MDDM23: 'Morphosis

[Dave Monroe]

"'... perhaps, it could be argued by minds more
scientifick, 'twas this very Attention to Detail,
whose Fineness, passing some Critickal Value, enabl'd
in the Duck that strange Metamorphosis, which has sent
it out the Gates of the Inanimate, and off upon its
present Journey into the given World.'" (M&D, Ch. 37,
p. 372)

"'Who knows? that final superaddition of erotick
Machinery may have somehow nudg'd the Duck across some
Threshold of self-Intricacy, setting off this
Explosion of Change, from Inertia toward Independence,
and Power.'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 373)

"...beneath it her Iron Confidence in the power
conferr'd by her Inedibility...being artificial and
deathless, as I was meat, and of the Earth...my only
hope was that her 'Morphosis would somehow carry her
quite beyond me, and soon." (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 380)

Cf. ...

"Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting
change in the world outside.  Neuromancer was
personality.  Neuromancer was immortality.
Marie-France must have built something into
Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing
to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer." 

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p.
269 ...

From, e.g., Ray Kurzweil, In the Age of Spiritual
Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(New York: Viking, 1998), "Prologue: An Inexorable
Emergence" ...

   "Achieving the basic complexity and capacity of the
human brain will not automatically result in computers
matching the flexibility of human intelligence. The
organization and content of these resources--the
software of intelligence--is equally important....
   "There is a plethora of credible scenarios for
achieving human-level intelligence in a machine.... 
Ultimately, the machines will gather knowledge on
their own by venturing into the physical world,
drawing from the full spectrum of media and
information services, and sharing knowledge with each
other (which machines can do far more easily than
their human creators). 
   "Once a computer achieves a human level of
intelligence, it will necessarily roar past it. Since
their inception, computers have significantly exceeded
human mental dexterity in their ability to remember
and process information.... The combination of
human-level intelligence in a machine with a
computer's inherent superiority in the speed,
accuracy, and sharing ability of its memory will be
formidable.... 

[...]

   "This specter is not yet here. But with the
emergence of computers that truly rival and exceed the
human brain in complexity will come a corresponding
ability of machines to understand and respond to
abstractions and subtleties. Human beings appear to be
complex in part because of our competing internal
goals. Values and emotions represent goals that often
conflict with each other, and are an unavoidable
by-product of the levels of abstraction that we deal
with as human beings. As computers achieve a
comparable--and greater--level of complexity, and as
they are increasingly derived at least in part from
models of human intelligence, they, too, will
necessarily utilize goals with implicit values and
emotions, although not necessarily the same values and
emotions that humans exhibit. 
   "A variety of philosophical issues will emerge. Are
computers thinking, or are they just calculating?
Conversely, are human beings thinking, or are they
just calculating? The human brain presumably follows
the laws of physics, so it must be a machine, albeit a
very complex one. Is there an inherent difference
between human thinking and machine thinking? To pose
the question another way, once computers are as
complex as the human brain, and can match the human
brain in subtlety and complexity of thought, are we to
consider them conscious? This is a difficult question
even to pose, and some philosophers believe it is not
a meaningful question; others believe it is the only
meaningful question in philosophy. This question
actually goes back to Plato's time, but with the
emergence of machines that genuinely appear to possess
volition and emotion, the issue will become
increasingly compelling....

[...]

"... the state of the art in computer technology is
anything but static....

[...]

   "In the second decade of the next century, it will
become increasingly difficult to draw any clear
distinction between the capabilities of human and
machine intelligence. The advantages of computer
intelligence in terms of speed, accuracy, and capacity
will be clear. The advantages of human intelligence,
on the other hand, will become increasingly difficult
to distinguish.

[...]
 
   "Also keep in mind that the progression of computer
intelligence will sneak up on us...."  

http://www.penguinputnam.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excerpts/prologue/prologue.htm

http://www.penguinputnam.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excerpts/exmain.htm

And see as well ...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/september99/gergen_9-13.html

Moravec, Hans.  Robot: Mere Machine to
   Transcendent Mind.  New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Not to mention ...

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to
watch out for will come - you heard it here first -
when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and
robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and
unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It
is certainly something for all good Luddites to look
forward to if, God willing, we should live so long."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

Reminds me ...

"The end of the world: the wholesale internal
introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has
simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its
complexity and centrality.  The end of the world: the
overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind,
fulfilled at last, from it material matrix, so that it
will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.
 The end of the world; critical point simultaneously
of emergence and emersion, of maturation and
escape...." 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
(trans. Bernard Wall, New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 
Book IV, "Survival," Ch. III, Sec. 3, "The Ultimate"
...

http://www.richmond.edu/~jpaulsen/teilhard/survival.html

And ...

"Autonomy, that's the bugaboo where your AI's are
concerned....  Nobody trusts these fuckers, you know
that. Every AI built has an electronic shotgun wired
to its head."

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p.
132 ...

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