Neil Hopcroft

The ringing of last nights Army gig still in my ears – I’d not noticed it until I got to the countryside, away from the aural footprint of the city. Its a beautiful moonlit night out there, mist licking the edges of the fields, rolling off the river. You can see why the lunatics came out on nights like this.

And perhaps I’m one of them. Standing alone on the deserted track down to the lock, admiring the faint orange glow of Cambridge to the south and the green clear signal in the distance to the north. Suddenly theres a siren and bright flashing lights. I’m broken out of the spell of nature by the roaring of diesel traction heading north, into the clear. Green turns red as the noise fades into the distance.

Can anyone give me a lift to, or more importantly home from, the New Model Army gig tomorrow night? My cars starter motor has died and there aren’t any convenient hills around here to leave it at the top of.

Bomb dog fools the man

Skyline – then and now

VR – a few unfortunate tearing effects when panning at high speed but these things are getting better…

At last I’ve got an explanation of why scifi isn’t as exciting as it was – I’ve hit future shock level 3 ‘Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists’.

I’ve been staring into the singularity.

All of this kinda makes sense on a technical level, but I’m not sure I quite understand the political and/or economic factors involved here, so I thought I’d write a little about those.

There are, I suppose, a few possibilities. Given that we can’t see what happens beyond the point of the singularity we can only explore the time leading up to it. In many ways I guess we can look at the development of general purpose computing for some ideas of how a seed AI might be grown into a post-singularity Power. At the point of singularity there will be a single system which transcends.

Early computers were often installed by large companies, with the concept of a home computer non-existant. But now we have a number of different parts to the computing industry – home computing, server systems, open source, handheld systems, etc.

Which of these have an analogy in AI terms? I guess there are really four possibilities: corporate, government, academic or personal.

It could be a corporate entity that creates the seed AI – why would a corporate entity do this? There would have to be some kind of profit motive. If a corporate AI were to transcend that would allow for a significant commercial advantage should you be the first to own such a thing. In the weeks after transcendence they would be able to gain control of all resources available on the planet, and perhaps beyond.

Government would have a similar incentive to control the first transcendance, though with a slightly different stance, perhaps with a view to gaining control of territory rather than purely financial gain.

Academia is a bit more of a loose canon, there are a number of potential incentives in academia, most likely wishing to create a kind-of Star Trek like world where noone is wanting for anything, its all just there.

Personal of course is even more difficult to envisage, but also far less likely, due to the funding necessary to create such a seed. The most likely way for this to happen would be with the creation of something like the FSF, a non-profit organisation of people working together toward a common goal of an AI for the common good.

So what? Essentially what I see from this is that the seed AI will take on different forms depending on who ‘owns’ it – it likely won’t remain owned in any sense for long, since it’ll outthink its owners fairly quickly, however if we are not on the same side as the owners (in some sense) we are likely to have a hard time at transcendence.

There are of course some other consdierations if the singularity is going to happen within our lifetimes. What happens to ownership? Does that make any sense as a concept beyond the singularity? Probably not. If thats the case, what is the argument for continuing to pay into a pension?

How do we know its coming? I’m going to assume I’m not going to be a part of the team working directly with the transcendant AI. Which means that all I’ll know about what is going on is what I read in the news. This news coverage will be a bit like internet time gone crazy, it’ll ramp up getting faster and faster. We’ll get a good sense of whats happening maybe a year in advance of the actual transcendance day – I’m not sure it could sneak up on us much faster than that, but things will start making less and less sense as we get closer.

Met with evilmattikinz yesterday to see Oakham Castle…which is a somewhat peculiar place – theres some earthworks, all that remains of a 12th century castle, and in the middle of the area is a building which looks rather like a church, but not quite. It has most recently been used as a courthouse, and is still set up as such inside, complete with two cells for prisoners at the back of the building.

We then went on to Blighty – Rutland to find our first geocache, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It was a good place to start, nicely hidden but easy enough to find if you know what you’re looking for. Its a passtime I could quite get into. I fear I will feel the need to alter my software though, since its a little irritating at the moment, I’ve got a bluetooth GPS unit that talks to my phone, but the software is mostly navigation software and isn’t really ideal for a ‘normal GPS’ output. It works but is a bit…odd.

They missed Disneyland
(contains small blue people and an adult theme. Worksafe: no Smurfette porn here)

History proving someone right – DJFood providing an all the pop you can eat extravagansa

bleh, i’ve just been woken up by the citilink man trying to deliver my cables – of course he didn’t wait for long enough for me to get downstairs so now I’ve been woken up earlier than anticipated *and* not got my cables to play with. grrr. But at least I can go out ‘cos I’m not waiting for him any more.