Blogging the Noosphere

The 2007 Hugo Award Winners were announced awhile ago and I saw that Vinge had won another Hugo for his excellent novel Rainbows End. I love Vinge and read everything he puts out, as soon as it comes out. He is one of the few I will pick up in hardback, which I did with Rainbows End.

One thought after rereading. We are currently in the middle of our Fall 2007 AI Course. Vinge is a Computer Scientist by training, and it shows in his work. The ideas just leap off of every page of this novel. I especially love his concepts of Analyst Pools. These are really a bit of a fleshed out version of a borganism (a term invented by Stross, I believe). I can almost see how a system like this might be created in today’s world of Social Networking Systems and Wisdom of Crowds organization. To bring it back to our AI class, imagine a big A* or min-max search specification being conducted in real-time. But instead of machine generated and evaluated heuristic functions, imagine analysts instead providing human-level-intelligent type heuristic estimation of states, possibly mitigated by a Prediction Market to allow many competing heuristic estimates of states to be combined. I could imagine, if you could build the software support system to manage 10s or 100s of thousands of analysts all working collectively on such a machine/human guided search, you would have something very like what Vinge envisions in Rainbows End. I’ll just say that I know of research initiatives at NSF and elsewhere that are envisioning and working towards the possibilities of such real-time social borganism as this.

I just finished giving a talk this afternoon for our TAMUC Freshman Success Seminar. Not sure if I managed to convey anything of use or import to any of you all. If any of the Freshmen who were there in the class want to leave me a comment I would love to hear what you thought, or if you had any questions. I really should have mentioned the blog and suggested people leave comments.

Anyway pressed for time I sort of threw out one topic or point that I was going to make. I’m sure by the last slide some students would perhaps think that I am obviously a Technophile at best, and possibly a naive fool at worst, in spouting an overly optimistic and simplistic view of the power of science and technology as a positive force in our culture. I was going to quote the following excerpt from Ted Kaczynski, you know he of Unabomber fame, as a somewhat diametrically opposed view of what I was presenting:

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

By all accounts Kazcynski is a very smart individual, a bonafide genius. So it should at least be distubing to us that he can look at the same set of facts and come up with such a bleak and opposite view of our potential future. In response I would urge you to read the following except by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger on Salon from their new book

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility

As a response to the type of depressive vision of Kaczynski, I think it rather nicely sums up my own message (though I wish I had even a portion of their talent to communicate it so well).

For those who might have been interested, here is a link to the slides of the presentation I gave:

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy PDF

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy PPT

Computational Sciences and Scientific Literacy ODP