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Visions of the Future: Art, Technology and Computing in the Twenty-First
Century edited by Clifford A. Pickover, Science Reviews, pp 212, Pounds
Sterling 25

‘When coupled to virtual reality hardware . . . future officers will have
ultra-realistic visions of battles. The effect of this may be more efficient
and effective war strategies, or even emotional reactions to the horrors of
war made more evident in realistic war games in the 21st century’. So states
James Perry – like many other contributors to this book an IBM man – at the
conclusion of his chapter ‘Computer war games in the 21st century’. As with
so much contained in Clifford Pickover’s compelling collection of
leading-edge research, a seemingly pragmatic conjecture leads to an
ultimately unnerving realisation: the coming shock wave of computer-driven
societal change will not just alter how we live, but who, and even what, we
are. Taking the above example – and reasoning that disasters looming on our
doorstep will be overcome only by agents of change of our construction, yet
with effects beyond our compass to predict – it seems possible that we
finally may be freed of the compulsion for warlike behaviour and war
itself. The agent of change begins no more stupendously than as a
simulation: faced with a virtual revulsion to war, might we be able to
resolve the drive to fight at a new, virtual level?

Again, in the chapter ‘Will computers really think in the 21st century?’,
what this book says is less important than what it tells you. Ira Glickstein
tells us that soft/hardware will likely take hundreds of millions of years
to ‘self-organise to achieve human levels of general intelligence’. A
formidable proposition, even a deterrent to a belief in strong AI. Yet, a
small voice defies logic: given that computer games signify
consumer-revolution-as-evolution, whereby a generation discovers a new
dimension of brain capacity and dexterity ostensibly through ‘play’, it is
not heresy to speculate that at some not-so-distant point we will not be
‘doing’ computers so much as sharing a partnership. At some point a great
leap will occur, long before conservative predictions deem it possible, to
the point where our development of strong AI, and the ability of the thing
itself to reach across the soft/hardware divide, merges.

As Hans Moravec of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, Pennsylvania,
says in ‘the universal robot’ under the subheading ‘Mind children (2050+)2’,
‘Intelligent machines, which are evolving among us, learning our skills,
sharing our goals, and being shaped by our values, can be viewed as our
children, the children of our minds. With them our biological heritage is
not lost. It will be safely stored in libraries at least; however, its
importance will be greatly diminished’. Such a vision could call forth the
all-too-human feeling of self-pity, and raises the real possibility that, as
intuition suggests, we are at present laying the foundations of technology
that will not only relieve us of much, but to an extent replace us.
Depending on your perception of humanity and of yourself, this prospect will
strike you as either a great blessing or a great curse.

On a more mundane level, Davis Foulger, in his ‘Computers and human
communication’, compares ideas of future communications typified by the
television series Star Trek: The Next Generation with what is now possible
and, while giving credit to its creators for a reputable degree of reality,
adds that their ‘vision of the future of communication does not satisfy’,
because it underestimates the possibilities already in the field.

It is this precociousness and confidence of its contributors that makes
Pickover’s book a world of imminent discovery and, in a way, a challenge. In
line with the revelations contained in the many other complementary books he
has written or edited, Pickover chooses material conducive to a feeling, a
sneaking suspicion, that the (near?) future will be unlike anything we can
at present imagine. This is not just because, as this book amply shows, we
don’t actually know what artistic, technological or computer features it may
comprise. It is also because we will be very different. Visions of the
Future shows that this future is at hand.

Jeremy Clarke is a writer. His latest book is published by Fourth Estate.