Wednesday, July 12, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Scholar Predicts That Computers Will Soon Be Smarter Than You By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Vernor Vinge has made a career out of peering into the future -- both as an academic and as a science-fiction author. Some have credited Mr. Vinge with being one of the first to imagine a shared virtual space created by computer networks. Though he did not use the term "cyberspace" -- which was coined by another science-fiction author, William Gibson, in 1984 -- Mr. Vinge's 1981 novella, True Names, seems to have predicted the wired realm we have entered. It described a world where people could plug into online gathering places and live out alternate lives, while carefully guarding their real-world identities. "I had a friend who read it when it first came out, and she said she thought it was a real good story, but it was really off the wall," says Mr. Vinge. "Then she read it again about five years later, and she said she thought it was a really neat story -- but it was sort of conventional." Mr. Vinge, an associate professor of mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University, has also written essays and given lectures on his visions of the future of computing. Perhaps his most radical prediction is that computers will become smarter than humans within the next 20 years. He calls the result of this development "the singularity," which he describes as "a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity." He has written several science-fiction novels and short stories, including his most recent novel, A Deepness in the Sky (St. Martin's Press, 1999). He is retiring from the university this summer after almost 30 years of teaching, though he will remain a professor emeritus and will continue writing fiction. Q. You've written that researchers are on the verge of creating computers that surpass humans in intelligence. Briefly, how do you see this playing out? A. I still think it's one of the most likely scenarios for the next 20 years or so, and the reasoning is based on a couple of things. One is just Moore's Law [which holds that the power of computer hardware doubles every 18 months]. The question is, How hardware-powerful are we? And this is open to profound debate. But we have 40 to 100 billion neurons, I guess. They're sort of like microprocessors themselves. ... If you think that a single neuron is on the order of a microprocessor, then a person can actually just take that and crank that into the Moore's Law trend line. And if you do, you come up with machines that have the computational power of a human being ... in the next 20 years or so. However, the real question is, What happens a year after that, or two years after that, or three years after that? This argument appears to make it a plausible scenario that there would be critters running around substantially smarter than we are. ... It would mean that we're no longer at center stage. It's a type of technical development that's different from previous technical developments. Q. So after a while, the machines won't even be able to communicate with us? A. Oh, they could communicate with us. If one of them showed up and wanted to talk to us, they could convince us of probably practically anything. But as far as us understanding what they really are up to, that sort of communication would mean that we would have to be operating on their plane. Q. Is this a dystopian vision? A. It's unclear what the implications of this are. ... It is a very unsettling thing, but ... it's not clear that it is dystopic. And in fact, one thing the optimists would like is that we would be participants. There are plenty of people working on the whole issue of computer-human interactions and computer-human interfaces. If you look at it that way, you could look at the computer stuff as sort of a neo-neo cortex. Q. So an extension of the human mind, essentially? A. Yes. If you look at it that way, we just become better, smarter, more creative. Q. What are the implications for higher education? What do you think universities will be like in 15 to 20 years? A. The near-future things are going to be relatively uncomfortable for organized education. I think that there are many things that the Internet and distance learning can do very effectively. And as a form of economic competition, it is definitely going to stir things up. ... I think what comes out of it all will be very helpful to society as a whole. In the longer run, it's conceivable that we might actually get some of the classic fantasies of being able to learn things as an operational act -- you know, "You walk in. You walk out. Now you know it." However, if that were to happen, I think it has a consequence that makes sense to the people who think it's unrealistic, and that is, learning anything that is complex means that a person has to change. Take a fairly extreme case: learn a language you don't now know. Suppose I wanted to learn Japanese. Suppose this could be done in a sort of magical way of just imprinting the Japanese on me. ... Human language comes fairly close to capturing what it is to be a person. And if you really could learn a different language in that sort of downloaded way, it would actually, it seems to me, entail approximately the personality and outlook changes that would happen if you had taken the years necessary to become fluent in the language. Q. So in a few moments, you could change your personality? A. Yeah. Q. How has your work in academe influenced your fiction writing? A. I think the two really have worked back and forth to each other's benefit. Just knowing what's going on and being able to think about the possibilities from a concrete standpoint, I think, has helped me writing stories and to some extent with background. But there's a conflicting notion, and that is, if a person is not careful, knowing too much about the practical difficulties of things actually makes it harder to write science fiction. In fact, it makes it harder to speculate realistically about what may be going on. Occasionally, you run into people who are so aware of how people are trying to do things now and what the technology is for doing them, that they can't step back from that and look at the larger picture. So you have to be careful. Science-fiction writers are under a lot more pressure than we used to be. It used to be that a person could sit down and write a science-fiction story and be 30 years ahead of their time. And now you can sit down and write a science-fiction story, and if you don't watch out, there's some guy at Oxford who has a prototype. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

New human-research office suspends studies at Tulsa medical campus of U. of Oklahoma States are urged to create agencies to govern links between colleges and schools Mounting debt and dwindling enrollments force Vermont's Trinity College to close Scholar predicts that computers will soon be smarter than you Panel recommends that Japan recognize degrees earned online