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Article-01-Final Biblio Tech Editor: Marc Donner, [email protected] AI Bites Man? ver the years, people have explored the broader Cyberpunk MARC and its roots DONNER implications of many seminal ideas in technology These works naturally evolved into a Department scarier version of the future. Cyber- Editor through the medium of speculative fiction. Some punk, one of the most fascinating threads in speculative fiction, is epito- of these works tremendously influenced the tech- mized in the work of William Gib- O son, who startled us many years ago nical community, as evidenced by the broad suffusion of terms into with a short story called “Johnny Mnemonic,” now included in the 1986 collection Burning Chrome (and its working vocabulary. When that is clearly derived from our own made into an unsuccessful 1995 Robert Morris disrupted the bur- but that makes a few technically plau- movie starring Keanu Reeves). Cy- geoning Internet in 1988, for ex- sible changes to our underlying as- berpunk stories generally feature a ample, the computer scientists try- sumptions. Vernor Vinge’s True dystopic world in the near or distant ing to understand and counteract Names represents such a world, in future in which technologies emerg- his attack quickly deemed the of- which the size and power of com- ing today have changed the ground fending software a “worm,” after a puter systems has grown to the point rules of life. term first introduced in John where artificial intelligence capable of Brunner’s seminal 1975 work, The passing the Turing test is beginning to 1949 Shockwave Rider. Brunner’s book emerge. Vinge’s most fascinating There isn’t a straight line from worlds launched several terms that became speculations involve the genesis and that resemble ours to cyberpunk. The standard labels for artifacts we see utility of these artificial intelligences, genre morphed over the years and today, including “virus.” and he explores the notion that AI decades through a variety of novels. In future installments of this de- might emerge accidentally, a theme Although cyberpunk is most strongly partment we’ll look at the important that appears elsewhere in books like identified with William Gibson, its writers, thinkers, works, and ideas in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a roots go much further back—all the speculative fiction that have got us Harsh Mistress and in Thomas J. way to George Orwell’s Nineteen thinking about the way technological Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1. Eighty-Four. change could affect our lives. This is In True Names, Vinge suggests a In 1949, when Orwell published not to imply that science fiction writ- radical use for such AI capabilities, the book that is now a staple of US ers represent a particularly prescient namely the preservation of the self high-school curricula, television was bunch—I think the norm is ray guns beyond the body’s death. Forget still a novelty in most households, al- and spaceships—but when they’re cryogenically freezing your brain or though the technology itself had good, they’re very good. And what- body in hope that someone will been around for 20 years. With TV’s ever gets us thinking is good. “cure” old age, he says—instead, fig- successful integration into modern To get started, let’s take a look at ure out how to save the contents of life, Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian some of the key subgenres and eras in your memory and the framework of future in which governmental con- science fiction’s history (see the “In- your personality in a big enough trol is mediated through two-way fluential Books” sidebar, p. 65). computer. If this AI passes the Turing television feels somewhat dated. test, then certainly your friends and Anyway, Orwell’s mastery of the lan- Worlds relatives won’t be able to tell the dif- guage and deep insights into many like our own ference. But will you know you’re human issues, including the relation- Some of the best (and earliest) science there? Will this AI be self-aware? ship between memory and truth (as fiction work speculates on a world Will it have a soul? Winston Smith discovers when he PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY I 1540-7993/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE I IEEE SECURITY & PRIVACY 63 Biblio Tech those of the 1969 world that pub- lished the book. Editor’s Intro Brunner, writing six years later, explores more fundamental ques- n this department, we will explore a range of thinking about the way techno- tions of identity and human relation- Ilogical change might affect our lives. We won’t consider just any science fiction ships in a future world in which a vast story that seems attractive. We want a set of works and authors proved to be sig- global network of computers has nificant, even if they only speculate on a world that is clearly derived from our own. changed the dynamic. This world is We seek submissions from engineers, scientists, and writers on these topics. scary and alien, although not as scary Reviews of individual works or of groups of related works are welcome. We would and alien as the one that Gibson like interesting interviews with prominent creators of speculative fiction, whether would reveal just six years later. authors, screenwriters, or directors. Any work that relates or did relate current Brunner makes clear the scariness of events in technology to possible future impacts is fair game. an entirely digitally mediated iden- Send your submissions, ideas, and comments to Marc Donner, donner@ tity early in the book when Nicky tinho.net. Halflinger’s entire world—electric power, telephone, credit, bank ac- counts, the works—is turned off in starts a diary and discovers the sub- ine living and finding happiness. I revenge for a verbal insult. versive power of a historical record) cherish the humor and the optimism Like Star Wars two years later, the have prevented obscurity. about relationships between artificial technological marvels of The Shock- An open question is whether new and natural intelligences that led wave Rider are a bit creaky and imper- technology tips the balance toward Heinlein to name the leading human fect, rendering them adjuncts to a central control, as Orwell feared, or character Manuel just so Mike the plausible future world rather than toward liberty, as many have specu- computer could say things to him central artifacts worthy of attention lated when considering the role of like, “Man, my best friend.” themselves. This is characteristic of faxes, photocopiers, and even the In- Things were changing rapidly in this genre’s best writing—it validates ternet in the collapse of the former the technical world in 1969 as well. the importance of technology by pay- Soviet Union. Dating back to that year, all the docu- ing only peripheral attention to the ments that have described and de- technology itself. 1969 fined the Internet have been numbers In the technical world, Vint Cerf, Heinlein’s thinly veiled romance of in the RFC (Requests for Com- Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine pub- the American Revolution, The Moon ments) series. Each document is lished RFC 675 “Specification of In- is a Harsh Mistress, begins with Manuel numbered sequentially, starting with ternet Transmission Control Pro- Garcia O’Kelly’s discovery that the RFC 1. RFC 4 (see www.faqs.org/ gram” in December 1974, making it Lunar Authority’s central computer rfcs/rfc4.html) is dated 24 March the earliest RFC with the word “In- (“Mike”) has become conscious and is 1969. It documents the Arpanet, ternet” in the title. In November developing a sense of humor. I still use which would later become known as 1975, Jon Postel published RFC 706 Heinlein’s observation that some jokes the Internet, as having four nodes. “On the Junk Mail Problem.” are “funny once” in teaching my own Two years later, Intel would introduce young son about humor. its 4004, the first commercial micro- 1977 As with True Names, Mike acci- processor. The 4004 had a 4-bit-wide In 1977, Macmillan published Thomas dentally reaches a level of complexity arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and was J. Ryan’s novel The Adolescence of P-1. It that mystically tips it over the edge developed for use in a calculator. was an age when vinyl records had to from being a machine to being a per- be turned over, when everyone son. Among Mike’s numerous 1975 smoked (although not tobacco), when achievements that anticipate contem- The Shockwave Rider is more about the 256 Mbytes of core was an amount be- porary technological progress is the potential role of computers, net- yond imagination, and when a charac- creation of a synthetic person, Adam works, and technology in society than ter in a book could refer to 20,000 ma- Selene, presented entirely through The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In Hein- chines as “all the computers in the video and audio. lein’s work, the computer’s role is not country.” Unlike the cyberpunk main- much different than that of a person In Ryan’s book, as in Heinlein’s, stream, which Heinlein anticipated with magical powers. The computer’s computer intelligence emerges acci- by over a decade, Mistress shows a accomplishments are technically dentally, although in this case by the world vastly different from this one plausible, but the operational aspects networking of many computers but in which most of us could imag- of Heinlein’s society are much like rather than through the assembly of a 64 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 I http://computer.org/security/ Biblio Tech large single machine.
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