ENVISIONING THE DAY WHEN TECHNOLOGY OUTTHINKS US

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not t...

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards. He can write space operas, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilisation is to a goldfish.
The Singularity is often called “the rapture of the nerds,” but Vinge doesn’t anticipate immortal bliss. He envisions catastrophes and worries about the fate of not-so-marvellous humans like Robert Gu, the protagonist of Vinge’s latest novel, Rainbows End.

Robert is an English professor and famous poet who succumbs to Alzheimer’s, languishing in a nursing home until 2025, when the Singularity seems near. He recovers most of his mental faculties; his 75-year-old body is rejuvenated. But he’s so lost in this new world that he has to go back to high school to learn basic survival skills. Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft, iPhones, instant messaging—all these are ancestral technologies now that everyone is connected to everyone and everything.
To Robert, a misanthrope who’d barely mastered e-mail in his earlier life, this networked world is a multitasking hell. He retreats to one of his old haunts, the Geisel Library, once the intellectual hub of the University of California, San Diego, where he finds a few other “medical retreads” still reading books and using ancient machines like laptops. Calling themselves the Elder Cabal, they conspire to save the paper library. Vinge, who is 63, talked about his own concerns about 2025—like whether anyone will still be reading books

Story continues below this ad

“These people in Rainbows End have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”
It’s an unsettling vision, but Vinge classifies it as one of the least unpleasant scenarios for the future: intelligence amplification, or I.A., in which humans get steadily smarter by pooling their knowledge with one another and with computers, possibly even wiring the machines directly into their brains. The alternative to I.A., he figures, could be the triumph of A.I. as artificial intelligence far surpasses the human variety. If that happens, Vinge says, the superintelligent machines will not content themselves with working for their human masters, nor will they remain securely confined in laboratories.

To avoid that scenario, Vinge has been urging his fellow humans to get smarter by collaborating with computers. At the conclusion of his novel, even the technophobic protagonist is in sync with his machines, and there are signs that the Singularity has arrived in the form of a superintelligent human-computer network. Or maybe not. Perhaps this new godlike intelligence mysteriously directing events is pure machine. Vinge has left it purposely ambiguous.
And what would happen to us if the machines rule? Well, Vinge said, it’s possible that artificial post-humans would use us the way we’ve used oxen and donkeys. But he preferred to hope they would want to protect weaker species.
_JOHN TIERNEY, NYT