Musings on Clarke/Kubrick's 2001, AI, virtualization, and Ray Kurzweil

[Flint]

A bit scattered, so to start at the beginning...

Was discussing server virtualization at work the other day. My boss expressed, to paraphrase, that he feels that virtual servers 'pretending' to be physical servers is a stop-gap measure. In effect, why do we bother to have them 'pretend' to have hardware instead of writing applications that can access direct units of server resources? If that makes sense.

The conclusion of this is that if we truly just time-sliced servers, we would be full circle to the mainframes we used to login to with dumb terminals.



A few days later, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL, being disconnected from his personality, disk by disk, says "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I said, "How ƒucked up is it that a computer is saying I can feel it?" and my friend J remarks, "He just thinks he can feel it."



HAL is a virtualized consciousness in exactly the same way that virtualized servers are virtualized--they both pretend to be something they are not. A virtual server only thinks it has RAM. Just as HAL thinks he can feel it.


So, jumping ahead, and in a very tight nutshell, Kurzweil predicts that we will--in this order-- 1) put machines inside ourselves, 2) put ourselves inside machines, 3) realize the futility of--in the above stated terms--'virtualizing' ourselves as humans, and--the big, unimagineable leap, to-- 4) embrace whatever it is that we will become next. This next thing, we can't imagine yet.

But Kurzweil tracks it on the same curve as the evolution of human consciousness, human technology, the convergence of the two, and whatever happens when that happens. Oddly, although not in the same way, the same elements play out in 2001--althought I never noticed this until an actual technology (server virtualization) connected the dots.

Actual science is revealing newer, truer meanings in science fiction.