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

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.

The Cylons were created by man.
They rebelled.
They evolved.
There are many copies.
And they have a plan.

DINK dink dink-dink, dink-DINK dink dink-dink....

"and they have a plan" ended up being one of the more underwhelming things on that show. I can't even remember what the plan was. It's almost as if the writers thought the show would be cancelled long before they would ever have to reveal one.

Science Fiction has an interesting way of becoming science fact. If you ask me what we need to 'teach' our computers is the God Factor.

Unilateral killing of all humans, I suppose. They never said the plan had to have a lot of steps.

1.) Kill all humans.
2.) ?????
3.) Profit!

Hell, that's my plan, too.


What?


Seriously, I reckon that in 100 years time, there's a 50% chance that the dominant "species" on earth will no longer be a biological life-form, but some kind of self-replicating technology whose first generations were created by humans, but who/which have long since transcended us.

No, this idea is not in the least original.
Now komm witt me if you vant to live.

This is very interesting since I, just a couple of days ago, began to read about Deep Learning and Markov Chain Monte Carlo. I don't know much other then these are areas of development in AI research and Quantum Computing. My first reaction when reading about this is that the groups-- mostly located at universities--who are studying and developing these systems sound like they are trying to create SkyNet.

If you havn't done any reading about these subjects and this is an area of interest than try your google fu, I promise you will find it fascinating.

That's exactly what the machines want us to do.

Close, but Ray Kurzweil's 'Age of Spiritual Machines' will convince you that those next things will be us. AI isn't the end game, we just need an OS that we can run ourselves on. First, 'virtualized' people, next . . . something else. But it will be us. You could even say we 'go to heaven and live forever'

...or some dumb, implausible (or is it?) shit like that.

It might be a select few of us, but not all of us.

If they offered you the chance at virtualization, both a grasp at immortality and a chance to further mankind's knowledge of both science and history in a way never possible before, but your family and friends didn't make the cut so you would have to watch them get old and die without you, would you do it?

If they offered you the chance at virtualization...would you do it?
 

No way.

That virtualization would be a copy, an emulation, but it wouldn't be 'me'.

'Me' (Henry Quirk) is the sum, and on-going result, of flesh, bone, organ, and experience (I'm a finite, discrete, on-going, organic, event...that is: I'm not 'software' running on 'hardware'...I AM the 'hardware').

Instead: I'll have my major marrow producing sites seeded with nano-machines...the lil buggers can swim my blood, cleaning and repairing.

'I' get to live as 'myself' till squashed by a Mack, meteor, or man (if I'm careful: I might live to prospect and mine the *Oort Cloud).









*I'm bettin' it's strange there...all manner of frigid, organic, gumbos producing lord knows what...I'd like to see that place for myself

If my personality and mind can be ported into a computer, then that's just a copy. The real me is left behind. It's creating another and as soon as that copy is made, that other is going to be different because he's going to go off onto his own path. I wouldn't be able to experience what he is experiencing, because I'm still here in this body. But he would think he's been ported from me into him. So it's kind of like having a kid. Giving life to someone else. But there's a very clear divide. I'm still me, and that's him.

These ethical issues are going to be real, and they are coming soon.

I'd only do it if it was a gradual, cell-by-cell augmentation where as the organic cells died, the technological ones took over. That way, if it's possible for consciousness to survive that transition, I would have maintained a continuity of consciousness; and if it's not, then I would have died anyway as my cells died.

reminds me of the Benny Hill joke years ago that the British were going to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right, but that they were going to implement the change gradually.