Collected Essays (48 page)

Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times, we imagined that we’d need a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence to make the global mind work—we thought of it as resembling an extremely smart person. The conventional Hollywood image for the global mind’s interface was a talking head on a wall-sized screen.

And now, in 2010, we have the global mind. Search-engines, user-curated encyclopedias, images of everything under the sun, clever apps to carry out simple computations—it’s all happening. But old-school artificial intelligence is barely involved at all.

As it happens, data, and not algorithms, is where it’s at. Put enough information into the planetary information cloud, crank up a search engine, and you’ve got an all-knowing global mind. The answers emerge.

Initially people resisted understanding this simple fact. Perhaps this was because the task of posting a planet’s worth of data seemed so intractable. There were hopes that some magically simple AI program might be able to extrapolate a full set of information from a few well-chosen basic facts—just a person can figure out another person on the basis of a brief conversation.

At this point, it looks like there aren’t going to be any incredibly concise aha-type AI programs for emulating how we think. The good news is that this doesn’t matter. Given enough data, a computer network can fake intelligence. And—radical notion—maybe that’s what our wetware brains are doing, too. Faking it with search and emergence. Searching a huge data base for patterns.

The seemingly insurmountable task of digitizing the world has been accomplished by ordinary people. This results from the happy miracle that the internet is that it’s unmoderated and cheap to use. Practically anyone can post information onto the web, whether as comments, photos, or full-blown web pages. We’re like worker ants in a global colony, dragging little chunks of data this way and that. We do it for free; it’s something we like to do.

Note that the internet wouldn’t work as a global mind if it were a completely flat and undistinguished sea of data. We need a way to locate the regions that are most desirable in terms of accuracy and elegance. An early, now-discarded, notion was that we would need some kind of information czar or committee to rank the data. But, here again, the anthill does the work for free.

By now it seems obvious that the only feasible way to rank the internet’s offerings is to track the online behaviors of individual users. By now it’s hard to remember how radical and rickety such a dependence upon emergence used to seem. No control! What a crazy idea. But it works. No centralized system could ever keep pace.

An even more surprising success is found in user-curated encyclopedias. When I first heard of this notion, I was sure it wouldn’t work. I assumed that trolls and zealots would infect all the posts. But the internet has a more powerful protection system than I’d realized. Individual users are the primary defenders.

We might compare the internet to a biological system in which new antibodies emerge to combat new pathogens. Malware is forever changing, but our defenses are forever evolving as well.

I am a novelist, and the task of creating a coherent and fresh novel always seems in some sense impossible. What I’ve learned over the course of my career is that I need to trust in emergence—also known as the muse. I assemble a notes document filled with speculations, overheard conversations, story ideas, and flashy phrases. Day after day, I comb through my material, integrating it into my mental net, forging links and ranks. And, fairly reliably, the scenes and chapters of my novel emerge. It’s how my creative process works.

In our highest mental tasks, any dream of an orderly process is a will-o’-the wisp. And there’s no need to feel remorseful about this. Search and emergence are good enough for the global mind—and they’re good enough for us.

The World is Unpredictable

Answer to the he Edge Annual Question , 2011: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

The media cast about for the proximate causes of life’s windfalls and disasters. The public demands blocks against the bad and pipelines to the good. Legislators propose new regulations, fruitlessly dousing last year’s fires, forever betting on yesterday’s winning horses.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

How so? To predict an event is to know a shortcut for foreseeing the outcome in advance. A simple counting argument shows there aren’t enough shortcuts to go around. Therefore most processes aren’t predictable. A deeper argument plays on the fact that, if you could predict your actions, you could deliberately violate your predictions—which means the predictions were wrong after all.

We often suppose that unpredictability is caused by random inputs from higher spirits or from low-down quantum foam. But chaos theory and computer science tell us that non-random systems produce surprises on their own. The unexpected tornado, the cartoon safe that lands on Uncle George, the winning pull on a slot machine—odd things pop out of any rich computation. The world can simultaneously be deterministic, chaotic, and unpredictable.

In the physical world, the only way to learn tomorrow’s weather in detail is to wait twenty-four hours and see—even if nothing is random at all. The universe is computing tomorrow’s weather as rapidly and as efficiently as possible—any smaller model is inaccurate, and the smallest error is amplified into large effects.

At a personal level, even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still can’t predict what you’re going to do. This is because your prediction method would involve a mental simulation of you that produces its results slower than you. You can’t think faster than you think. You can’t stand on your own shoulders.

It’s a waste to chase the pipedream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing reality’s waves.

Inverse Power Laws

Answer to The Edge Question 2012: What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

I’m intrigued by the empirical fact that most aspects of our world and our society are distributed according to so-called inverse power laws. That is, many distribution curves take on the form of a curve that swoops down from a central peak to have a long tail that asymptotically hugs the horizontal axis.

Inverse power laws are elegantly simple, deeply mysterious, but more galling than beautiful. Inverse power laws are self-organizing and self-maintaining. For reasons that aren’t entirely understood they emerge spontaneously in a wide range of parallel computations, both social and natural.

One of the first social scientists to notice an inverse power law was George Kingsley Zipf, who formulated an observation now known as Zipf’s Law. This is the statistical fact that, in most documents, the frequency with which a given word is used is roughly proportional to the reciprocal of the word’s popularity rank. Thus the second most popular word is used half as much as the most popular word, the tenth most popular word is used a tenth as much as the most popular word, and so on.

In society, similar kinds of inverse power laws govern society’s rewards. Speaking as an author, I’ve noticed, for instance, that the hundredth most popular author sells a hundred-fold fewer books than the author at the top. If the top writer sells a million copies, someone like me might sell ten thousand.

Disgruntled scribes sometimes fantasize about a utopian marketplace in which the naturally arising inverse power law distribution would be forcibly replaced by a linear distribution, that is, a sales schedule that lies along a smoothly sloping line instead of taking the form of the present bent curve that starts at an impudently high peak and then swoops down to dawdle along the horizontal axis.

But there’s no obvious way that the authors’ sales curve could be changed. Certainly there’s no hope of having some governing group try and force a different distribution. After all, people make their own choices as to what books to read. Society is a parallel computation, and some aspects of it are beyond control.

The inverse-power-law aspects of income distribution are particularly disturbing. Thus the second-wealthiest person in a society might own half as much as the richest, with the tenth richest person possessing only a tenth as much, and—out on in the burbs—the thousandth richest person is making only one thousandth as much as the person on the top.

Putting the same phenomenon a little more starkly, while a company’s chief executive officer might earn a hundred million dollars a year, a software engineer at the same company might earn only a hundred thousand dollars a year, that is, a thousandth as much. And a worker in one of the company’s overseas assembly plants might earn only ten thousand dollars a year—a ten-thousandth as much as the top exec.

Power law distributions can also be found in the opening weekend grosses of movies, in the number of hits that web pages get, and in the audience shares for TV shows. Is there some reason why the top ranks do so overly well, and the bottom ranks seem so unfairly penalized?

The short answer is no—there’s no real reason. There need by no conspiracy to skew the rewards. Galling as it seems, inverse power law distributions are a fundamental natural law about the behavior of systems. They’re ubiquitous.

Inverse power laws aren’t limited to societies—they also dominate the statistics of the natural world. The tenth smallest lake is likely to be a tenth as large as the biggest one, the hundredth largest tree in a forest may be a hundredth as big as the largest tree, the thousandth largest stone on a beach is a thousandth the size of the largest one.

Whether or not we like them, inverse power laws are as inevitable as turbulence, entropy, or the law of gravity. This said, we can somewhat moderate them them in our social context, and it would be too despairing to say we have no control whatsoever over the disparities between our rich and our poor.

But the basic structures of inverse power law curves will never go away. We can rail at an inverse power law if we like—or we can accept it, perhaps hoping to bend the harsh law towards not so steep a swoop.

Note on “Edge Questions”

Written 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012.

Appeared on the
Edge
website and in various anthologies edited by John Brockman.

In 2004, hoping for a better-than-usual advance for my tome on the philosophy of computer science,
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
, I engaged the prominent science-book agent John Brockman. Brockman sent my proposal to about thirty publishers, but in the end, we ended up selling the book for a mid-range advance to my editor friend John Oakes, then at Avalon Publishing. Oakes had already who’d already published several of my books when he had his own company, Four Walls Eight Windows. Ironically, Oakes had wanted to buy the book before I even got involved with Brockman. Oh well!

But it was fun getting to know the colorful and abrasive Brockman, a quintessential New Yorker. John has a sort of scam where every year he sends out an annual question to his past and present clients—a truly star-studded list of the digerati. We obediently send John our answers, craving the slight publicity bump of appearing on his popular
Edge
site. And then he turns around and sells an anthology of our answers to a publisher without paying his contributors at all. And we ink-stained wretches are grateful to see our names in print, among such illustrious company. Why not. It’s only a few hundred words, and it’s fun making up wild answers to the Big Questions.

New Futures in SF

Ideas and Stories

Living art forms change—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. SF people are always sad to see the most recent “Golden Age” slip away, but it’s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire gutters down. It’s still
possible
to write novels about androids and spaceships and uploading your brain. And, by the same token, it’s still possible to write a doo-wop song or paint an abstract expressionist painting. But old forms become stiff and mannered, and working with them is a bit quixotic. Why not some new kinds of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.

It’s sometimes hard to grasp that the physics and sociology of earlier SF are only things that past writers made up. The received ideas of SF are unlikely to apply to any actual future. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t change the rules and dream up fresh futures of our own. We’re not duty-bound to copy what our predecessors did.

I’m going to talk about some fresh areas to mine for ideas. Note that having ideas is one thing, and turning them into stories is another. You need
two
separate things for a story: first of all, the SF idea or gimmick and, second of all, an underlying issue that the gimmick solves.

I’m of the transreal school of SF writing, so when I’m forming my ideas for an SF tale, I always look into my own life for the issues. That is, given an SF trope, I work to make the idea into a fresh and true metaphor for some immediate real-life concern of mine.

A cautionary note. By “real-life concern” I do
not
mean the doom-and-gloom that the official media are forever pushing on us. The news, in my opinion, is mind-control, motivated by incredibly narrow and self-serving interests. For years I’ve had a theory that commercial news, advertising, and mass entertainment are working in concert. All three of them promote fear and belligerence. Why? If you’re afraid, it’s easier for the politicians and the plutocrats to manipulate you. If you’re belligerent, you can be provoked into attacking whatever rebellious groups the politicians and plutocrats want to stamp out. And if you’re fearful and belligerent, you’re willing to hand over a large cut of your income to the warmongers who are “defending” you from their fellow warmongers in other lands.