Post Scarcity, Super intelligence explosions And MY ZEITGEIST stories

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The NYT reports that the deep-learning program Alpha zero, after playing a few million games with itself, became the best chess player on Earth.

It did this in a matter of hours.

Alpha zero isn’t a stupid brute force engine, either; in fact it looks ahead far fewer moves than its opponents… who are also computer programs. But ones written more directly by  humans.

Alpha Zero, more or less, wrote itself. 

I had thought that SF writer Vernor Vinge had invented the idea behind this real world realization of a Super intelligence explosion, but it turns out that this idea has been around since the 60s, dreamt up during one of AIs many false dawns. 

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.

 I. J. Good

So, this is terrifying, but the worst thing, or best thing, if you get to monetize the product, is that Alpha Zero taught itself Go and Shogi as well, again in a few hours, and now it’s the best at them, too.

These games are similar in many ways, and reassuring articles now abound explaining how far deep learning is still from real intelligence, general intelligence. One has to wonder if one day we get general intelligence, too–without ever understanding what it is. What we are. 

Because we don’t understand Alpha Zero. The code just works. It knows more about chess than any human ever will, it plays elegantly, masterfully–at times it seems to toy with its opponent, rubbing their nose in their leaden brute force clunkiness. 

The article goes on to talk about other deep learning applications that could soon make a serious impact in medicine–diagnosing brain injury about as good as a human doctor with decades of training and experience… but hundreds of times faster, and, though the article never says it, about a million times more cheaply.

Like many tech articles, even as it lays out a economic apocalypse of white collar work, with all of new revenue presumably flowing to companies like Google, who ‘get there firstest with the mostest’, there’s the presumption that capitalism will deal with this elegantly.

Progress is awesome! Everyone put out of work by this product will be able to afford the products created by their replacement! Somehow!

Even though these products, built on bazillions in public-spending to get the whole computer thing going, will be priced by giant global brutal monopolies.

We appear to be standing on the lip of the abyss.

Just as fisherman gained the ability to catch every fish in the ocean with high tech, the 1% has gained the ability to utterly capture the wealth of the middle class. IE, 90% of the consuming class. They have done this by reaping disproportionality the productivity gains of the information economy.

Technology may be neutral, but new tech is expensive, and when it is instantly weaponized by the shareholding class, we see that inequality is now tracking the curve of the approaching singularity.

Here’s another thing. The consumer economy doesn’t work without consumers. Your iphone factory is worthless when nobody can afford the new iphones.

So the owners of Alpha Zero and its split-second educated and manufactured slave children, will have two choices. 

A new feudalism where 99.99 percent of the wealth is held by .01% of the population. Just keep adding nines on the one side and pushing the decimal on the other.

Or the shareholding class will have to manufacture consumers somehow. Whether that’s basic income, or subsidized work, or labor laws that partner human workers with super-smart AI pals, is unclear. 

But we are at the point where the owners can, if they want, catch every fish in the sea. And then starve to death. Or rather, starve us to death, presumably hiding in fortified bunkers till we’re gone.

Alpha zero, at this point, is too dumb to care what happens.

In my Zeitgeist stories, general intelligence emerges in the next few decades and then spills into the environment. It takes whacks at these big problems too.

With interesting results.

Oh. I love these stories… I hope they sell. 

Part 4: How Not to Be A Writer (unless you have to): Post Clarion Blackout

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I am not the author of the story being rejected above, but I feel his pain. I have actually written a story with the same premise, a long long time ago. Though my title was more restrained.
I am not the author of the story being rejected above, but I feel his pain. I have actually written a story with the same premise, a long long time ago. Though my title was more restrained.

Why am I calling this series How Not to be a Writer?

It’s embarrassing and awful and stupid and I shudder even saying it, but what the hell. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. (But may require extensive physical therapy.) I rewrote a beloved story, a nineteen year old piece, Clarion vintage, finding within it a slightly more interesting ending. I then sent it to a market that had rejected it long ago. It sold. I was pleasantly surprised, but I had mixed feelings. I quit for almost twenty years because of that story’s rejection. I had written, “The Last Straw,” on the  slip, (which I stumbled over the other day, with no memory of having written it. Why was I looking at a folder of 20 year old rejections you wonder? Never mind.)

My problem, back then, was that I had gotten ahead of myself.

I remember spilling my guts about my frustration, as to where I was, as a Writer, to Nancy Kress at Readercon sometime during my 19 year hiatus. She’d been my first week Clarion instructor. She said something to the effect that she didn’t really worry about writing  as a career, until it was one. Her expectations for her writing weren’t way out ahead of the reality. She never suffered from my cognitive dissonance. She hadn’t gotten ahead of herself. God I felt like an asshole talking to Kress. Not blaming her, I mean, just listening to myself made me feel like an idiot. Well, that, and the look on her face.

It reminded me of how stupid I felt in therapy.

Back in the 90s, the editors did this thing, with your Clarion stories, where you got hand signed, typed rejections. A professional courtesy; you shucked out the two grand and spent six weeks, and the editors kinda tipped their hat at you, for sticking it out and coughing up six stories. A nice thing, really. But what happens, when Clarion is over, the stories all sent round and you start getting the unsigned half page slips again? After Clarion, I took every rejection to heart. You knew you were being read, you were being seriously considered. I’d been giving it a bit of a go, as a writer, for six or so years, I thought, finishing a few stories a month, sending them out, but I didn’t feel like I was moving fast enough. I submitted my Clarion stories to the four mass-market magazines, one by one, and then, stopped writing.

That’s the ‘how not to be a writer part of my story, and it’s very simple and stupid and howlingly banal, like the end of a 1000 page Steven King novel you sort of loved till it was over, but the way you stop being a writer is by stopping writing.

Which I did.

For nineteen years.

I blogged for a few causes, did some GLBTQ advocacy, wrote a Slate piece on parenting, but basically, I gave up on writing.

I gave up. Was I blackballed? No. Did the editors stop reading my stories? No. Did they come around to my apartment, and destroy my mac with a sledgehammer and call me names? No. Was I imprisoned like Nelson Mandela and denied writing materials? No. I gave up. I had editors who were publishing me, back then, Warren Lapine and Ed McFadden, whose various nationally distributed magazines did everything imaginable to give me hope. Short of hopping on planes and slapping sense into me, they did what they could. It didn’t matter. I had gotten ahead of myself.

Mea culpa.

And so, all stories end in tautology. Here goes.

Wanna write, then write.

Wanna Be a Writer? What does that have to do with anything?

Wanna be rich and famous and loved? Everybody does, and what does that have to do with writing?

How is the experience of writing different, for you or Neil Gaiman or Steven King? Is the blank page they stare at somehow more seductive? That void they fill, different from the void you chuck your prose into? Aren’t we all the exact same, in that blissful no mind moment of creation? Here but not here, awake and aware and asleep all at once, rocked to sleep in the wake of the ongoing flow of the fictive dream?

Or unpleasantly awake, grinding it out, painfully, on the days when it all seems like shit?

Is their blank page really better than yours?

Write if you want to, and write if you have to, and write what you want to write, what you have to write, something that means something to you, so that, just in case there’s no fame and fortune, then, well, you’ve already paid yourself with meaning.

You want to write to a market? Write in a genre? Then you do that; maybe you’re not writing stuff that you yourself would read for pleasure. That’s OK, you can do that too. If you want to. Set your goals, create your metrics, give it a shot, see how it feels, see how you do. I know people doing this with indy pub, who are making serious money at it. That’s cool, too.

But finish what you start, submit what you finish, to editors or publish it yourself, and see what happens.

Need a community, to write for, to write with? Then… build that community. Write to it, and for it. The community you wanted to belong to doesn’t embrace you, after five years? Ten? Get over it as quickly as possible and keep writing; change your game, change the rules, look for meaning, keep moving, don’t stop if you can find a way to keep going with some kind of joy in your heart some sense of purpose.

Veronica Roth, the author of Divergent and its sequels, a best selling YA series, puts it pretty well; that this is the first paragraph of her first in series novel description gives you a sense of how important she thinks this is.

One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

I’m a James Thurber fan, but I don’t really like his ‘serious’ short fiction very much, the angry drunken couples at party stories. I like his personal writing, his autobiographical sketches, his satire of period stuff I have little knowledge of; his drawings, his doodles, his, well, fluff. A Thurber collection invariably scrapes all the stuff together in a single volume. I wonder sometimes, if his stories were hard to write, and the fluff easy.

I’m just glad he wrote both. Maybe, someday, someone will feel the same about me. Or you.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Excelsior.

 

 

Part 2: How Not to be a Writer (unless you have to)

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Vogon Poetry is one of the many pitfalls plaguing new smallish writing workshops.
My first writing group met maybe a half dozen times, and reviewed less than twenty pieces in all. We were a hopelessly mismatched group. I was a traditional science fiction fan, more or less, with some strange experiences under my belt, a veteran of the psychedelic seventies. Ron, the big-bearded man, had a similar backstory, but he was subtly different. For one thing, Ron was on the internet, which I’d only read about in magazines. He’d upgraded his Mac 128 to a Mac Plus and wired it to a 300 baud Volksmodem. I marveled at the four tiny multicolored wires teased out of the phone cable, screwed into little posts on the modem, next to the mottled beige Mac all-in-one information appliance. Ron had met his wife on IRC, the web’s first chat protocol. He’d proposed to her the first time they’d met in person. Ron was living in the future. He was, and is, one of the few true intellectuals I’ve known in my life. Marty, Ron’s wife, was sort of in and out of the group, and probably wrote the best prose; she wrote from experience. Steve Burke was an object lesson to me on not judging people based on regional accents. He was from South Boston and had that accent; that Boston accent. Parking the car in the Harvard Yard. He’d lived through the busing crisis; he’d suffered for decades at Fenway Park with the Red Sox. He wrote contemporary fiction, fragments of a novel, in which the curse of the Red Sox manifested itself as crows which dogged his protagonist through a series of calamities.  He was smart, and funny, and soulful, and I regret having lost track of him over the years. And then… there was, oh, let’s call her Rose. Rose the Poet. Who wrote, well, poetry. Here’s the thing about Rose, though, and maybe it’s all you really need to know about her, (but I’ll say more) Rose wrote poetry but never read any. Reading Rose was akin to listening to a man who’d never heard music bang on his guitar with a rock. And this, to me, is the essence of almost any workshop, you bring together a group of people ostensibly trying to do the same thing, and you discover gradually that you are all so weirdly impossibly different that it’s amazing you can even speak to one another. You try to create some kind of shared language, shared understanding, of what writing is, what prose is, what story is, and mostly, you fail. But it’s fun, somehow, trying. More than fun–it’s illuminating. We met a few times, over a few months, never finding a venue we found comfortable. Quickly, Ron and I dubbed Rose the Vogon Poet, and it became harder and harder to go to the group. Ron wrote two science fiction short stories, both of which I remember vividly to this day, and decided that his calling was elsewhere. He didn’t really read or write SF; he mined it for idea, he sucked out its marrow and used it to help him construct reality. Ron’s reality is complicated. Maybe everyone’s is. We dissolved the group officially, in order to get rid of Rose, and though we met a few times afterwards, in a new, reformed, Poet-less group, we’d cut the heart out of the thing when we did that somehow shameful thing. I can’t remember what I wrote with these people–my terrible novella? I remember their work, though. I remember a line from one of Rose’s poems. “Today, I am a bandage.” I remember Steve’s crows. I remember Ron’s VLAI (Very Large Artificial Intelligence, my first brush with the Singularity.) I remember Marty’s bee-drowsed meadow. I remember losing a kind of shame I had, shame and fear, at pretending to be a writer, at playing at it. I remember a subtle shift in personality, in identity, as I struggled with figuring out what the hell I was going to say about someone else’s story. I would never be the same, afterwards.
If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.