Hello, all — I’m continuing on with the brainstorming for “Mind of Man”. Last time, I talked about the main character’s profession a little: information archaeologist. Now I’m going to run some ideas by y’all about the world that the main character and why the idea of AI is a problem.
What I’m looking for is something that would put a screeching halt on AI research — to the point where actually trying to recreate AI would be seen as a cardinal sin, but I really want to avoid “AI War 4.1.5” or anything else like that. Yes, war is horrible, but it’s been overdone. I would like to think that something would happen in which AI is strictly verboten. I’m considering something along the lines of “…and history turned into legend“. Something that would put AI on the brink of annihilation and dragging Mankind along with it, but trying to avoid the usual routes that have become rather ham-fisted as of late.
Well, if I wanted to draw a link between “Game of Chinese Whispers” (Facebook stand-in + Direct Neural Interface + Paranoid Schizophrenic = Societal Meltdown), the extrapolation of this would be that the crude sort of AI that came out of that particular computing kerfuffle would be quickly shut down. After that and a few tests, it was discovered that there is a critical mass to sapience (a term I am going to use rather than intelligence for the purposes of this posting).
After that, it was decided that there would be a hard limit on processing speed, numbers of nodes in networks, number of running networks, number cat pictures allowed at one time — all the important things.
Of course when anyone sets a limit to something, there are going to be people who are going to say “You’re not the boss of me!” These are also the same people that usually yell “OK — I was wrong! Help!”, but we can get to that later.
So, in the far future of this particular little world, computer systems are much regulated. Trust me, piracy is the least of IT’s issues. Networks are watched very carefully for that tipping point…which makes the information archaeologist a useful profession in as far as trying to retrieve records from the past — getting clues as to what information technology was like before everything went severely pear-shaped. In academic way, this is vital to keep society from having to re-invent the wheel every time someone decides to hook up their computers in parallel and an interest in keeping the past alive – unlike what those ass-hats in ISIS tend to believe.
In a mercenary way, there is a black market for Pre-Page Wave programming (Page Wave is what I’m currently calling the event. Those of you who have been reading this for a long time know that I’m going to go through five or six names before settling on the right one). Programming in “Mind of Man” is set up to be purposefully limited. Yeah – it can do great things and even mimic human intelligence, but it’s not going to be able to make value choices without a lot of preset functions…kinda like today, but a little better. I’m toying around with the notion that by this point we have trinary computing (-1,0,+1 rather than 0 and 1) so computers can do a lot of fuzzy logic, but they’re still running programs just like the PC I’m working on.
As far as how the soon-to-be sentient and sapient computer AI comes around, it’s going to need a specific set of systems. Another thing that Information archaeologists are looking for are what sort of old hardware can be cribbed. Modern archaeologists do this in re-discovering old ways of doing things. Information archaeologists are out there too, combing through old scraps and lost sites for a clue to what’s going to be the “Holy Grail” of this time period.
Trinary quantum computing. The difference between trinary quantum and regular trinary is power useage (making systems smaller and depending on less power to function would be great for exploration and/or military applications) and… you know, I’m going to end up having to do a lot of research into this, but this particular iteration of Trinary Quantum Computing could bring about a Sapient and Sentient AI.
So – I hope that I didn’t bore the heck out of you with this. It helps to just talk about stuff here when I’m working out the kinks for the novel.
Thanks for reading, y’all have a good day. Tomorrow, I’m going to continue on with the main character as a person.
Sincerely,
Seething Apathy
Seething Apathy 