Go ahead, read the whole thing.

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.”

Vernor Vinge: The Singularity

Vernor Vinge Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State
University
(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge

This article may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied
in its entirety, including this notice.

The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium
sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March
30-31, 1993.

A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of _Whole Earth
Review_.

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create
superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so
that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers
(and some further dangers) are presented.

What is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of
this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable
to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the
imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human
intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this
breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event
will occur):

There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly
intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can
create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then
there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly
thereafter.)
Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a
superhumanly intelligent entity.
Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably
be considered superhumanly intelligent.
Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in
computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly
steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I
believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during
the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts
have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I’m not
guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if
this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence
drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no
reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more
intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I
see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make
inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the
world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have
the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we
can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now,
by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are
entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are
from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the
previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond
any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in
“a million years” (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [5],
Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of
hours.)

I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity (“the Singularity” for the
purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models must be discarded
and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster
and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it
finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the
1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von
Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and
changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching
some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human
affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking
of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the
superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a
glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman
intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass
all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design
of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine
could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
“intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need
ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it
under control.
…
It is more probable than not that, within the
twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most
disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would
not be humankind’s “tool” — any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or
robins or chimpanzees.

Through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [29]
[1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first
concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who
try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and
more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put
such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their
most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon. Once, galactic
empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary
ones are.

What about the ’90s and the ’00s and the ’10s, as we slide toward the edge?
How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For
a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After
all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish
to think we’ll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence.
(There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out
of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up speed, if we were
willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [30]. But it’s
much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving
lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware
machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is
substantially more powerful than humans’ natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science
fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard
thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when
everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will
see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now
(symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery.
Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a
steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the
Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_ technological unemployment
finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should
spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to
find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now
the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me
losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like
the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate
through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its
actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably
occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event
will likely be unexpected — perhaps even to the researchers involved. (“But all
our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters….”)
If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may
seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only
analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era.
And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I’d be more
comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand
years remove … instead of twenty.

Can the Singularity be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won’t happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms
that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the
widely respected arguments of Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the
practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines
Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question “How We Will Build a
Machine that Thinks” [27]. As you might guess from the workshop’s title, the
participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine
intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on
nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the
existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power
that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992
computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain.
The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec’s estimate [17] that we are
ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority
who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the computational competence of
single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present
computer hardware might be as much as _ten_ orders of magnitude short of the
equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if
the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity.
Instead, in the early ’00s we would find our hardware performance curves
beginning to level off — this because of our inability to automate the design
work needed to support further hardware improvements. We’d end up with some
_very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial
digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to
digital operations, but nothing would ever “wake up” and there would never be
the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would
likely be seen as a golden age … and it would also be an end of progress. This
is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of
[25], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a
sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the
governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear
of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been
stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of “a machine in the likeness
of the human mind” [13]. In fact, the competitive advantage — economic,
military, even artistic — of every advance in automation is so compelling that
passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that
someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [8] has provided spectacular insights about how far technical
improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in
the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo.
But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their
results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good’s ultraintelligent
machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically
impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in
your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If
those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you,
there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up
with “helpful advice” that would incidentally set you free. (I call this “fast
thinking” form of superintelligence “weak superhumanity”. Such a “weakly
superhuman” entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time.
“Strong superhumanity” would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a
human-equivalent mind. It’s hard to say precisely what “strong superhumanity”
would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog
mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any
human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and _then_ run at high
speed, we might see something different….) Many speculations about
superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe
that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by
thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point
later in the paper.)

Another approach to confinement is to build _rules_ into the mind of the
created superhuman entity (for example, Asimov’s Laws [3]). I think that any
rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability
was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would
favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov
dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your
capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe
wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other
activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled
with benevolent gods (though one of _my_ wishes might be to become one of
them).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the
Post-Human era be? Well … pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human
race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all
that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they
no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest
possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals.
Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet…. In a Post-Human world
there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be
desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the
lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would
likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of
these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal
processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very
human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_ that would put them in a
mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be
flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment
to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though
at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a “Meta-Golden
Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be
treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my
friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to
articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say
something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming
is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the
possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even
the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to
establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical
than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what
the right guiding nudge really is:

Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are
usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the beginning of this paper,
there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer
interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the
Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA).
IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even
recognized by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to
access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we
have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a PhD
human and good computer workstation (even an off-net workstation!) could
probably max any written intelligence test in existence.

And it’s very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of
superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have
already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than
figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of
that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach.
Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an
adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis
(in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great
driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What
goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am
suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is
something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that
insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional
interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the
Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the
IA point of view: o Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are
normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems),
and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans’ intuition
and available computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher
dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been
devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and
control tools provided to the human team member. o Develop human/computer
symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines
and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous
amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving
tools. I’m suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of
competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is
possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work in this direction. o Allow
human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can
play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this
power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were
allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on
IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding
niche in AI. o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without
requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer.
(This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that
lots of effort is already being spent on it.) o Develop more symmetrical
decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has
been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on
systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information,
there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance. o Use local area
nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their
component members). This is generally the area of “groupware”, already a very
popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the
group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be
regarded as the goal of inventing a “Rules of Order” for such combination
operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in
classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from
ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the
team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more
conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this
suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a
political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power
of the persons making the rules!) o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a
combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this
is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything
else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly
underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would
break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren’t for the edge that
the USENET “group mind” gives the system administration and support people! The
very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As
connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we
are seeing something like Lynn Margulis’ [15] vision of the biosphere as data
processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions
of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of
contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms. For
example, much of the work in Artificial Intelligence and neural nets would
benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying
to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be
directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life
for guidance or for the providing features we don’t understand well enough yet
to implement in hardware. A long-time dream of science-fiction has been direct
brain to computer interfaces [2] [29]. In fact, there is concrete work that can
be done (and is being done) in this area: o Limb prosthetics is a topic of
direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14].
This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication. o Direct links
into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning
flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely
selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who
would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces. o Plugging in to the
optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for
this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to
place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our
high bandwidth connection to be _in addition_ to what paths are already present
in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid
of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won’t do it. But suppose that
the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually
setting up, as the embryo develops. That suggests: o Animal embryo experiments.
I wouldn’t expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving
developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very
interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the
long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and
interesting intellectual abilities. Originally, I had hoped that this discussion
of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all,
IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.) Alas, looking back over
these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they should be considered,
that they may give us more options. But as for safety … well, some of the
suggestions are a little scarey on their face. One of my informal reviewers
pointed out that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We
humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard
competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in
today’s world, one where losers take on the winners’ tricks and are coopted into
the winners’ enterprises. A creature that was built _de novo_ might possibly be
a much more benign entity than one with a kernel based on fang and talon. And
even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind
can be viewed as a nightmare [26].

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of
humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held
notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity
can show why that is.

Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for

Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most
extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans themselves would
become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by
our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be
benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being
masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress
(overleaping Stent’s barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we
can make the universe survive [10] [4]) would be achievable.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems
themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot
live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating
tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in
[18].) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow … and when it
becomes great enough, and looks back … what fellow-feeling can it have with
the soul that it was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything
the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the
Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of
the old must still be valid.

This “problem” about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The
notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded
rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is
under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people (“self-awareness and other
delusions”). Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from
another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely
high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities
will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including
ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego
can be copied and merged, when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to
fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features
of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to
feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be — _no
matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending,
where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From
another angle, it’s a lot like the worst- case scenario I imagined earlier in
this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too
different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based
on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith
links. But the post-Singularity world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of
change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of
biological life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such
an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this
understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good’s
Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on
the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly
more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought)
need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: “God is
what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard
Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with
me.]

Annotated Sources [and an occasional plea for bibliographical help]

[1] Alfve’n, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, _The End of Man?_, Award
Books, 1969 earlier published as “The Tale of the Big Computer”, Coward-McCann,
translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English
translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollanz, Ltd.
[2] Anderson, Poul, “Kings Who Die”, _If_, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted in
_Seven Conquests_, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.
[3] Asimov, Isaac, “Runaround”, _Astounding Science Fiction_, March 1942,
p94. Reprinted in _Robot Visions_, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes the
development of his robotics stories in this book.
[4] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, _The Anthropic Cosmological
Principle_, Oxford University Press, 1986.
[5] Bear, Greg, “Blood Music”, _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June,
1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985.
[6] Cairns-Smith, A. G., _Seven Clues to the Origin of Life_, Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
[7] Conrad, Michael _et al._, “Towards an Artificial Brain”, _BioSystems_,
vol 23, pp175-218, 1989.
[8] Drexler, K. Eric, _Engines of Creation_, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.
[9] Dyson, Freeman, _Infinite in All Directions_, Harper && Row,
1988.
[10] Dyson, Freeman, “Physics and Biology in an Open Universe”, _Review of
Modern Physics_, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.
[11] Good, I. J., “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent
Machine”, in _Advances in Computers_, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff,
eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.
[12] Good, I. J., [Help! I can’t find the source of Good’s Meta-Golden Rule,
though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s.
Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items.
G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate to
extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, “How to Get along with Extraterrestrials …
or Your Neighbor”, _Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction_, February, 1980,
p39-47.] [13] Herbert, Frank, _Dune_, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel
was serialized in _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_ in the 1960s.
[14] Kovacs, G. T. A. _et al._, “Regeneration Microelectrode Array for
Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation”, _IEEE Transactions on Biomedical
Engineering_, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.
[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of
Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986.
[16] Minsky, Marvin, _Society of Mind_, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
[17] Moravec, Hans, _Mind Children_, Harvard University Press, 1988.
[18] Niven, Larry, “The Ethics of Madness”, _If_, April 1967, pp82-108.
Reprinted in _Neutron Star_, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.
[19] Penrose, Roger, _The Emperor’s New Mind_, Oxford University Press,
1989.
[20] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.
[21] Rasmussen, S. _et al._, “Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a
Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks”, in _Emergent
Computation_, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp428-449, MIT Press, 1991.
[22] Searle, John R., “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, in _The Behavioral and
Brain Sciences_, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted
in _The Mind’s I_, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic
Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an
excellent critique of the Searle essay.
[23] Sims, Karl, “Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems”, Thinking
Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in _Toward a Practice
of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on
Artificial Life_, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.
[24] Stapledon, Olaf, _The Starmaker_, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the
date on forward, probably written before 1937).
[25] Stent, Gunther S., _The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of
Progress_, The Natural History Press, 1969.
[26] Swanwick Michael, _Vacuum Flowers_, serialized in _Isaac Asimov’s
Science Fiction Magazine_, December(?) 1986 – February 1987. Republished by Ace
Books, 1988.
[27] Thearling, Kurt, “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks”, a workshop
at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.
[28] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, _Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society_, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp1-49.
[29] Vinge, Vernor, “Bookworm, Run!”, _Analog_, March 1966, pp8-40.
Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.
[30] Vinge, Vernor, “True Names”, _Binary Star Number 5_, Dell, 1981.
Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.
[31] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, _Omni_, January 1983, p10.
[32] Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ 🙂 ].