian quantum mechanics doesn't remotely exhaust the totality of suffering. For there may be googols of other multiverses. Suffering may exist in other post-inflationary domains far beyond our light cone; and in countless other "pocket universes" on variants of Linde's eternal chaotic inflation scenario; and in myriad parent and child universes on Smolin's cosmological natural selection hypothesis; and among a few googols of the other 10⁵⁰⁰⁺ different vacua of string theory; and even in innumerable hypothetical "Boltzmann brains", vacuum fluctuations in the (very) distant future of "our" Multiverse. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Nor are they exhaustive. Thus some theorists believe we live in a cyclic universe, for instance; and that the Big Bang is really the Big Bounce.

Of course, the theories alluded to above are speculative. They are far removed from our everyday experience. Even if one or more of these theories is correct, it is tempting implicitly to suppose that the suffering of sentient beings occupying such realms is (somehow) less real than our own: metaphysical theories imply, in some sense, only metaphysical suffering. This comfortable assumption would be wrong-headed, not to say complacent. If any of the above hypotheses are substantively true, then the suffering of victims embedded therein is no less real than our own. Moreover in the case of other branches of "our" multiverse, it's debatable whether the branches are even "metaphysical". Not merely is their existence implied by empirically well-attested theory. Strictly speaking, interference effects from other quasi-classical branches never disappear; they merely become vanishingly small. Interference effects between different "worlds" can in principle be quantified by decoherence functionals. Their inferred real existence isn't just airy philosophizing.

Faced with this fathomless immensity of suffering, a compassionate mind may become morally shell-shocked, numbed by the sheer enormity of it all. Googolplexes of Holocausts are too mind-wrenching to contemplate. We might conclude that the amount of suffering in Reality must be infinite - and hence any bid to minimise such infinite suffering would still leave an infinite amount behind. A sense of moral urgency risks succumbing to a hopeless fatalism.

Then, later in the essay, he discusses the possibility that even when future humans figure out a way to eradicate all suffering, there may continue to be some branches of the multiverse where, quite inexplicably, suffering is allowed to continue:

This discussion contains a controversial assumption which if confounded will make the story sketched here even darker. The controversial assumption is that when intelligent agents have attained the technical means to abolish the biological substrates of suffering, they will almost invariably do so. Thus by implication, suffering will be abolished in the great preponderance of branches where humans [or their functional counterparts] decipher their own genetic source code and develop biotechnology. A subsequent cross-branch reproductive revolution of designer babies is effectively inevitable. This generalisation might seem an extraordinarily reckless prediction. Forecasting is perilous enough even if one is a classical one-worlder. So predicting that a highly speculative scenario (i.e. the abolition of suffering) will eventually play out in the vast bulk of branches of macroscopic worlds with inhabitants attaining our level of technological development - and conversely, predicting that only a vanishingly small density of such branches will retain suffering indefinitely - might seem foolhardy in the extreme. Perhaps so. Recall how opiophobia still retards the medical treatment of even "physical" pain. But let's suppose instead that the analogy with anaesthetics holds up. After the discovery of general anaesthesia, its surgical use was contentious for a decade or two. But pain-free surgery soon became universally accepted. In our current state of ignorance, there is no way we can rigorously calculate the probability density of branches of the Multiverse where anaesthesia was discovered and rejected. But at worst, it's fair to say the proportion of branches is extremely small. Branches where governments outlaw pain-free surgery aren't sociologically credible. Of course the abolition of psychological distress is a less clear-cut case than anaesthesia. Technologies to abolish mental pain are in their infancy. But let's assume that in future they can be made as technically clean and successful as surgical anaesthesia. In what proportion of such branches will some or all people reject mental superhealth indefinitely? Again, a case can be made (though it won't be attempted here) that the proportion will be vanishingly small. Unfortunately, the proportion of life-supporting branches of the Multiverse whose dominant species reaches this stage of technical development is extremely small too. So the anticipated local success of the abolitionist project touted here is not as wonderful news as it sounds.

What practical lessons, if any, should be drawn from this bleak analysis of Reality? Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure - absolutely sure - that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.

David Pearce
(2008)

A beautifully written piece, Mr. Pearce, my hat is off to you. Here are some of the blogs where I've explored similar ideas, though admittedly not with the number of ideas-per-sentence that you were able to achieve with your brilliant essay:

We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
The Biocentric Universe
The Past is an Illusion
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Big Bang is an Illusion

Computers and Consciousness

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bXACTqKIII

In May one of of my most popular blogs was called News From the Future, an entry which fancifully portrayed a moment two decades from now where we finally use technology to realize that humans are not nearly as unique as we've convinced ourselves. We continued the discussion of such ideas a few entries ago in "Do Animals Have Souls?". You may or may not be surprised when I tell you that this all ties to the entry prior to that as well, "Logic vs. Intuition", where we talked about Monica Anderson and her Artificial Intuition project. Monica's company Syntience is developing new algorithms which may help to make computers able to process The Stream , a potentially overwhelming flood of sometimes flawed information, in ways that parallel how humans are able to deal with these contradictions and holes and an incalculably large amount of incoming data: using intuition rather than logic (see Illusions and Reality for more about how humans assemble all this data together). Would such processes allow computers to some day become more self-aware? If you look in the column to the right, you will see that we are currently running a poll question here at the tenth dimension blog which asks visitors for their opinions on that very question.

I've been following Blogging the Singularity for related ideas to all this, a very active blog with a wide range of topics, check it out. As we saw in the above video "The Singularity is Near", the idea that we live in times that are rapidly accelerating seems to be driving us to a moment of a major paradigm shift, a "flip" into a new way of existing: such ideas are connected to the transhuman movement, which believes in a future where technology seamlessly melds with humans to make our lives better. The ideas in the above YouTube clip are related to Ray Kurzweil's book and upcoming movie, "The Singularity is Near": Kurzweil predicts that humans some day not too long from now will be able to upload the unique patterns that make them who they are into a computer, and effectively live forever as a result! In order for such a thing to happen, computers would have to be able to duplicate the processes that allow each human to have their unique perspective, a concept we talked about not long ago in "Where Are You?".

The Turing Test was proposed in 1950 by computing pioneer Alan Turing, and although it has its critics, it has been an essential part of the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence ever since. The picture at left is from wikipedia, which describes the test as follows: "player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination."

Nowadays it's not so uncommon to be fooled by a "bot" for a moment, where sly programmers convince you that you're talking to a real human who really wants to offer you a one-of-a-kind deal before you leave their webpage, or who has just written you a highly personalized email. I've talked before about the amusing "Chat with Einstein" window over at the excellent Journey By Starlight blog, which is somewhat similar to ELIZA, a simple psychotherapy program that first appeared back in the 60's. Even though such programs can sometimes seem to make interesting intuitive leaps, they are certainly not what we are talking about when we say Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Intuition.

Nonetheless, they do reveal two sides of an important coin: anthropomorphism doesn't just apply to animals, and when we see a computer responding in a human-like way we're more likely to believe the computer has a personality, a point of view, all those things that point towards consciousness. But what if we played with the Turing Test, were asked to decide whether A or B was the computer, but this time we were actually talking to two humans? How long would it take us to decide there was something "off" about one of the responders, and pronounce that person to be the robot?

This is the slippery slope we find ourselves on: if we are really moving to a time when people will be able to upload their consciousness to computers, then I would say it follows that we must also be moving to a time when a computer will be conscious on its own. Rather than interpret this to mean that humans and computers will then be superior to all other living things, we have to see this as being part of the continuum that shows us how all living things have varying degrees of consciousness. As computers start to become "aware", they will not just suddenly wake up one day to become indistinguishable from civilized adults: this will be a gradual process, much as an embryo first starts to become aware of its surroundings. Interestingly, award-winning science fiction novelist Robert Sawyer, who has been writer-in-residence at the Synchrotron here in Saskatchewan for the last few months, has just released a novel called "Wake" which talks about some near future time when the World Wide Web starts to wake up, to become conscious. Here's a quote from my local newspaper, the Regina Leader-Post, about the novel:

In Wake, Caitlin, a blind female math genius gets a signal-processing implant that may give her sight. Instead, she starts to perceive the actual structure of the World Wide Web. While she's looking at it, she becomes aware that there's an entity or consciousness starting to bubble up into existence out of the vast complexity of the Internet. Caitlin gets it into her head to play the role of Annie Sullivan, the famous teacher of her hero Helen Keller, to this "nascent consciousness" of the Internet.

I love the idea that things are growing and changing at an ever-increasing pace, and what that could be mean to our new future. We're going to continue this discussion next time with more about technology, AI, intuition, and connections.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Connecting It All Together