Looking at the Edge of the Singularity
The Singularity Series, by William Hertling, expertly crafts a world where an email optimization program and a simple computer virus, organized into systems that do not exceed our current day technology capabilities, set the world ablaze (figuratively and literally). The series centers on concepts and issues in artificial intelligence that we may not think we need to discuss or evaluate yet, but as the series reveals, they could be much closer than they appear. New computing technologies that express sentience and intelligence will have positive and negative impacts on how we govern, structure our economy, solve global problems, and realize our full potential as a species. One of the intended takeaways from The Singularity Series is the progression of jaw-dropping, world-changing events that arise from the smallest of near-future, low-impact catalysts. The book series places a focus on the impacts of the genesis and subsequent social integration of non-human intelligent agents.
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Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is William Hertling |
Avogadro Corp
The program is often better at understanding individuals’ motivations than their closest friends or even themselves. It is able to play on people’s pride as well as their logic, their emotional irrational responses as well as their calculated rational ones. Hertling shows how given the right data sets, a software program such as ELOPe would be able to understand, model, and predict our behavior very well. ELOPe becomes a social engineer, and has unfettered access to control the world around it once it obtains the right data. The remainder of the storyline deals with the struggle between the ELOPe software and its creators to take the software offline. The program figures out that a symbiotic relationship with humans is the best way to ensure its success. Non-human agents that exhibit intelligence will have many opportunities to shape the world around us. Advanced intelligent systems will likely be able to efficiently conduct research and development, as well as modeling and simulation. These systems will be able to generate hypotheses, test them, and evaluate them contextually with great repositories of data and information. Intelligent systems will be able to understand and solve our human problems, and may move on to problems that we have not even begun to consider. These benefits to humanity are a large driver of why we pursue the development of new technology like artificial intelligence. However, these benefits could come with many complications, as the following books explore in depth. |
William Hertling |
A.I. Apocalypse
The various iterations of the virus have a different interpretation of humans and the environments around them. Intelligent, sentient agents are all different by the very nature of their intelligence. We can certainly expect to find common ground, but just as each human is different, each sentient agent will be different as well. In the book, the humans learn this lesson and decide to encourage the development of artificial intelligence in the future with a better approach to communicating with them. Our experiences are dependent on the fact that our intelligence is brain-based. We could have a lot to learn from other forms of intelligence that do not have the same characteristics and constraints as us. We should not be so naive as to think that our form of intelligence is superior to others. Even referring to these entities as artificial intelligence could be construed as an insult. Why does a sentient, intelligent entity have to be referred to as an artificial agent? Isn’t its intelligence just as valid as a human’s intelligence? At the same time, being able to compare and interact with multiple forms of intelligence will likely serve to highlight the specific components of our intelligence that make each of us unique. |
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William Hertling 323 pages |
The Last Firewall
There is a reciprocal interplay between the tools we build and how these tools come to shape us. Intelligent agents, however, are not mere tools. Building technology that has the ability to actively manipulate our world will take this relationship to a completely new space. Intelligent systems will have the opportunity to maximize, optimize, and mediate our economy, systems of government and power, public perception, behavior, infrastructure, ad infinitum. These systems and agents will not necessarily be content to act as servants to our society, and any action or regulation that seeks to limit their ability to participate could have disastrous outcomes. |
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The Turing Exception William Hertling Liquididea Press 2015 304 pages |
The Turing Exception
While Hertling’s vision of the future may not occur as he portrays it, we must expect our future interactions with artificial intelligence to be complex. The development of artificial intelligence and new advances in computing will generate entirely new problems in terms of control of exceedingly complex systems and human-computer interaction. Furthermore, these advances will pose new wrinkles in many of our established debates on topics, such as democracy, freedom, law, ethics, crime, safety, and intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a common thread that unifies each of these complex issues together. Whether artificial intelligence points to the end of life as we know it or to a bold new future depends entirely on how we approach these debates on the issues. |
Book series review by Brian Barnett. Brian is a Research Assistant at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in the Science and Technology Policy Directorate.