What if our civilization is more advanced than we know?I got my copy. Did you get yours? :)
The New York Times bestselling author of Daemon--"the cyberthriller against which all others will be measured" -Publishers Weekly) --imagines a world in which decades of technological advances have been suppressed in an effort to prevent disruptive change.
Are smart phones really humanity's most significant innovation since the moon landings? Or can something else explain why the bold visions of the 20th century--fusion power, genetic enhancements, artificial intelligence, cures for common disease, extended human life, and a host of other world-changing advances--have remained beyond our grasp? Why has the high-tech future that seemed imminent in the 1960's failed to arrive?
Perhaps it did arrive...but only for a select few.
Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they've been working toward for years: a device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionize the field of physics--the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring. This Bureau of Technology Control uses the advanced technologies they have harvested over the decades to fulfill their mission.
Daniel Suarez's Influx Released Today
Daniel Suarez, author of the amazing Daemon, has a new book coming out today: Influx.
2004 Article about Stross and Doctorow
This article from 2004, ten years ago, about Charles Stross's then-upcoming Accelerando, and featuring bits of Stross and Cory Doctorow, along with Verner Vinge and the lobster researchers, was so much fun to read. Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?
A small excerpt:
Stross and Doctorow are sitting outside the Chequers Hotel bar in Newbury, a small city west of London. The Chequers has been overrun this May weekend by a distinct species of science-fiction fan, members of a group called Plokta (Press Lots of Keys to Abort). The men are mostly stout and bearded, the women pedestrian in appearance but certainly not in their interests. During one session Stross mentions an early model of the Amstrad personal computer, and the crowd practically cheers. Stross is the guest of honor, and he and Doctorow have just emerged from a panel discussion on his work.
The two have met just four times, but they have the comfortable rapport of long-distance friends that is possible only in the e-mail age. (They have collaborated on several critically acclaimed short stories and novellas, one of them before they ever met in person.) Stross, 39, a native of Yorkshire who lives in Edinburgh, looks like a cross between a Shaolin monk and a video-store clerk—bearded, head shaved except for a ponytail, and dressed in black, including a T-shirt printed with lines of green Matrix code. Doctorow, a 33-year-old Canadian, looks more the hip young writer, with a buzz cut, a worn leather jacket and stylish spectacles, yet he’s also still very much the geek, G4 laptop always at the ready.
They have loosely parallel backgrounds: Stross worked throughout the 1990s as a software developer for two U.K. dot-coms, then switched to journalism and began writing a Linux column for Computer Shopper. Doctorow, who recently moved to London, dropped out of college at 21 to take his first programming job, then went on to run a dot-com and eventually co-found the technology blog boingboing.net.
Although both have been out of programming for a few years, it continues to influence—even infect—their thinking. In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he’s working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. “I was thinking of calling it /usr/bin/god.”
“That’s great!” Stross remarks.
The Singularity is Still Closer than it Appears
Ramez Naam, author of Nexus and Crux (two books I enjoyed and recommend), has recently put together a few guest posts for Charlie Stross (another author I love). The posts are The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears and Why AIs Won't Ascend in the Blink of an Eye.
They're both excellent posts, and I'd recommend reading them in full before continuing here.
I'd like to offer a slight rebuttal and explain why I think the singularity is still closer than it appears.
But first, I want to say that I very much respect Ramez, his ideas and writing. I don't think he's wrong and I'm right. I think the question of the singularity is a bit more like Drake's Equation about intelligent extraterrestrial life: a series of probabilities, the values of which are not known precisely enough to determine the "correct" output value with strong confidence. I simply want to provide a different set of values for consideration than the ones that Ramez has chosen.
First, let's talk about definitions. As Ramez describes in his first article, there are two versions of singularity often talked about.
The hard takeoff is one in which an AI rapidly creates newer, more intelligent versions of itself. Within minutes, days, or weeks, the AI has progressed from a level 1 AI to a level 20 grand-wizard AI, far beyond human intellect and anything we can comprehend. Ramez doesn't think this will happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the exponential difficulty involved in creating successively more complex algorithm (the argument he lays out in his second post).
I agree. I don't see a hard takeoff. In addition to the reasons Ramez stated, I also believe it takes so long to test and qualify candidates for improvement that successive iteration will be slow.
Let's imagine the first AI is created and runs on an infrastructure of 10,000 computers. Let's further assume the AI is composed of neural networks and other similar algorithms that require training on large pools of data. The AI will want to test many ideas for improvements, each requiring training. The training will be followed by multiple rounds of successively more comprehensive testing: first the AI needs to see if the algorithm appears to improve a select area of intelligence, but then it will want to run regressive tests to ensure no other aspect of its intelligence or capabilities is adversely impacted. If the AI wants to test 1,000 ideas for improvements, and each idea requires 10 hours of training, 1 hour of assessment, and averages 1 hour of regressive testing, it would take 1.4 years to complete a round of improvements. Parallelism is the alternative, but remember that first AI is likely to be a behemoth, require 10,000 computers to run. It's not possible to get that much parallelism.
The soft takeoff is one in which an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is created and gradually improved. As Ramez points out, that first AI might be on the order of human intellect, but it's not smarter than the accumulated intelligence of all the humans that created it: many tens of thousands of scientists will collaborate to build the first AGI.
This is where we start to diverge. Consider a simple domain like chess playing computers. Since 2005, chess software running on commercially available hardware can outplay even the strongest human chess players. I don't have data, but I suspect the number of very strong human chess players is somewhere in the hundreds or low thousands. However, the number of computers capable of running the very best chess playing software is in the millions or hundreds of millions. The aggregate chess playing capacity of computers is far greater than that of humans, because the best chess playing program can be propagated everywhere.
So too, AGI will be propagated everywhere. But I just argued that those first AI will require tens of thousands computers, right? Yes, except thanks to Moore's Law (the observation that computing power tends to double every 18 months), the same AI that required 10,000 computers will need a mere 100 computers ten years later and just a single computer another ten years after that. Or an individual AGI could run up to 10,000 times faster. That speed-up alone means something different when it comes to intelligence: to have a single being with 10,000 times the experience and learning and practice that a human has.
Even Ramez agrees that it will be feasible to have destructive human brain uploads approximating human intelligence around 2040: "Do the math, and it appears that a super-computer capable of simulating an entire human brain and do so as fast as a human brain should be on the market by roughly 2035 - 2040. And of course, from that point on, speedups in computing should speed up the simulation of the brain, allowing it to run faster than a biological human's."
This is the soft takeoff: from a single AGI at some point in time to an entire civilization of that AGI twenty years later, all running at faster than human intellect speeds. A race consisting of an essentially alien intelligence, cohabiting the planet with us. Even if they don't experience an intelligence explosion as Verner Vinge described, the combination of fast speeds, aggregate intelligence, and inherently different motivations will create an unknowable future that likely out of our control. And that's very much a singularity.
But Ramez questions whether we can even achieve an AGI comparable to a human in the first place. There's this pesky question of sentience and consciousness. Please go read Ramez's first article in full, I don't want you to think I'm summarizing everything he said here, but he basically cites three points:
1) No one's really sure how to do it. AI theories have been around for decades, but none of them has led to anything that resembles sentience.
This is a difficulty. One analogy that comes to mind is the history of aviation. For nearly a hundred years prior to the Wright Brothers, heavier than air flight was being studied, with many different gliders created and flown. It was the innovation of powered engines that made heavier than air flight practically possible, and which led to rapid innovation. Perhaps we just don't yet have the equivalent yet in AI. We've got people learning how to make airfoils and control services and airplane structure, and we're just waiting for the engine to show up.
We also know that nature evolved sentience without any theory of how to do it. Having a proof point is powerful motivation.
2) There's a huge lack of incentive. Would you like a self-driving car that has its own opinions? That might someday decide it doesn't feel like driving you where you want to go?
There's no lack of incentive. As James Barrat detailed in Our Final Invention, there are billions of dollars being poured into building AGI, both in big profile projects like the US BRAIN project and Europe's Human Brain Project, as well as countless smaller AI companies and research projects.
There's plenty of human incentive, too. How many people were inspired by Star Trek's Data? At a recent conference, I asked attendees who would want Data as a friend, and more than half the audience's hands went up. Among the elderly, loneliness is a very real issue that could be helped with AGI companionship, and many people might choose an artificial psychologist for reasons of confidence, cost, and convenience. All of these require at least the semblance of opinions.
More than that, we know we want initiative. If we have a self-driving car, we expect that it will use that initiative to find faster routes to destinations, possibly go around dangerous neighborhoods, and take necessary measures to avoid an accident. Indeed, even Google Maps has an "opinion" of the right way to get somewhere that often differs from my own. It's usually right.
If we have an autonomous customer service agent, we'll want it to flexibly meet business goals including pleasing the customer while controlling cost. All of these require something like opinions and sentience: goals, motivation to meet those goals, and mechanisms to flexibly meet those goals.
3) There are ethical issues. If we design an AI that truly is sentient, even at slightly less than human intelligence we'll suddenly be faced with very real ethical issues. Can we turn it off?
I absolutely agree that we've got ethical issues with AGI, but that hasn't stopped us from creating other technology (nuclear bombs, bio-weapons, internal combustion engine, the transportation system) that also has ethical issues.
In sum, Ramez brings up great points, and he may very well be correct: the singularity might be a hundred years off instead of twenty or thirty.
However, the discussion around the singularity is also one about risk. Having artificial general intelligence running around, potentially in control of our computing infrastructure, may be risky. What happens if the AI has different motivations than us? What if it decides we'd be happier and less destructive if we're all drugged? What if it just crashes and accidentally shuts down the entire electrical grid? (Read James Barrat's Our Final Invention for more about the risks of AI.)
Ramez wrote Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, a wonderful and optimistic book about how science and technology are solving many resource problems around the world. I think it's a powerful book because it gives us hope and proof points that we can solve the problems facing us.
Unfortunately, I think the argument that the singularity is far off is different and problematic because it denies the possibility of problems facing us. Instead of encouraging us to use technology to address the issues that could arise with the singularity, the argument instead concludes the singularity is either unlikely or simply a long time away. With that mindset, we're less likely as a society to examine both AI progress and take steps to reduce the risks of AGI.
On the other hand, if we can agree that the singularity is a possibility, even just a modest possibility, then we may spur more discussion and investment into the safety and ethics of AGI.
They're both excellent posts, and I'd recommend reading them in full before continuing here.
I'd like to offer a slight rebuttal and explain why I think the singularity is still closer than it appears.
But first, I want to say that I very much respect Ramez, his ideas and writing. I don't think he's wrong and I'm right. I think the question of the singularity is a bit more like Drake's Equation about intelligent extraterrestrial life: a series of probabilities, the values of which are not known precisely enough to determine the "correct" output value with strong confidence. I simply want to provide a different set of values for consideration than the ones that Ramez has chosen.
First, let's talk about definitions. As Ramez describes in his first article, there are two versions of singularity often talked about.
The hard takeoff is one in which an AI rapidly creates newer, more intelligent versions of itself. Within minutes, days, or weeks, the AI has progressed from a level 1 AI to a level 20 grand-wizard AI, far beyond human intellect and anything we can comprehend. Ramez doesn't think this will happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the exponential difficulty involved in creating successively more complex algorithm (the argument he lays out in his second post).
I agree. I don't see a hard takeoff. In addition to the reasons Ramez stated, I also believe it takes so long to test and qualify candidates for improvement that successive iteration will be slow.
Let's imagine the first AI is created and runs on an infrastructure of 10,000 computers. Let's further assume the AI is composed of neural networks and other similar algorithms that require training on large pools of data. The AI will want to test many ideas for improvements, each requiring training. The training will be followed by multiple rounds of successively more comprehensive testing: first the AI needs to see if the algorithm appears to improve a select area of intelligence, but then it will want to run regressive tests to ensure no other aspect of its intelligence or capabilities is adversely impacted. If the AI wants to test 1,000 ideas for improvements, and each idea requires 10 hours of training, 1 hour of assessment, and averages 1 hour of regressive testing, it would take 1.4 years to complete a round of improvements. Parallelism is the alternative, but remember that first AI is likely to be a behemoth, require 10,000 computers to run. It's not possible to get that much parallelism.
The soft takeoff is one in which an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is created and gradually improved. As Ramez points out, that first AI might be on the order of human intellect, but it's not smarter than the accumulated intelligence of all the humans that created it: many tens of thousands of scientists will collaborate to build the first AGI.
This is where we start to diverge. Consider a simple domain like chess playing computers. Since 2005, chess software running on commercially available hardware can outplay even the strongest human chess players. I don't have data, but I suspect the number of very strong human chess players is somewhere in the hundreds or low thousands. However, the number of computers capable of running the very best chess playing software is in the millions or hundreds of millions. The aggregate chess playing capacity of computers is far greater than that of humans, because the best chess playing program can be propagated everywhere.
So too, AGI will be propagated everywhere. But I just argued that those first AI will require tens of thousands computers, right? Yes, except thanks to Moore's Law (the observation that computing power tends to double every 18 months), the same AI that required 10,000 computers will need a mere 100 computers ten years later and just a single computer another ten years after that. Or an individual AGI could run up to 10,000 times faster. That speed-up alone means something different when it comes to intelligence: to have a single being with 10,000 times the experience and learning and practice that a human has.
Even Ramez agrees that it will be feasible to have destructive human brain uploads approximating human intelligence around 2040: "Do the math, and it appears that a super-computer capable of simulating an entire human brain and do so as fast as a human brain should be on the market by roughly 2035 - 2040. And of course, from that point on, speedups in computing should speed up the simulation of the brain, allowing it to run faster than a biological human's."
This is the soft takeoff: from a single AGI at some point in time to an entire civilization of that AGI twenty years later, all running at faster than human intellect speeds. A race consisting of an essentially alien intelligence, cohabiting the planet with us. Even if they don't experience an intelligence explosion as Verner Vinge described, the combination of fast speeds, aggregate intelligence, and inherently different motivations will create an unknowable future that likely out of our control. And that's very much a singularity.
But Ramez questions whether we can even achieve an AGI comparable to a human in the first place. There's this pesky question of sentience and consciousness. Please go read Ramez's first article in full, I don't want you to think I'm summarizing everything he said here, but he basically cites three points:
1) No one's really sure how to do it. AI theories have been around for decades, but none of them has led to anything that resembles sentience.
This is a difficulty. One analogy that comes to mind is the history of aviation. For nearly a hundred years prior to the Wright Brothers, heavier than air flight was being studied, with many different gliders created and flown. It was the innovation of powered engines that made heavier than air flight practically possible, and which led to rapid innovation. Perhaps we just don't yet have the equivalent yet in AI. We've got people learning how to make airfoils and control services and airplane structure, and we're just waiting for the engine to show up.
We also know that nature evolved sentience without any theory of how to do it. Having a proof point is powerful motivation.
2) There's a huge lack of incentive. Would you like a self-driving car that has its own opinions? That might someday decide it doesn't feel like driving you where you want to go?
There's no lack of incentive. As James Barrat detailed in Our Final Invention, there are billions of dollars being poured into building AGI, both in big profile projects like the US BRAIN project and Europe's Human Brain Project, as well as countless smaller AI companies and research projects.
There's plenty of human incentive, too. How many people were inspired by Star Trek's Data? At a recent conference, I asked attendees who would want Data as a friend, and more than half the audience's hands went up. Among the elderly, loneliness is a very real issue that could be helped with AGI companionship, and many people might choose an artificial psychologist for reasons of confidence, cost, and convenience. All of these require at least the semblance of opinions.
More than that, we know we want initiative. If we have a self-driving car, we expect that it will use that initiative to find faster routes to destinations, possibly go around dangerous neighborhoods, and take necessary measures to avoid an accident. Indeed, even Google Maps has an "opinion" of the right way to get somewhere that often differs from my own. It's usually right.
If we have an autonomous customer service agent, we'll want it to flexibly meet business goals including pleasing the customer while controlling cost. All of these require something like opinions and sentience: goals, motivation to meet those goals, and mechanisms to flexibly meet those goals.
3) There are ethical issues. If we design an AI that truly is sentient, even at slightly less than human intelligence we'll suddenly be faced with very real ethical issues. Can we turn it off?
I absolutely agree that we've got ethical issues with AGI, but that hasn't stopped us from creating other technology (nuclear bombs, bio-weapons, internal combustion engine, the transportation system) that also has ethical issues.
In sum, Ramez brings up great points, and he may very well be correct: the singularity might be a hundred years off instead of twenty or thirty.
However, the discussion around the singularity is also one about risk. Having artificial general intelligence running around, potentially in control of our computing infrastructure, may be risky. What happens if the AI has different motivations than us? What if it decides we'd be happier and less destructive if we're all drugged? What if it just crashes and accidentally shuts down the entire electrical grid? (Read James Barrat's Our Final Invention for more about the risks of AI.)
Ramez wrote Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, a wonderful and optimistic book about how science and technology are solving many resource problems around the world. I think it's a powerful book because it gives us hope and proof points that we can solve the problems facing us.
Unfortunately, I think the argument that the singularity is far off is different and problematic because it denies the possibility of problems facing us. Instead of encouraging us to use technology to address the issues that could arise with the singularity, the argument instead concludes the singularity is either unlikely or simply a long time away. With that mindset, we're less likely as a society to examine both AI progress and take steps to reduce the risks of AGI.
On the other hand, if we can agree that the singularity is a possibility, even just a modest possibility, then we may spur more discussion and investment into the safety and ethics of AGI.
Google's Deep Mind == Daniel Suarez's Daemon?
Here's a scary paragraph from a longer article about Google's acquisition of AI company Deep Mind:
One of DeepMind's cofounders, Demis Hassabis, possesses an impressive resume packed with prestigious titles, including software developer, neuroscientist, and teenage chess prodigy among the bullet points. But as the Economist suggested, one of Hassabis's better-known contributions to society might be a video game; a niche but adored 2006 simulator called Evil Genius, in which you play as a malevolent mastermind hell-bent on world domination.That sounds just like the plot of Daniel Suarez's Daemon:
When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet's interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It's up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is realized: to dismantle society and bring about a new world order.
Avogadro Corp is free at Noise Trade!
You or a friend can pick up a free copy of Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than it Appears from Noise Trade Books, a new service for introducing readers to authors.
If you've got the print book and always wanted the ebook, or just want a DRM-free epub or mobi copy of Avogadro Corp, please take advantage of this opportunity. Avogadro Corp on Noise Trade.
If you've got the print book and always wanted the ebook, or just want a DRM-free epub or mobi copy of Avogadro Corp, please take advantage of this opportunity. Avogadro Corp on Noise Trade.
Book Review: Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross
I'm a big fan of Charles Stross's science fiction. He's absolutely brilliant (listen to some of his talks on YouTube if you get the chance, or go read his blog posts), and it always comes across in his fiction.
On one level, Neptune's Brood is a classic space opera novel involving interstellar space travel, colonization, and space battles.
On another level, Neptune's Brood is a careful study of what you get when you rigorously think about how economic principles, human uploading, transhumanism, the limitations of light speed, and the cost moving matter apply to developing an interstellar civilization.
In other words, it's the type of very smart fiction you expect from Charles Stross.
The occasional pitfall of uber-smart fiction is that it can sometimes be a challenge to read. If the ideas come too fast or require too much effort to grok, the reader ends up working so hard to understand things that the reading loses its fun. Stross manages to avoid that pitfall here. It's an enjoyable, straightforward read underlaid with a foundation of brilliance.
You can get Neptune's Brood on Amazon, and I'm sure everywhere else as well.
On one level, Neptune's Brood is a classic space opera novel involving interstellar space travel, colonization, and space battles.
On another level, Neptune's Brood is a careful study of what you get when you rigorously think about how economic principles, human uploading, transhumanism, the limitations of light speed, and the cost moving matter apply to developing an interstellar civilization.
In other words, it's the type of very smart fiction you expect from Charles Stross.
The occasional pitfall of uber-smart fiction is that it can sometimes be a challenge to read. If the ideas come too fast or require too much effort to grok, the reader ends up working so hard to understand things that the reading loses its fun. Stross manages to avoid that pitfall here. It's an enjoyable, straightforward read underlaid with a foundation of brilliance.
You can get Neptune's Brood on Amazon, and I'm sure everywhere else as well.
Goals for 2014
I spent the last few days in bed with the flu. In addition to missing the company of visiting family, I also missed writing time.
During those couple of days, my friend Tac Anderson asked on Facebook about people's goals for 2014, as opposed to resolutions.
That got me thinking. What I'd like to achieve in 2014 includes completing, editing, and publishing my next adult novel, editing and publishing my children's novel, and rewriting Avogadro Corp. (Avogadro Corp is a great story, but it was my first written work, and it's got some rough areas that could benefit from time and attention.)
One way or another, I will get those books done, but I'd prefer to do it with less stress than its taken to get some of my past books out. I balance a day job, a family, and writing, and although each book is a joy to write and publish, it's also exhausting to do on top of an already full life.
So my goal for 2014 is to get my day job commitment down from 80% time to 60%. (Hi boss!) To do that, I'll either need to bring in more book income, find alternate sources of income, reduce expenses, or some combination of all of the above.
I've been investigating foreign rights and traditional publishers, and I'll think more about kickstarter campaigns. I'm open to ideas if you've got any.
What are your goals for 2014, and how do you hope to achieve them?
During those couple of days, my friend Tac Anderson asked on Facebook about people's goals for 2014, as opposed to resolutions.
That got me thinking. What I'd like to achieve in 2014 includes completing, editing, and publishing my next adult novel, editing and publishing my children's novel, and rewriting Avogadro Corp. (Avogadro Corp is a great story, but it was my first written work, and it's got some rough areas that could benefit from time and attention.)
One way or another, I will get those books done, but I'd prefer to do it with less stress than its taken to get some of my past books out. I balance a day job, a family, and writing, and although each book is a joy to write and publish, it's also exhausting to do on top of an already full life.
So my goal for 2014 is to get my day job commitment down from 80% time to 60%. (Hi boss!) To do that, I'll either need to bring in more book income, find alternate sources of income, reduce expenses, or some combination of all of the above.
I've been investigating foreign rights and traditional publishers, and I'll think more about kickstarter campaigns. I'm open to ideas if you've got any.
What are your goals for 2014, and how do you hope to achieve them?
Self-Deploying Code
I'm reading Our Final Invention by James Barrat right now, about the dangers of artificial intelligence. I just got to a chapter in which he discussed that any reasonably complex artificial general intelligence (AGI) is going to want to control its own resources: e.g. if it has a goal, even a simple goal like playing chess, it will be able to achieve its goal better with more computing resources, and won't be able to achieve its goal at all if its shut off. (Similar themes exist in all of my novels.)
This made me snap back to a conversation I had last week at my day job. I'm a web developer, and my current project, without giving too much away, is a RESTful web service that runs workflows composed of other RESTful web services.
We're currently automating some of our operational tasks. For example, when our code passes unit tests, it's automatically deployed. We'd like to expand on that so that after deployment, it will run integration tests, and if those pass, deploy up to the next stack, and then run performance tests, and so on.
Although we're running on a cloud provider, it's not AWS, and they don't support autoscaling, so another automation task we need is to roll our own scaling solution.
Then we realized that running tests, deployments, and scaling all require calling RESTful JSON APIs, and that's exactly what our service is designed to do. So the logical solution is that our software will test itself, deploy itself, and autoscale itself.
That's an awful lot like the kind of resource control that James Barrat was writing about.
This made me snap back to a conversation I had last week at my day job. I'm a web developer, and my current project, without giving too much away, is a RESTful web service that runs workflows composed of other RESTful web services.
We're currently automating some of our operational tasks. For example, when our code passes unit tests, it's automatically deployed. We'd like to expand on that so that after deployment, it will run integration tests, and if those pass, deploy up to the next stack, and then run performance tests, and so on.
Although we're running on a cloud provider, it's not AWS, and they don't support autoscaling, so another automation task we need is to roll our own scaling solution.
Then we realized that running tests, deployments, and scaling all require calling RESTful JSON APIs, and that's exactly what our service is designed to do. So the logical solution is that our software will test itself, deploy itself, and autoscale itself.
That's an awful lot like the kind of resource control that James Barrat was writing about.
Recent Rate of Computer Processing Growth
I was having a discussion with a group of writers about the technological singularity, and several asserted that the rate of increasing processor power was declining. They backed it up with a chart showing that the increase in MIPS per unit of clock speed stalled about ten years ago.
If computer processing speeds fail to increase exponentially, as they have for the last forty years, this will throw off many different predictions for the future, and dramatically decreases the likelihood of human-grade AI arising.
I did a bit of research last night and this morning. Using the chart of historical computer speeds from Wikipedia, and I placed a few key intervals in a spreadsheet and found:
By no means is the list of MIPS ratings exhaustive, but it does give us a general idea of what's going on. The data shows the rate of CPU speed increases has declined in the last ten years.
I split up the last ten years:
Five years isn't much of a long term trend, and there are some processors missing from the end of the matrix. The Intel Xeon X5675, a 12 core processor isn't shown, and it's twice as powerful as the Intel Core i7 4770k that's the bottom row on the MIPS table. If we substitute the Xeon processor, we find the growth rate from 2008 to 2012 was 31% annually, a more respectable improvement.
However, I've been tracking technology trends for a while (see my post on How to Predict the Future), and I try to use only those computers and devices I've personally owned. There's always something faster out there, but it's not what people have in their home, which is what I'm interested in.
I also know that my device landscape has changed over the last five years. In 2008, I had a laptop (Windows Intel Core 2 T7200) and a modest smartphone (a Treo 650). In 2013, I have a laptop (MBP 2.6 GHz Core i7), a powerful smartphone (Nexus 5), and a tablet (iPad Mini). I'm counting only my own devices and excluding those from my day job as a software engineer.
It's harder to do this comparison, because there's no one common benchmark among all these processors. I did the best I could to determine DMIPS for each, converting GeekBench cores for the Mac, and using the closest available processor for mobile devices that had a MIPS rating.
When I compared my personal device growth in combined processing power, I found it increased 51% annually from 2008 to 2013, essentially the same rate as for the longer period 1996 through 2011 (47%), which is what I use for my long-term predictions.
What does all this mean? Maybe there is a slight slow-down in the rate at which computing processing is increasing. Maybe there isn't. Maybe the emphasis on low-power computing for mobile devices and server farms has slowed down progress on top-end speeds, and maybe that emphasis will contribute to higher top-end speeds down the road. Maybe the landscape will move from single-devices to clouds of devices, in the same way that we already moved from single cores to multiple cores.
Either way, I'm not giving up on the singularity yet.
If computer processing speeds fail to increase exponentially, as they have for the last forty years, this will throw off many different predictions for the future, and dramatically decreases the likelihood of human-grade AI arising.
I did a bit of research last night and this morning. Using the chart of historical computer speeds from Wikipedia, and I placed a few key intervals in a spreadsheet and found:
- From 1972 to 1985: MIPS grew by 19% per year.
- From 1985 to 1996: MIPS grew by 43% per year.
- From 1996 to 2003: MIPS grew by 51% per year.
- From 2003 to 2013: MIPS grew by 29% per year.
By no means is the list of MIPS ratings exhaustive, but it does give us a general idea of what's going on. The data shows the rate of CPU speed increases has declined in the last ten years.
I split up the last ten years:
- From 2003 to 2008: MIPS grew by 53% per year.
- From 2008 to 2013: MIPS grew by 9% per year.
Five years isn't much of a long term trend, and there are some processors missing from the end of the matrix. The Intel Xeon X5675, a 12 core processor isn't shown, and it's twice as powerful as the Intel Core i7 4770k that's the bottom row on the MIPS table. If we substitute the Xeon processor, we find the growth rate from 2008 to 2012 was 31% annually, a more respectable improvement.
However, I've been tracking technology trends for a while (see my post on How to Predict the Future), and I try to use only those computers and devices I've personally owned. There's always something faster out there, but it's not what people have in their home, which is what I'm interested in.
I also know that my device landscape has changed over the last five years. In 2008, I had a laptop (Windows Intel Core 2 T7200) and a modest smartphone (a Treo 650). In 2013, I have a laptop (MBP 2.6 GHz Core i7), a powerful smartphone (Nexus 5), and a tablet (iPad Mini). I'm counting only my own devices and excluding those from my day job as a software engineer.
It's harder to do this comparison, because there's no one common benchmark among all these processors. I did the best I could to determine DMIPS for each, converting GeekBench cores for the Mac, and using the closest available processor for mobile devices that had a MIPS rating.
When I compared my personal device growth in combined processing power, I found it increased 51% annually from 2008 to 2013, essentially the same rate as for the longer period 1996 through 2011 (47%), which is what I use for my long-term predictions.
What does all this mean? Maybe there is a slight slow-down in the rate at which computing processing is increasing. Maybe there isn't. Maybe the emphasis on low-power computing for mobile devices and server farms has slowed down progress on top-end speeds, and maybe that emphasis will contribute to higher top-end speeds down the road. Maybe the landscape will move from single-devices to clouds of devices, in the same way that we already moved from single cores to multiple cores.
Either way, I'm not giving up on the singularity yet.
Interview with Singularity 1 on 1
I'll be in Seattle on Saturday to be interviewed by Nikola Danaylov of the Singularity Weblog and Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. I've listened to quite a few of his podcasts, and he's a great interviewer, and had interviewed Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Noam Chomsky, and many other amazing people.
This will be a joint interview with myself, Ramez Naam (of Nexus fame), and Greg Bear, a prolific author of science fiction novels.
If you have any questions you'd like to have answered by any of us, please contact Nikola on twitter: @singularityblog this evening.
p.s. I'm posting this while traveling by Amtrak from Portland to Seattle. Trains rock!
This will be a joint interview with myself, Ramez Naam (of Nexus fame), and Greg Bear, a prolific author of science fiction novels.
If you have any questions you'd like to have answered by any of us, please contact Nikola on twitter: @singularityblog this evening.
p.s. I'm posting this while traveling by Amtrak from Portland to Seattle. Trains rock!
Notes from OryCon: I Quit My Job to Be a Writer! What Have I Done?
Anne Bishop
Matt Vancil
Jim Kling
- Background
- JK: Quit day job in 1992 to go to grad school. In 1995, decide he didn't want to complete PhD in chemistry, eventually decided to science writing internship. Then went on to do freelance, and has done it ever since.
- MV: Screenwriter and filmmaker. Have a day job, but it's a writing job. Got that as a result of a string of other writing. First time he's had a consistent gig.
- AB: Author of multiple series. Pretty much a full-time writer. Working on 18th novel, but still have a day job, two jobs a week.
- What is the writing life like?
- JK:
- Currently have home office. Had an outside office, but stop using it.
- I don't get dressed or shower until noon. Doesn't keep regular hours.
- Had a regular job briefly, hated the regular hours. Would rather work when he wanted to in order to be happy and healthy.
- Deadlines dictate when he needs to get certain work done.
- MV:
- Required to have bit of structure because of the company he works for.
- To work at home, he prefers a place that quiet, cool, and calm.
- But at work, he's forced into an environment that loud and chaotic.
- because of this, he's abandoned the idea of structure, and just embraced the chaotic nature of the work.
- On his own work, its about a routine: an outline and a quota. Because at the end of a day of work, the last thing he wants to do is write.
- AB:
- I like structure. I treat it as a job I have 5 days a week.
- I don't get dressed for the office.
- I throw on clothes, make coffee, and as soon as my brain is engaged and start working.
- The less time between waking and getting to the keyboard the better.
- The less input, less sensory, the better.
- I set a weekly word count equal to 1,500 words a day. This is what is needed to make the deadlines for the size of the novels I write.
- I sit down from 8:30 in the morning until about 1:30.
- At that point, it's time to meet the day. Get cleaned up, and tend to all the other stuff. Nobody gets time in the writing slot except for the characters.
- MV: The development is actual work too: sometimes its not just typing characters into a keyboard. It's deep thinking about motivation before you're ready to put words on the page.
- AB: No matter what the process is, you have to be willing to produce the end product.
- JK: You have to be willing to deal with the self-doubt. As a hobbyist, there's no external pressure. If you never send off the novel, the editor doesn't even know. But if you're self-employed, you have to finish it and send it off, because you need it for the check, even if you're worried that its a piece of shit.
- AB: Know your writing style. Are you a sprinter or a marathoner? All of these are valid ways to get to the end-goal. But know what it right for you.
- How do you deal with writing time vs. all the other things you can do?
- MV: Ultimately it's about holding yourself to a quota. And what helps you make that quota is an outline. Problems in Act 3 are almost always due to problems in Act 1 that weren't resolved because there was no outline. Also, give yourself permission to suck.
- AB: There's a difference between 10 minutes of minesweeper to rest your brain and an hour of minesweeper to avoid writing.
- Q: If you get blocked somewhere in the first draft, do you ever go back and edit as a way of making some progress?
- AB: I do what I call musings. I open up another file, and just start typing about what I think the problems might be, what the characters might be thinking about. Sometimes this is like warming up after you've had an injury: you have to get the muscle warmed up.
- Give yourself an ultimatum to do the chore you hate the most or write a 100 words. I guarantee that you'd rather write 100 words than to scrub the kitchen floor.
- Before you quit your day job, what do you need to get from your writing?
- AB: I've gradually decreased my hours at my day job down to two mornings. This has been very good to be able to gradually decrease.
- If you hope to quit your day job and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, you should be writing under contract long before you give up your day job.
- Don't give up the day until your fiction is earning enough to pay all of your bills for a year.
- Ideally you need to not only pay bills, but also put aside money for emergencies, savings, etc.
- Agents will say you should have ten books in print before you consider it…
- MV: It's better to have a job and work some minimal hours than to simply quit. Determine how many hours a day you need to write, and then try to find a job that will support it.
- You have to be prepared that this is a long haul… I went to a film school and they beat into your head that you'd need to do this for at least five years before you'd be able to make money at it.
- Embrace any job that helps you further your goals: e.g. a tech writing job that gets you access to publishers.
- JK: It's hard to do this and it requires some luck. But it also requires being willing to embrace a different lifestyle. If you want to drive a new car, have new clothes, eat your meals out… then don't quit your day job.
- There are some, but not very many.
- Be willing to scale back the lifestyle.
- AB: Leave lean.
- MV: If you're writing you are probably doing it because you love it. Be prepared that at some time it'll feel like a job, and you'll hate it. Remember why you started doing it.
- Q: What's a likely amount of money to make?
- AB: First advances are lucky to be $5,000, except for an exceptional few. And that comes in 3 payments over about 3 years, so it's not a lot of money.
- If you have 10 books in print, then royalties will start to add up, but it's still a live lean lifestyle.
- JK: I have a second income in the form of my wife who works.
- How do you force yourself to get dressed and leave the house? How do you avoid feeling isolated?
- AB: Why do I want to leave the house?
- JK: It is isolating, and sometimes it bothers me, and sometimes it doesn't.
- I go out and meet with other writers every other week.
- I get sick of being at home and go out.
- My dogs force me to take them out.
- Q: You've talked about the income, what about the expenses particular to writing?
- AB: You need a computer, paper, electricity and time. The expense of writing is not great except that it is time.
- MV: One cost is that you'll have a scary credit history if you don't have a steady income.
- AB: Self-employment tax: the other 7.5% you need to pay into social security.
- MV: Keep very clear records of your sources of income. I have 8 sources of income.
- JK: Deduct everything you can.
- Q: How does it work between writing and film-making?
- MV: Over the last two years, I didn't have a day job. When I had a film, I could film it. Now I have to negotiate the time off work from a job I want to keep.
Notes from Orycon 35, Part One
My notes from OryCon 35 (2013) are a little shorter than usual this year, so rather than one blog post per panel, I'm consolidating posts.
(One meta-comment: There have been a fair number of panels about the future, including one that I was on. In every case, it feels like panelists consistently under-estimate the amount of change I think we'll see in the future. In a panel I attended entitled "300 Years from Now" panelists discussed issues facing us today: water shortages, climate change, global economic divide, etc. while assuming that humans remain much like we are today. In 300 years, I think we'll have gone past those problems, and we'll be dealing with questions of what it means to be human when we're 90% machine and 10% biological.)
Notes from The End of All Things at OryCon 35 - 2013
Kat Kenyon
Karen Azinger
Nancy Kress
Ru Emerson
Richard A. Lovett
- What makes a bad ending
- A scene so preordained the reader anticipated it for 100 pages
- A climax that happens offstage.
- This happens before the end, but it's the most important. The very ending is the mopping up.
- A scene that is obvious.
- It should seem both inevitable and yet not obvious
- The book should wrap up on its own terms
- It should feel satisfying on its own
- Especially for a first time novelist -- there's no trust that you'll wrap it up later. No guarantee that the next book will come.
- The inciting incident suggests what the story problem is. And at the climax it should be resolved.
- The marrying and the burying: this is what comes after the climax.
- What is the cost of success for the protagonist?
- it should cost your character something. An emotional cost to the choices they make.
- A writer's secret weapon is theme.
- The reader may or may not be able to articulate it. But if a book has no theme, the reader will say it doesn't work.
- Both the plot and the ending must involve the theme.
- An action oriented book will have an action scene for its climax. The reader can see it coming. But there can often be an internal story was well (about the journey of the character, where they are moving to, what their shortcomings are.)
- Dual arc story:
- the arc of the situation
- the arc of the character
- the situation arc: the events of the story. it must affect the character, or the reader doesn't care.
- How to construct an ending both surprising and inevitable?
- Plan for reversals
- Even if the main story arc isn't very surprising, other things will
- There are betrayals, a surprise, a mystery.
- Something that the reader didn't see coming. So some is a surprise, and some seems expected.
- Plant subtle clues ahead of time.
- It leads to the sense of "oh, i should have known this was coming."
- What can go wrong now?
- Then make it go wrong.
- Then the character will be forced to change.
- The choice ending…
- As the reader progresses, it becomes obvious that the character is going to be forced to choose between two alternatives. Those alternatives become more obvious as the reader reads. But we don't know which they'll choose. The options should be roughly equally weighted.
Notes from One Lump or Two: How much Technology is Too Much?
Richard A. Lovett
Patrick Swenson
Gordon Eklund
Annie Bellet
David W. Goldman
- How much science in a story for it to be science fiction?
- RL: None! Science fiction is extrapolation from something. It's based in reality. But it doesn't need to be about science.
- PS: My stories are about what-if… extrapolation about what we know now into the future. not just science, but our culture and society. But… cool science and cool tech goes a long way. My editor asked me to add more technology into the the early chapters to ground the reader. Happy to do that…required research on my part.
- GE: Heinlein quote: the perfect science fiction story is a story that, at some point in the future, would just be a contemporary fiction story.
- RL: Explain enough of the science so that people understand how it works. Work out a lot, but put the minimum necessary in the story.
- PS: Consulting with (editor? scientist?), asked what was necessary: Don't violate certain principles, and then hand wave the rest.
- DG: You don't need to explain what we don't know (e.g. how a warp drive would work), but you do need to avoid explaining things in a way that violates what we do know (e.g. faster-than-light travel without special conditions).
- DG: There are some stories that are about science. They're about a specific scientific idea, and then a story is wrapped around it. But that's the minority of all stories.
- RL: Lots of research that doesn't go into the book. Had to write a spreadsheet tracking oxygen consumption over 24 hours according to exercise levels of the protagonist. That doesn't go into the book, but its there to make sure the science is right.
- What makes a story age well or not with respect with technology?
- The emotional arc of the story.
- The story has to hold up without the technology.
- Don't put dates in story, because that really affects how people perceive it.
- A lot of science fiction written during the cold war is about the soviet union: now it's alternate history.
- Older science fiction is a time capsule to the future of a different time.
- Now matter how forward looking science fiction is, it's always a commentary on the time in which it was written.
The Future of Publishing
Linn Prentis - Literary Agent in Pacific Northwest
Tod McCoy -
Liz Gorinsky - Editor at Tor Books
Peter Smalley - Indie published author
Phoebe Kitanidis - Ebook publisher and traditionally published YA author
- What are the threats to traditional publishing?
- LG: The main issue is not ebooks or self-publishing but attention. The number of people buying and finishing books. How do we find and keep and communicate with readers?
- Reading on screens - notifications pop up, getting an email to watch a youtube video. Many people complain that its harder to finish a novel. People get excited about interactive media on the web.
- PS: A challenge to traditional publishing is the platform… People have multiple electronic devices and its a chore to move between them. The competition for attention is not just what form of entertainment we want, but the cost of moving to the platform where the books are.
- MS/M: The counter to that is that if someone recommends a book, I can easily and immediately go buy it. So I'm more likely to buy a book.
- Is the business changing?
- LG: Absolutely. The challenge is getting readers in contact with our authors. The main job of editors is not editing. 60-70% of the time in the office is spent figuring out how to get books to readers, anything from managing blurbs to editing meta-data, etc. In the past, getting attention meant getting 12 traditional book reviews. Now it might mean two traditional reviews and fifty blog mentions.
Support Your Local Indie Bookstore with Kobo and Indiebound
Amazon is a pretty amazing company. They create a very compelling shopping experience encompassing nearly every category of product, they make the discovery and shopping experience easy, and customer reviews have transformed shopping by helping us find quality products and avoid crappy ones. Shopping online helps save time when shopping and running around town. And of course, as an indie author, 99% of my book sales are through Amazon.
For all that, Amazon is not a panacea. The same scale that allows recommendations, reviews, and low pricing to work also has negative side effects. There are many, but I'll just mention a few:
For all that, Amazon is not a panacea. The same scale that allows recommendations, reviews, and low pricing to work also has negative side effects. There are many, but I'll just mention a few:
- As more book buying moves online to Amazon and to ebooks, it becomes harder for local bookstores to survive. Some might say "who cares?" but for the 20% of Americans without Internet access, bookstores and libraries are how they access books. For younger children, bookstores are an exciting place of discovery. My kids love visiting any bookstore. But bookstores can't survive on childrens books and only a small percentage of adults visiting them.
- As an author, I'm very concerned that 99% of my book sales are through Amazon. What if they change their policies and decide to offer half the royalty rate? Without any other effective distribution outlet, I'd be screwed. I'm delighted to sell as many books as I do there, but I'd be much more comfortable if I was also selling elsewhere.
- Local, indie bookstores are owned by people, whereas Amazon is a global corporation. As I've mentioned before, every time we make a credit card purchase with a global corporation, we're sending our money to the 1% of wealthiest people. Yes, we're supporting them. If you spend your money at a local bookstore, a much greater percentage is actually staying people like you and me.
Recently I've learned about two great ways you can support local bookstores: IndieBound and Kobo.
Kobo is an alternate ebook reading platform. Like Amazon, they have ereader devices and reading apps for all major smartphones and tablets. Like Amazon, they have millions of books, usually at the same price as Amazon. What's different from Amazon is that they sell their ereading devices through local, indie bookstores. And when you buy a Kobo ereader from a local bookstore, a percentage of revenue of every single book you buy continues to support that bookstore for the life of the device. If you use a Kobo app instead, you can still support a local bookstore by purchasing ebooks through the affiliate website of your local bookstore.
In other words, you can get most of the benefits of shopping with a major online ebook store while still supporting your local bookstore.
IndieBound is an affiliation of local bookstores that are members of the American Booksellers Association. Through the IndieBound website, you can find and order books online, just as you would through Amazon, but instead your purchase benefits your local bookstore. And because the IndieBound website searches the large, commercial databases, nearly everything available on Amazon is also available through IndieBound, even if it's a specialty, published-on-demand book.
So the next time you reach for the mouse to buy a book, give Kobo or IndieBound a try.
My books are available through both:
So the next time you reach for the mouse to buy a book, give Kobo or IndieBound a try.
My books are available through both:
To give you a little incentive to try Kobo, you can pick up a copy of A.I. Apocalypse for FREE on Kobo through the end of November, 2013 by entering the code jansbooks. Detailed instructions:
- Visit Kobo.
- Click on A.I. Apocalypse, then click Buy Now.
- Sign in with your Kobo UserID and Password. If you don't have one, create an account.
- On the "Confirm Your Purchase" page, click on the link for "Have a gift card or promo code?" and enter the PROMO code: jansbooks
- A box will pop up saying that you've covered your cost so they won't have to bill your credit card.
- Now you will see at the BUY NOW button that $0.00 will be charged. Click the BUY NOW button.
- Download the epub to read on your computer, tablet, or Kobo ereader.
Mobile processors lag desktop processors by 7 years
The new Nexus 5 processor (2.3 ghz quad-core) is about 11,000 Dhrystone MIPS, roughly equal to the best dual-core processors of 2005/2006.
This suggests that at this moment in time smartphone processors are roughly 7 years behind general purpose CPUs.
Then I remembered that in 1995, I got an HP 200LX, a handheld PDA. It had an 8mhz 8086-equivalent processor, which was roughly equal to what I had in 1988 when I had an IBM PC clone at 8mhz. So then too, they were 7 years behind desktop processors.
It looks like it's a fairly constant ratio, over nearly a twenty year period.
This suggests that at this moment in time smartphone processors are roughly 7 years behind general purpose CPUs.
Then I remembered that in 1995, I got an HP 200LX, a handheld PDA. It had an 8mhz 8086-equivalent processor, which was roughly equal to what I had in 1988 when I had an IBM PC clone at 8mhz. So then too, they were 7 years behind desktop processors.
It looks like it's a fairly constant ratio, over nearly a twenty year period.
Orycon 35 Schedule
If you're at OryCon 35 in Portland, I'd love to chat. Either stop me and say hi, or find me at one of these panels:
Social Media and the Modern Writer
Jefferson/Adams Fri Nov 8 12:00pm-1:00pm
Websites, Facebook fan pages, email lists, contests, twitter, tumblr,
Pinterest, ads, blogs and that annoying thing called a "platform": what
works, what doesn't, and why you need to care (spoiler: you do).
Grá Linnaea, William Hertling, (*)Jason Andrew, Aaron Duran, Cat Rambo,
Peter A. Smalley
Revision: Path to better writing or way to never finish?
Lincoln Fri Nov 8 2:00pm-3:00pm
Endless revisions can kill good writing, but everyone says polish your
work. Besides, the first draft is usually bad, right? How to navigate
through the apparent contradictions without going crazy.
Renee Stern, (*)Irene Radford, William Hertling, Amber D. Sistla
Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA) Booth
Dealer's Room Fri Nov 8 5:00pm-6:00pm
The future of dental floss
Hamilton Sat Nov 9 10:00am-11:00am
How technology will change everyday life, from taking a shower to reading
the newspaper, from getting to work to the clothes we wear.
(*)David W. Goldman, William Hertling, Mark Niemann-Ross
How near is too near
Broadway Sun Nov 10 12:00pm-1:00pm
What time frame is too near for near future science fiction longevity and
credibility.
(*)Jason M. Hough, William Hertling, Blake Hutchins, Nancy Kress
Social Media and the Modern Writer
Jefferson/Adams Fri Nov 8 12:00pm-1:00pm
Websites, Facebook fan pages, email lists, contests, twitter, tumblr,
Pinterest, ads, blogs and that annoying thing called a "platform": what
works, what doesn't, and why you need to care (spoiler: you do).
Grá Linnaea, William Hertling, (*)Jason Andrew, Aaron Duran, Cat Rambo,
Peter A. Smalley
Revision: Path to better writing or way to never finish?
Lincoln Fri Nov 8 2:00pm-3:00pm
Endless revisions can kill good writing, but everyone says polish your
work. Besides, the first draft is usually bad, right? How to navigate
through the apparent contradictions without going crazy.
Renee Stern, (*)Irene Radford, William Hertling, Amber D. Sistla
Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA) Booth
Dealer's Room Fri Nov 8 5:00pm-6:00pm
The future of dental floss
Hamilton Sat Nov 9 10:00am-11:00am
How technology will change everyday life, from taking a shower to reading
the newspaper, from getting to work to the clothes we wear.
(*)David W. Goldman, William Hertling, Mark Niemann-Ross
How near is too near
Broadway Sun Nov 10 12:00pm-1:00pm
What time frame is too near for near future science fiction longevity and
credibility.
(*)Jason M. Hough, William Hertling, Blake Hutchins, Nancy Kress
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