A Logic Named Joe
A Logic Named Joe is one of the earliest fictional examples of a dangerous emergent artificial intelligence.
A Logic Named Joe is one of the earliest fictional examples of a dangerous emergent artificial intelligence.
If you haven’t read Mary Shelley’s transhumanist horror fiction Frankenstein, today is the day to do it!
Structures. Something has been built, grown, stretched. Maybe skin, maybe a web, maybe a protective barrier – it is a plastic protein emitted by an organism in order to increase its survival opportunities, it is a food matrix for its offspring which thrive on glossy resin. You can travel across it and it can easily be mapped, although not by humans.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has given us much to chew on, ranging across gender politics and history, including symbolic, political, psychological and social themes.
Like many geeks of the post-Sputnik generation, I grew up hoping that space travel would be common by the time I reached middle age. Weaned on a youthful diet of speculative fiction by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Arthur Clarke, raised on Star Trek and The Outer Limits, and thrilled by real-life hero Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” onto the gravelly surface of the Moon when I was in elementary school, it never occurred to me that humankind’s manifest destiny in the stars would be undone by changing political winds, disasters like theChallenger explosion, and a mountain of debt to pay for misguided military adventures like the War in Iraq.
Put aside your morals momentarily — and now consider the perfect slave.
“Set in a hostel in the 1980s, ‘Digital Physics’ follows Khatchig, a man searching for truth in mathematics, physics, logic, and life. As he monopolizes the sole computer in the hostel to make sense of a counter-intuitive result, he has an epiphany: We may be living in a computer simulation.”
A cautionary tale about a future world where everything “untrue” is made illegal and individuality ceases to exist. Do you value peace and safety over freedom and individuality? You might end up in the world of “Us”.
This is a super panel discussion from last year featuring David Brin, Phil Osborn, Vernor Vinge, and Mitch Wagner. The panel discusses the technological singularity with a live audience at LOSCON 39. The panel drop some pretty interesting ideas and...