How can humans stop intelligent machines from leaving us in the dust?
Vernor Vinge, the computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s the subject of my Findings column, predicts that a post-human superintelligence will emerge by 2030, creating what he calls a technological Singularity. His critics question that date, arguing that it’s way too soon, but a lot of them acknowledge it’s possible that machines will eventually be far more intelligent than humans.
To keep humans in the game, Dr. Vinge advocates intelligence amplification, or I.A.: let humans become smarter by collaborating with one another and with computers. In his latest novel, “Rainbows End,” he envisions how these networks of humans and machines could operate in the year 2025; you can get a taste of this same world in a shorter tale published online in IEEE Spectrum, “Synthetic Serendipity.”
But how do humans start learning to collaborate? In his 1993 essay predicting the Singularity, Dr. Vinge suggested ways to prepare ourselves for the era of post-human intelligence. I asked him to update these suggestions for Lab readers. Here are the original suggestions in italics followed by his updated comments:
Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. This has also been suggested by Garry Kasparov. It still seems to me that allowing such entrants in human tournaments need not be obtrusive, and would ease the general acceptance of the symbiosis idea. It would also be interesting to see if top players came to recognize that such teams displayed a new style of play, different from the styles of pure human and pure machine competitors.
As time passed, it would be cool if chess tournaments became like the one shown in my novel, “The Peace War.” (Unfortunately, I suspect that researchers are not enthused by the idea because it would make progress milestones much more difficult to identify.) It would also be interesting to see this in the game Go.
Develop human/computer symbiosis in art. Of course, parts of this are being deeply exploited. However, we’re still missing a very important possibility and this is collaboration closer to the point of creativity itself. Karl Sim’s “picture breeding” was a super example of this: The program would generate a screen full of abstract art thumbnails and the user (artist) would select particular thumbnails to be the “seed stock” for the next iteration of the process. In 15 minutes, an ordinary person (such as myself) could generate abstract graphics that were as attractive (well, to me at least) as the best commercial art.
Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. Of course, smartphones are pursuing this avenue like gangbusters! Hopefully, wearable computing will break out into similar commercial success. There is lots of good research going on there already.
Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (i.e., are more effective than their component members). There are a lot of commercial efforts here, with various names. The commercial efforts are still relatively static and desktop-oriented. Hopefully we’ll see dynamic collaborations that can be used with wearables (and small cameras and voice communication) like the equipment used by the team of remotely guided Marines in “Rainbows End.”
Will these kinds of innovations help humans keep up with intelligent machines? And how much should we be worried about these machines?