Collected Essays (62 page)

One immediate win is that violent crime becomes impossible to get away with. The orphidnet remembers the past, so anything can be replayed. If you do something bad, people can find you and punish you. Of course someone
can
still behave like a criminal if he holds incontrovertible physical force—if, for instance, he is part of an armed government. I dream that the orphidnet-empowered public sees no further need for centralized and weaponized governments, and mankind’s long domination by ruling elites comes to an end. Another win is that we can quickly find missing objects.

The flip side of omnividence is that nobody has any privacy at all. We’ll have less shame about sex; the subject will be less shrouded in mystery. But sexual peeping will become an issue, and as omnividence shades into telepathy, some will want to merge with lovers’ minds. But surely lovers can find some way to shield themselves from prying. If they can’t actually turn off their orphids, the lovers may have physical shields of an electromagnetic or quantum-mechanical nature; alternately, people may develop mantra-like mental routines to divert unwanted visitors.

Telepathy lies only a step beyond omnividence. How will it feel? One key difference between omnividence and telepathy is that telepathy is participatory, not voyeuristic. That is, you’re not just watching someone else; you’re picking up the person’s shades of feeling.

One of the key novelties attending electronic telepathy is the availability of psychic hyperlinks. Let me explain: Language is an all-purpose construction kit that a speaker uses to model mental states. In interpreting these language constructs, a listener builds a mental state similar to the speaker’s. Visual art is another style of construction kit; here an idea is rendered in colors, lines, shapes, and figures.

As we refine our techniques of telepathy, we’ll reach a point where people converse by exchanging hyperlinks into each other’s mind. It’s like sending someone an Internet link to a picture on your website—instead of sending a pixel-by-pixel copy of the image. Rather than describing my weekend in words, or showing you pictures that I took, I simply pass you a direct link to the my memories in my head. In other words, with telepathy, I can let you directly experience my thoughts without my explaining them via words and pictures. Nevertheless, language will persist. Language is so deeply congenial to us that we’d no sooner abandon it than we’d give up sex.

On a practical level, once we have telepathy, what do we do about the sleazeball spammers who’ll try to flood our minds with ads, scams, and political propaganda? We’ll use adaptive, evolving filters. Effective spam filters behave like biological immune systems, accumulating an ever-growing supply of “antibody” routines. In a living organism’s immune system, the individual cells share the antibody techniques they discover. In a social spam filter, the individual users will share their fixes and alerts.

Another issue with telepathy has to do, once again, with privacy. Here’s an analogue: a blogger today is a bit like someone who’s broadcasting telepathically, dumping his or her thoughts into the world for all to see. A wise blogger censors his or her blog, so as not to appear like a hothead, a depressive, or a bigot.

What if telepathy can’t be filtered, and everyone can see everyone’s secret seething? Perhaps, after a period of adjustment, people would get thicker skins. Certainly it’s true that in some subcultures, people yell at each other without necessarily getting excited. Perhaps a new kind of tolerance and empathy might emerge, whereby no one person’s internal turmoil seems like a big deal. Consider: to be publicly judgmental of someone else, you compare your well-tended
outside
to the other person’s messy
inside
. But if everyone’s insides are universally visible, no one can get away with being hypocritical.

Telepathy will provide a huge increase in people’s ability to think. You’ll be sharing your memory data with everyone. In the fashion of a Web search engine, information requests will be distributed among the pool of telepaths without the need for conscious intervention. The entire knowledge of the species will be on tap for each individual. Searching the collective mind won’t be as fast as getting something from your own brain, but you’ll have access to far more information.

Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won’t actually change that much—not even in a million years. That’s a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we’ve utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins.

No matter the tech, what people do is based upon simple needs: the desire to mate and reproduce, the need for food and shelter, and the longing for power and luxuries. Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there’ll be only ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportions of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there’s going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we’re getting screwed.

Those goodies need not be “possessions” as we understand them; in the near term, an interesting effect will emerge. Since we’re all linked on the net, we can easily borrow things or even get things free. As well as selling things, people can lend them out or give them away. Why? To accumulate social capital and good reputation.

In the orphidnet future, people can always find leftover food. Some might set out their leftovers, like pies for bums. Couch-surfing as a serial guest becomes eminently practical, with the ubiquitous virtual cloud of observers giving a host some sense of security vis-à-vis the guests. And you can find most of the possessions you need within walking distance—perhaps in a neighbor’s basement. A community becomes a shared storehouse.

On the entertainment front, I imagine orphidnet reality soap operas. These would be like real-time video blogs, with sponsors’ clickable ads floating around near the characters, who happen to be interesting people doing interesting things.

People will still dine out—indeed this will be a preferred form of entertainment, as physically eating something is one of the few things that require leaving the home. As you wait at your restaurant table for your food, you might enjoy watching (or even experiencing) the actions of the chef. Maybe the restaurant employs a gourmet eater, with such a sensitive and educated palate that it’s a pleasure to mind-meld when this eater chows down.

Will telepaths get drunk and stoned? Sure! And with dire consequences. Imagine the havoc you could wreak by getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just emailing, phoning, or yelling at people face to face. There will be new forms of intoxication as well. A pair of people might lock themselves into an intense telepathic feedback loop, mirroring their minds back and forth until chaotic amplification takes hold.

In the world of art, suppose someone finds a way to record mood snapshots. And then we can produce objects that directly project the raw experiences of transcendence, wonder, euphoria, mindless pleasure, or sensual beauty, without actually having any content.

Telepaths will use language for superficial small talk, but, as I mentioned, just as often they’ll use psychic hyperlinks and directly exchanged images and emotions. Novels could take the form of elaborate sets of mental links. Writing might become more like video-blogging. A beautiful state of mind could be saved into a memory network, glyph by glyph. This new literary form might be called the metanovel.

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification

In the ubiquitous nanobot model I’ve been discussing, the orphidnet, we have a vast array of small linked minds. It’s reasonable to suppose that, as well as helping humans do things, the orphidnet will support emergent, artificially intelligent agents that enlist the memory and processing power of a few thousand or more individual orphids.

Some of these agents will be as intelligent as humans, and some will be even smarter. It’s easy to imagine their being willing to help people by carrying out things like complex and tedious searches for information or by simulating and evaluating multiple alternate action scenarios. The result is that humans would undergo IA, or intelligence amplification.

A step further, intelligent orphidnet agents group into higher minds that group into still higher minds and so on, with one or several planetary-level minds at the top. Here, by the way, is a fresh opportunity for human excess. Telepathically communing with the top mind will offer something like a mystical experience or a drug trip. The top mind will be like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that link into unifying concepts that puzzle-piece themselves into powerful systems that are in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory—
aha
! Hooking into the top mind will make any individual feel like more than a genius. Downside: once you unlink you probably won’t remember many of the cosmic thoughts that you had, and you’re going to be too drained to do much more than lie around for a few days.

Leaving ecstatic merging aside, let’s say a little more about intelligence amplification. Suppose that people reach an effective IQ of 1000 by taking advantage of the orphidnet memory enhancement and the processing aid provided by the orphidnet agents. Let’s speak of these kilo-IQ people as
kiqqies
.

As kiqqies, they can browse through all the world’s libraries and minds, with orphidnet agents helping to make sense of it all. How would it feel to be a kiqqie?

I recently had an email exchange about this with my friend Stephen Wolfram, a prominent scientist who happens one of the smartest people I know. When I asked him how it might feel to have an IQ of 1000, and what that might even mean, he suggested that the difference might be like the difference between simulating something by hand and simulating it on a high-speed computer with excellent software. Quoting from Wolfram’s email:

“There’s a lot more that one can explore, quickly, so one investigates more, sees more connections, and can look more moves ahead. More things would seem to make sense. One gets to compute more before one loses attention on a particular issue, etc. (Somehow that’s what seems to distinguish less intelligent people from more intelligent people right now.)”

Against Computronium

In some visions of the far future, amok nanomachines egged on by corporate geeks are disassembling the solar system’s planets to build Dyson shells of computronium around the Sun. Computronium is, in writer Charles Stross’s words, “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.” A Dyson shell is a hollow sphere of matter that intercepts all of the central sun’s radiation—using some of it and then passing the rest outwards in a cooled-down form, possibly to be further intercepted by outer layers of Dyson shells. What a horrible thing to do to a solar system!

I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere and everywhen computes at the max possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god.

Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that’s a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It’s worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that no feasible VR can
ever
match nature because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts. (For details on this point, see Rudy Rucker,
The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul
, or see the topic “irreducibility” in Stephen Wolfram,
A New Kind of Science.
)

Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that’s smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels.

But wait—if you
do
smash the whole planet into computronium, then you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we
could
make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right? Wrong. Maybe you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the software that was embedded in the world’s behavior. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a potentially human-equivalent robot with no AI software, or, more simply, like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.