A few interesting links for y’all …
Esquire Magazine last month published a serious, reasonable article by Stephen Poole on the Singularity and advancing AGI… just don’t mind the Terminator-ish title: “The Rise of the Machines”
Poole presents a balanced range of views on how soon human-level AGI will come, and expresses some understandable worry about the possibility of superintelligent military battle-bots
Also on the theme of potential scary world-outcomes, H+ Assistant Director Marcelo Rinesi has released a fascinating new novella entitled “The Ontociders“, which the author describes as A short novella of multiple apocalypses, casual violence, and genocidal insanity — and those are just the good guys.
I read Ontociders during the recent DC “snowpocalypse” which shut down the US capital for a week, which felt somehow appropriate. Thematically it’s a bit in the vein of Kafka, Lem’s Futurological Congress or Dick’s Three Stigmata … but the stylistic vibe is more cyberpunk or manga … one feels the characters are inside a giant multiversal video game and it isn’t clear in what sense anything is actually happening … but still the fast-paced action and drama and experience continue … wait, that’s a bit like this universe we find ourselves stuck in, isn’t it?
After reading Ontociders, it was amusing to randomly happen on Tish Shute’s blog post about augmented reality: The Physical World Becomes a Software Construct … which, like the Esquire article mentioned above, quotes Vernor Vinge …
It all really makes one wonder. “Life”, “death”, “physical” and “software” are all just part of our limited pre-transhuman-era concept-sphere, right? Yet still they have their elemental importance, just as does the conscious experience of every sentient being. What will we think of all this in a few decades or centuries when our minds have been vastly improved and expanded? Let’s hope we live long enough to find out … and avoid the battle-bots and Ontociders on the path to a positive transhuman future… (and not only hope, but work to make it so…)
And in that vein, I’ll give you one more link … a reminder to read Stephan Pernar’s fascinating AGI/Singularity novel Jame5, which presents one detailed strategy for increasing the odds that superhuman AGIs, when created, will be positive for all sentient beings…. Without giving away the plot, let me just say that the strategy has to do with the interesting relationship between physical and digital reality…
