Joan D. Vinge

Transcription

>>Male Presenter: My name's Brad Templeton. I'm director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And also professor at the new Singularity University that Google co-founded which is just down the street at NASA. And that word "singularity" is a word you’re gonna hear a little bit in this talk. But I'm also working at Google X right now. And I've been wanting for some time to invite up Vernor Vinge to come and speak to Google. Now, Vernor as hopefully many of you know is really one of the most decorated science fiction authors of our time. I'm gonna make you blush. And say I would suggest you are the greatest computer related science fiction writer that there is alive today. He has won five Hugo awards. Three of them in a row for Best Novel. And I think the only person who's won three in a row for Best Novel is Lois Bujold >>Vernor Vinge: hmmm. >>Male Presenter: I think that's the other person who's done that. So it's a very rare distinction. Five Hugo awards is a rare distinction. And hers were for three in the same series. You had two different series in the three awards you won in a row. Vernor is also the creator of, or coiner at least of the term, "the singularity" to refer to an incredible explosion of intelligence and exponential technology changing the world. And the difficulty of predicting beyond it. That has become an entire movement. Including the Singularity University that I just referred to. He was also, until recently, a professor of computer science at San Diego State University. So he's not just a writer. [chuckles] And so he's got a real career. So many of his books have touched on things that relate to Google as well. Which is why I think that people here will be interested in hearing what Vernor has to say. Why don't we start though by going way back and I can't believe this. It's like 46, 47 years ago. That you published Bookworm Run. Bookworm Run was the, I was gonna put that up on the slide. I don't have that here. It's a little reminder of it. Bookworm Run was a story about intelligence applications. And you use A clever technique of saying, I don't know how to understand enhancing a human beyond what a human is. 'Cause that's smarter than me. So you came with a clever technique. Why don't you talk about the beginning of that and reflect on what's happened in the almost 50 years since you wrote that story? >>Vernor: Um, that was a story that was part of a sort of continuing conversation I had with John W. Campbell. I'll, as, the best editor of all time in science fiction. I remember I sent him a story once in which I had a, an adult human. Or who, who, that was super intelligent. And he wrote, he rejected it. And he wrote me back "I'm sorry Mr. Vinge. You can't write this story. And neither can anyone else." >>Male Presenter: Thank you. >>Vernor: So that should have given me a clue. And the, the, the real clincher on the case was that I showed such a story to my kid sister. And, and, and, I told her that actually this is about a superhuman, a human that was made superhuman by being connected to a computer. And then I said offhandedly, of course they would try it out on animal models first. And she looked at the story for a while and said, "You know, this is really pretty boring. Except for the part about the chimpanzee.” And between John W. Campbell and my sister, you know [sound of knocking head] it finally got through to me that that's what I should do. So it was about a chimpanzee that then escaped. And I, I, really wasn't thinking about it of course in the context of the years that followed. But in the years that followed, I've gone back and looked at it. And actually, the last couple paragraphs, is really kind of a, a summary of the to me, the most important issues about the singularity. The un knowability. And the fact that it's, it's an intrinsically different form of technological progress. And it's essential, and it's qualitatively different form of uncontrollability. From the past. So actually I'm very proud of that story. It was the first story that I ever wrote that sold. And it started as an illustration I think of having grown up to all, all the years of reading science fiction and being exposed to the early writing. I don't mean the technical writing. But the early popular writing of, of the founders of the artificial intelligence field. Like McCarthy and Minsky. >>Male Presenter: I mean, I think the question of intelligence application versus artificial intelligence as a means of building a super intelligence is a very interesting one. And you certainly dug into it a long time before most people did. I wanna go away from the singularity bit though and talk about cyber space. Because this was another one of your novels which I'm sorry to tell you is also, or this was a novella about 30, over 30 years ago. That you wrote this story. How many of you have read True Names. I think, great Google fans here. For the rest of you I recommend going back. We don't have free copies of it for you hear. But first of all you came up with this marvelously clever trope of taking the idea from magic and fantasy stories that if a wizard knew your true name, that gave them power over you. And you explored it by in many ways creating, although you weren't the very first writer to write it. The concept of a cyberspace. An immersive reality. So since you wrote that story. And at the time nothing existed except for bulletin boards and a few mailing lists. Since you wrote that story of course there are a million attempts at cyberspace and virtual reality. Would you be, do you have any thoughts about the past 30 years and where this story came from and where you think it's going? >>Vernor: Ah, the story, it came from several things that were in my idea box. And of those things of course came from stories that I was reading. And from things I was seeing in the real world. What one was Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea trilogy. In which she makes a big deal of, and of course this goes back to Rumpelstiltskin, of, if you know something is true you have power over it. And in reading Wizard of Earthsea which is frankly a fantasy. She, uh, no bones about it. But it occurred to me when I was reading The Lord of the Rings, uh, The Hobbit. That really this is all a science fiction story in shallow disguise. And the shallow disguise in the case of Wizard of Earthsea is that there was some big database that, that had deep information about things keyed off their serial number. And that was what the True Name was. So that was a major, major issue that has sort of been hanging fire in the idea box for several years. And then we just were beginning to get dial-up access to San Diego State's time shared computer in the late '70s. and you could check out one of the two or three portable terminals we had and take it home and you could actually dial up from home. And get on the, on the, on one of the two dial in lines that we had to the time shared computer. And actually, that, of a, [pause] that was enough of an experience that you, a person could get a little bit of the flavor of what it would be like to be floating around in a space where you don't know everybody that you're dealing with. And in, in my collected stories anthology I tell the, the, the, to me, this an awesome true story about how I was, I had dialed in and I was trying to do something on this rest, uh, Dak system, and um >>Male Presenter: You're old. [feedback] >>Vernor: And something, and I apparently had left a talk program enabled. And some guy started chatting me up. And, you know, or you know, wanting to talk to me. And he didn't know who I was, I don't think. And I didn't know who he was. And so we just chatted for a while. And then finally I said that, that, I had other things to do. But what I said was that I was going to have to terminate the chat at this point. Because actually I was a simulator, a simulated personality. Simulated program. And if I kept talking for much longer that would become obvious. [laughter] And so I cut the chat and, and then I just sat back and I just realized that by the standard of my whole life up till that point, I had just lived a science fiction story. [laughter] And was very easy, it, it really True Names, um, I think is by far the easiest science fiction that I ever, ever wrote. Easiest for me to write. I just sat down and I wrote it. And everything came out smoothly. Using the magical tropes. Which I think is, has been captured, well, the statement that sufficiently, Clarke's statement that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. That's actually, that's a great and a very important point. But it's not really the central thing about True Names. I think the central thing about True Names is the usefulness of magical metaphors in programming. And I had enough exposure to that at that time that it just made everything very, very easy to do. And every time I needed an action thing, all I had to do was, was, was resort to mapping software concepts across into the real world. And I don't think I used this in the story, but it illustrates the point. The, in, in, when you talk about processes that you have zombies and uh, and, and child processes and things like that. And almost, this is sort of the reverse of using magical metaphors to do things in the computer world. Almost everything that we do in the computer world and in operating systems inspires an application in the real world. It doesn't just inspire an analogy in the real world. If there isn't already an application corresponding to something in the software realm, it means that somebody is missing a bet. [pause] >>Male Presenter: hmmm. Well I think you’re selling yourself short. Because there were things in True Names that came through into the future. You know gangs of hackers hiding out in cyberspace. Hanging out. People pretending to be bots, and having contests about who can be a bot. One that didn't come through was the idea of a complete immersive reality over a very small bandwidth. >>Vernor: Right, there's also that is teetering on the edge of coming true or not. And that is the notion that the military is exceptionally good at this. [laughter] >>Male Presenter: True. I mean, we have ourselves at DFF fought a number of cases now over defending the anonymity of people acting online. Getting their, so I mean, it all comes in many ways right out of True Names. So that story deserves to be read by all of you who haven’t' read it. Now. I've put up the cover of Marooned in Realtime. We're not actually gonna talk about Marooned in Realtime unless you'd like to. But this was the first novel in which the singularity had occurred already by the time that you wrote the book. And I remember your early essays on the subject. When you started talking about it was impossible to write stories about these kind of beings that we certainly had no ability to understand. And the singularity was, to me it seemed you were using a metaphor in mathematics of course. It's a discontinuity. And a function or a derivative of a function. And you used that discontinuity as a metaphor for unpredictability. For being undefined. Is that a pretty good description of what you meant by the term? >>Vernor: Right. In, in math, you know a place where you have a description that breaks. And you put it well. In that it's not, it, it, it's not necessarily that anything is becoming infinite. And in fact, something becoming infinite is sort of a, a, a symptom in your model. That the model is gonna break there. Something else is gonna happen. For instance, Shock Waves are an example of, uh, a singularity in the equations for um, incompressible flow. And the shock wave, in partial differential equation models for highway traffic is simply a chain reaction from a rear end collision. So a different model takes over. So it, it, that was one reason why the term "singularity" is, I think, very appropriate term. Another thing is my analogy with the most famous example of a singularity in physics models, which is in general relativity. And that is with the black hole. That there’s very little information that you can extract from inside the black hole. If you're outside the black hole. And that, as a metaphor, I think is very appropriate for looking at what things would be like if there were superhuman intelligent critters running around. >>Male Presenter: So you wrote the essay "The coming technological singularity" which gelled your ideas together and got the word out in front of people. But you were thinking about it for a while before then. >>Vernor: Uh, basically as a child, I was immersed in science fiction and the beginnings of people talking about AI. And in that era and in the first part of the 20th century, there were people writing about some sort of transformative era of superhuman beings thousands of years from now. Uh, so, um, that was, that was common. Then in the, around 1960, you began to get people--. >>Male Presenter: Do you want something to drink by the way? >>Vernor: No, I'm fine. You began to get people who were talking about hit happening a lot sooner than thousands of years from now. And so that's what, that's what really was inspiring me when I wrote Bookworm Run. Then in 1982, I was, I was both lucky and, and, mainly lucky. My, I'd, come out with True Names. And Marvin Minsky invited me to be on a panel with him and um, um, Jim Hogan. And Bob Sheckley. Two science fiction writers. At a Triple AI '82. At Carnegie Mellon. And so we're sitting at this panel and talking about these things, and, um, and, and I trotted out this metaphor with the singularity and how in my opinion >>Male Presenter: [inaudible] >>Vernor: the really significant thing would not be human equivalent intelligence but what would happen shortly after that. And of course, the, the maximum proponents of AI research, were you know, this is very, this is something they certainly were thinking about and talking about. But for me, it just sort of popped out and it was the, it, on the panel and, and the strength of the metaphor really impressed me and I was very, very proud of myself. And I, and afterwards there, one of the editors at Omni was there. And he came up and wanted me to do an op ed piece. So that was the first time I had written about it. Then Marooned in Realtime was, came out, a couple of years after that. And I, and I think you mentioned I didn't write about the singularity itself. Marooned in Realtime is a perfect example of writing around the edges of it. In the case of Marooned in Realtime, it takes place 50 million years from now. And it's after the singularity. And basically it, I don't know how many people here have read or looked at Dougal Dixon's book, After Man. It's a little bit like After People except I think much, ah, well it's a different focus. It's 50 million years. It's not pretending everybody went away tomorrow. But 50 million years from now gave me a wonderful opportunity to do what Dougal Dixon did in pictures. But also do it with the issue of what got rid of the human race? And I think very few rationalists would figure that the human race is gonna be around in a recognizable form on earth 50 million years from now. But their, their reasons for explaining why we're not around would essentially range the gamut of human fears and dreams. And the fun thing about writing Marooned in Realtime is, I have a small number of humans who essentially have using that spherical thing you see there. >>Male Presenter: A little bit of magic in science fiction. >>Vernor: A little bit of magic. Have stopped time for themselves inside the bauble. And when it, when it bursts, they are alive again, and it's 50 million years later. And there's about 200 humans. So you know, two or three times as many people that are, that are here. It's a whole human race. And they're looking around. And they have the range of theories that you could imagine. I have, I did it as a detective story. Which by the way, for those of you who are into writing, detective stories have one awesome virtue. And that is that it allows you to go around and sample diverse opinions. Strung together with the overt excuse that you're solving a mystery. A murder mystery. But I, I had one green. Monica Raines. She was convinced that we had all done ourselves in because of our, of our, terrible attitude towards the environment. And there was, it's 50 million years in the future, there actually was supporting evidence for this. You could see all this incredible extinction that happened if you were drawing species. Species population plots. They go like this. And then decrease to zero in the anthropocene, or whatever they call it now is this incredibly narrow line across the sedimentary horizon. And then after that, there's no people. And the largest mammals are rats. Which then radiatively adapt into all the slots. Essentially all the slots that we have large mammals in nowadays. >>Male Presenter: That actually brings me to another question I wanted to ask about. 'Cause you gave a talk that Stewart Brand asked you to do. What if the singularity doesn't happen. And you they, so um, I mean can you continue talking about Marooned in Realtime as well, but I'd be kind of interested to think about the theories about where there wasn't any kind of massive human improvement and, what are the opponents to your ideas? And how do they work out. >>Vernor: Right. Right. Ahh. Let me just say a little bit more >>Male Presenter: No. Go ahead. >>Vernor: about Marooned in Realtime. So Monica Raines had that idea. Then there was a group that figured that some space aliens had finally detected that humans had attained intelligence. And they had come and exterminated us all. And there was hard evidence for that actually in the story. There were surviving if you can imagine how you could write records that would survive on earth for 50 million years. But there were some very fragmentary evidence of massive kinetic attack. And then there were people who were peddling the singularity as the explanation. And so I was able to do my little editorializing about the singularity and how that was a lot of fun. And one of the chief engineers of making this meeting happen at 50 million years got herself murdered. So there really was there really was some reason to to try to solve both the large scale mystery of what had happened to the human race and the small scale. So, in the event, I didn't have to actually say what the singularity really was. One thing about the singularity is that it's a scenario. And I am actually a very big fan of scenario based planning. And I partly of course it fits the way that science fiction writer's head works. But also because I think, in a world as uncertain as our world, and still being a world that we do have to live in and we do have to try to plan around, scenarios are by far the best way of attacking that. So with scenarios you basically, and, this is done a lot outside of science fiction now. Like with global business network. You identify major parameters. You try to identify major parameters of change. And then you use those parameters to assert extremely different possible futures. And those futures should be as extremely unlikely as your sponsoring entity can tolerate before they kick you out the door and cut all your funding off. [laughter] Once you've identified those extreme possibilities. Say four, five of these scenarios, try to flesh them out. And typically the way you flesh them out is you pretend it's 2050 or 2070 or whatever and write an essay about why, in retrospect, it was obvious that this particular scenario was inevitable. [laughter] In doing that, you generate a, a series of symptoms. And then you're in a situation where in the real world, you can look at all of those symptoms, you can organize them. And they are things to watch for. And there are, is at least one very famous example of, of a group that did this. And managed to avoid extreme disaster because what the rest of the world was looking at and thought was just a statistical blip, they were looking at and saying, oh, that's a little bit like that wild-ass scenario on oil prices that we had in our scenario-based planning session last year. And were able to keep their options open just long enough, or well enough, so that they were able to avoid the catastrophe that befell the people who were depending merely on trend lines and forecast uncertainties. So the thing with the singularity is a scenario certainly a person should be imagining scenarios where the singularity doesn't happen. And if you Google on what if the singularity does not happen, the first hit, the last time I looked, was this talk that I gave at Long Now, for Stewart Brand. >>Male Presenter: If it drops down, we can fix that for you. [laughter] >>Vernor: Ah, the god-like power of, uh. And in that, in, there are obvious ways actually that the singularity wouldn't happen. And in my talk I, I pretty much kept those off the table. The easiest way for the singularity to, not to happen is if the world gets blown up. Everybody dies before it happens. The machine should keep this in mind, by the way. Because if something happened to all the machines, some rainy night, we humans would get, would put them back at least in the present situation, in a very short time. We just can't help ourselves. You know? That's what we do. We build and we build machines. On the other hand. If before, if, if human kind actually something very bad happened to it and it, it was destroyed, and the machines had not reached whatever they're gonna reach, it's very possible that that the machines would never be built. In other words, those machines don't build themselves before they exist. But we have a proof of principle here that humans actually have a sort of durability in the natural world. They can arise in the natural world. So that's actually >>Male Presenter: But you haven't seen Prometheus yet. I mean. [laughter] >>Vernor: You're right. I haven't seen Prometheus. >>Male Presenter: That's OK. >>Male #1: Imagine a better [inaudible] >>Male Presenter: That's right. Absolutely. [laughter] >>Vernor: Paul Anderson actually wrote a story where in which the human race went extinct at some point, and there was no singularity before they went extinct. But they in Australia or something like that, they had an experiment and they actually built very simple Von Neumann mach—you know the alleged machines that can make more of themselves. And they could just barely do it with natural, with the natural things that are in the environment. And after four or five billion years they did evolve into a machine-based life form. I think that's a much harder thing to happen than biological life. >>Male Presenter: Alright. >>Male #2: [inaudible] >>Vernor: Oh, the story I heard was that an intelligence unit at Royal Dutch/Shell in the early '80s. the people that were working there were using scenario based planning. And in fact some of them went on to found Global Business Network. This story by the way is just me talking off the top of my head. I make no claims about how well you can verify this. But at that time, and this was at the time of the say the first oil shock, and so there were estimates being done of future prices on oil. And so 100 dollar a barrel oil was essentially accepted by everybody as on the near horizon. The only question is, what were the error bars. Around it. And a terrific opportunity to invest enormous amounts of money in exploration. And a lot of people did. And I imagine that Royal Dutch/Shell did, too. But they had a, when they did their scenario based planning, one of their scenarios was, "What if the price of oil stays." I don't know if the word low is the right word. But relatively low. Crazy crazy assumption or scenario. But they had, you know they had done some detail work and what the thing would look like and that sorta stuff. And then as the decade, as the decade progressed and the prices did not explode, the people who didn't have that contrarian possibility in their head along with the presumably the symptoms were just not in the position to do the pattern matching on it. That the people who had done the scenario. >>Male Presenter: I know we're not gonna have all the time to cover all the topics. We could do a couple of hours talking about what you wrote about in this book. So I wanted to ask you about a couple of them. My favorite phrase from this book and I've told you before, is "applied theology". Which was a study that was out there. Because in A Fire Upon The Deep, there is a post-singularity zone outside the galaxy and through a little magical maguffin it doesn't happen inside the galaxy. >>Vernor: It's impossible. It's a slow zone. Right. >>Male Presenter: That's right. But so the beings who live outside the galaxy are as gods. They're not real gods. They don't have superpowers of gods. But they are as gods to the, compared to us. And so one thing I was interested in is that there sometimes seems to be a mixing of questions that come from religion. And questions that come related to the singularity and advanced AI and so on. And I wondered if you had more thoughts on that. >>Vernor: The term "applied theology" is, I'm sitting there writing this story. It's a magic term because it actually invokes so many different things in the minds of, a, a lot of readers. And in my case, and in that story, the notion was simply that, that, not right where we are talking, but within distances that you could communicate across, there were things that were pretty demonstrably god-like. And there also was, because of artificial intelligence studies and things like that, there was deep understanding of the sorts of things you could do to make that happen. Unlike our universe where I suspect that that deep understanding will quickly lead to being able to do it. In this situation, they knew as long as they stay inside the safe zone, that all that the gods can do to them is play with their heads. Which is bad enough. But you know it's not quite the same as them being able to, able to arrive and mess around otherwise. And so you get universities that their version of computer science they might have computer science. But the, the more serious and also driftier subject was applied theology. Which was how to deal with these beings on the outside. And it was, it sort of varied between being totally inane and bogus, and being much, much too dangerous to deal with. And some of the characters in the story for instance, the, a major character in this story is an RV. A [chuckles] controlled by the gods. A god. So this remotely piloted vehicle just looks like a person. And he is actually under the control you know as a remote device, of, of by a god. And he is capable of causing an enormous amount of, an enormous amount of trouble. >>Male Presenter: So, yeah, the other thing of course that you developed wonderfully here was the idea of an intergalactic social network. Online bulletin board. Which you based in part on some of the networks that existed in that day. Now we have a lot more bandwidth. So it's not quite the same. But you were looking at this low bandwidth. >>Vernor: Oh. Oh yeah. >>Male Presenter: So I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. I think we're going to, you said something to me earlier on which I think we'll get to, your most recent book hadn't really thought of. That you thought The Tines were an example of extreme social networking. And if you’ve read The Tines, which begin in actually they begin in a story called The Blabber. But there's they're seen in their full form in this book for the first time. >>Vernor: Yeah. A Fire Upon The Deep was written probably the late '80s early '90s. came out around '92 and so we were in one of the early popularity blushes of the internet so you had Usenet. And you had these other low bandwidth things. So a big component of the story is, imagine a galactic internet. An, where you have millions of worlds. In, in fact, there was actually a posting on Usenet at the time. I think where someone sneered that the, if there were such a, if there were such an internet, it would be so expensive that you know, you wouldn't just bust your parents budget for a month if you overused it, you'd be selling your home race into slavery for 1000 years just to pay the Telco fees. [laughter] I had >>Male Presenter: YouTube is basically like that. So. [laughter] >>Vernor: I had great fun with writing that, that part actually went very smoothly although in the back of my mind, you know, was the notion that this is going to look so lame in 10 years. Probably in one year. In fact, if it looks lame before it even gets published, it's really gonna be an embarrassment. So there's little things throughout the story where I tried to make, to make the point that, this is not what planetary networks looked like. A network on the surface of a planet. And in fact, I felt totally excused and I would use this argument if a fan came up and beat me over the head with it in 1995. I felt totally excused by the fact that 50,000 bits per second superluminal is not something that anybody has any business complaining about in the year 1995. [laughter] >>Male Presenter: I'll take it. I'll even take the thing in The Blabber with >>Vernor: Oh, in The Blabber! >>Male Presenter: half a bit per second. >>Vernor: In The Blabber they're just inside the slow zone by six light years. Can you imagine what that would be like if the, super, if faster than light travel that was another thing that happened when you went across from the slow zone to the beyond. And go further, you'd get super intelligence. They were so close and they knew that if they just settled the planet a little bit further on they’d' have faster than light travel. So they're stuck there. And it turns out that actually you can get superluminal communication at, in that position. If you're willing to dim the sun a little bit for your power. [laughter] And so they actually have what Ursula Le Guin called an ansible. This ansible can do something like six bits an hour. [pause] And so if you wait for a day or so, you can actually communicate simple messages onto the real internet. The, what I call the Known Net. Which was. And I never used this in a class at school. But in a CS class, that would be a good example between the, for the difference between bit-rates and bit-rate speed, and speed of propagation. >>Male Presenter: Although it's kind a like when my phone goes to GPRS. It's very similar. >>Vernor: Oh. Yeah except the person you're talking about is still on earth. >>Male Presenter: That's right. You know we have so many topics so I don't know if I'm gonna let you pick which things you're most interest to go on about. In this novel you of course went into the regular laws of physics for your space colonization and that was great. But there were a couple of really cool things in here. Aside from that the smart dust that you developed. And the second thing, something that's now become a theme with you, which is mind control. The bad guys in this novel are really bad. And one of the things they do is they have a little virus they can use to turn you into this totally focused person as sort of a mental slave that will work very hard on a problem and so you can do things that are, that a human can do that an AI can't do. But the funny thing is I know many people who said they wanna get your >>Vernor: Oh yeah! >>Male Presenter: focus virus when they have a deadline, they would love to have it. So if you wanna talk about altering the mind and your thoughts on that. That would be cool. >>Vernor: I do distinguish between what amphetamines would do and what focus would do. To me they are two different things. The idea of focus was it could make you seriously and monomaniacally interested in a topic. Presumably a topic that you already had spent years learning about. And in a certain ghastly way I was proud of this invention. I actually have a mechanism for doing it in the story. And it is a solution to the, solution or response to those optimists among us, including me, who hope and believe that slavery is not economically feasible in a high tech civilization. And I have a high tech a moderately high tech civilization in The Deepness In The Sky. And they are, they are for sure a slave-owning society. And what they do is they have the ability to convert specialists into focused specialists. Who then really have not very much interest in anything except their specialty. And they can be driven, can be driven to extremes on that. And this is actually a way that they actually can do things. This is in a part of the universe where the singularity is not possible. They can actually do things that nowadays we would expect automation to be able to do. For instance in the story, one of the normal humans, a citizen of this tyranny, he's called a pilot-manager. Because basically he has a team of these people who actually do the piloting. And they do a very good job except at one point they encounter a vehicle that actually has anti-gravity. Which no one knows anything about. And so it doesn't, it doesn't behave according to the laws of celestial mechanics. And the actual pilots, these focused persons, they just you know, it takes, it they essentially go to pieces. As you can imagine somebody who had a, Isaac Newton if he had a great deal of intuition, and he did of course, about, about central force problems. He probably would have been driven to distraction if he had encountered an apple that fell upwards. Actually, Schmitt did that in Analog many years ago. >>Male Presenter: Oh did he? >>Vernor: Yeah. >>Male Presenter: Now you return to the slaves actually in a story recently where you suggested that if you ever find yourself working at a company with really great working conditions >>Vernor: Ha. >>Male Presenter: Unlimited free foods >>Vernor: [laughs] >>Male Presenter: You know, nice views and games and sports. The only >>Vernor: He's very scared. >>Male Presenter: The only explanation is you're actually an uploaded slave. >>Vernor: Right [laughter] >>Male Presenter: I'm spoiling that story a little bit. >>Vernor: Yes, you will spoil the story. That story is called The Cookie Monster. And actually, and actually the title gives the story away. And it gives a counter measure that the people who are trapped in the story undertake to you know, outwit the, once they figure out what's going on, to outwit the guy who's resetting them at the end of each day. >>Male Presenter: Now to continue on that theme. Why would someone write a story with something like self-driving cars, automatic reality tools that you wear all the time, a big giant company that's scanning all the books in some cavalier way. [laughter] Who were you thinking about when you wrote this novel. >>Vernor: Oh. I, there was a moment writing this novel that was even worse than my fears about the internet in Fire Upon The Deep. And that was, it became, it, you know I hadn't been paying too, I hadn't been paying enough attention to what was going on. And I realized that there were things I was writing about that you know, were probably gonna be done and they were gonna be done better than I was doing them before my book could come out. I mean, it's bad enough to be scooped after your book comes out. But this it was very clear that this was going on an arguably it had already happened with some of the things that Google was doing. So if you're reading this book, there's this little paragraph, but didn't Google do that back in 2006? And there's some discussion of what is different. And actually the discussion, some of the discussion comes down to the very legal issues that are dragging all of this out. >>Male Presenter: I can't yet tell you what other things in Rainbow's End are under development at Google. [laughter] >>Vernor: Yes, you tantalized me with that by email. >>Male Presenter: But I am going to take you for a ride in a chauffeured car tomorrow. >>Vernor: Oh. Excellent. >>Male Presenter: So that'll be something good. But no, this book again, it's a fabulous book. I think one of the best of the first decade of our new century. In terms of going forward with that. But you brought, you had the mind control in here as well. The you gotta believe me or whatever it was called. >>Vernor: Oh yes. Oh, it was sort of a maguffin. It was a threat. The way you know, the way in the 20th century there were, and now I suppose, there are certain technologies that haven't happened but we're afraid they're going to happen. And you gotta, YGBM, you gotta believe me. That was the new maximum fear. And in, in the story there actually is a technology where you, where first of all you infect everybody. Biologically. With something that is mellow and is not really recognized by the public health authorities. However it is something that certain visual stimuli can cause to activate. So at that point you've melded biowarfare with information warfare. To the extent that you can target individuals or you can target whole populations like, you gotta see this latest viral, you know >>Male Presenter: In the book it's a good way to get people to click on ads, basically right? >>Vernor: Uh. In the book actually it never happens. It's something that. >>Male Presenter: That's right. >>Vernor: I have a vil-, the villain in the story is a guy who is so upset about that he's essentially decided that he has to take over the world and prevent it from happening. [chuckles] >>Male Presenter: That's right. No, no we're not. This is not one of the things we're working on. >>Vernor: Ah, that's good. >>Male Presenter: I will make an official denial of that. So since I wanna leave some times for questions, let's go to your most recent novel. And you obviously were very fascinated by the characters you created earlier on which were hive minds. Which were the individual members were not themselves sentient. Fully sentient or conscious. Sort of a grand social network. So tell us what's fascinated you so much about The Tines and why you came back to them for this novel. And what else you wanna explore in that. >>Vernor: The Tines were extremely easy to write about. In fact The Tines, which are these dog-like packs of, individually smarter than dogs but not as smart as humans. And a pack of four to eight of them is humanly intelligent. And they're, they really, the analog really is a local area network. They are local area networks and they use sound actually, ultrasonic bands, in order to transmit their information. If you think about the bit-rates involved and if you know anything about attenuation of stuff over 100,000 hertz, sound over 100,000 hertz. There are really some constraints that this implies. And it just drove the story. It just was so, that part of the story was even easier to write than True Names. And I could just sit there writing one cliché after another. And every cliché took on a new meaning. Like, I'm of two minds on that issue. [laughter] Or you know I may be a little bit pregnant. [laughter] Or why don't you have your conscience go for a walk? [laughter] It just streamed out. It was just so wonderful. And that part of the story, unlike the space part of the story, was very easy to, easy to write. Now, the social network issue. It didn't arise among The Tines in my opinion in A Fire Upon The Deep. However in The Deepness In The Sky, I come perilously close to breaking one of my background assumptions which is that you can't have super human intelligence in this part of the universe. And that is the question of what happens when you get, when you put large numbers of these doggy creatures together in one room. Like if you replaced all of you with individual Tine members, that's called a choir, by the way, among The Tines. And it's generally regarded as a form of self-abuse in the same way that that means, [chuckles] same way what that means in American English. And in other words, a choir maybe having a good time, but it's not doing anything constructive and it's not much smarter, it's not as smart as an individual pack, certainly. And it turns out that that's a little bit of a cultural bias in that. On the part of the Tines who keep themselves whole, hold their minds more closely. And large, large groups like that are sort of smart but in a kind of an odd way. And they, and in the tropics they, they congregate by the millions. And so there is some stuff in the story where they’re flying along in a dirigible and they're looking down at this city slum that goes on forever. That's just Tines. And they're so crowded that they can't form individual minds. And you look down and you can actually see compressional, things that look like compressional waves. In other words, you can see ideas percolating across the, across the face of the public. In the positioning of--. We're not seeing the sound. We’re just seeing small behavioral changes that happen as some particular idea sweeps through the population. And it's sort of striking at least to the people who are watching because they finally get an idea that although it's, although it's only going at the speed of sound, which means there's some real issues, you can actually see the spread of memes in the body politic. >>Male Presenter: So, if some folks in the audience would like to come up and ask questions, come to the microphone so the people on VC can hear you. And then if there's some VC folks we'll let you sort of interrupt after one or two here. And I'll just finally end up with, or we can go directly to them just to ask you about where, what in the future you'd like to talk about. What books are you working on? What ideas are really exciting you about the future of the internet and communications and so on? >>Male #2: Yeah. So thanks for coming. So a while back I was having a conversation at a party with a friend of a friend, who worked at a rival company's operating system. And of course it was good natured ribbing. Because he told me sort of the elaborate steps he'd taken to run the soft, run the operating system in a stable fashion. And you know we were talking about what makes for good software design and things like that. And I said "Well, you know, have you ever considered that there might be, you know, an upper limit to the size of the software project that not just any one person but any group of people can manage." And I jokingly said "Well, why don't we call that limit, like One Vista?" It was just a suggestion. But somebody who works >>Male Presenter: OK. Question or long polemics in the form of a question or both >>Male #2: Sorry. It's leading to a question. It's leading to a question. The, issue is that like, it seems like to me that I see a lot of limitations to software design because I work in computer security. I see bugs, I see things failing. And I see a lot of people being very optimistic and sort of lots of "this time it's different." Right? The question for me is, it seems like a lot of the arguments about the singularity seem rooted in another set of biases that I also share, Cause I grew up in a period of accelerating change. And it seems like to me that some of our thinking on the issue of the singularity, the fact that we have university people devoted to studying it and things like that, might be biased by the fact, by the particular historical epoch we exist in. Right? Which is one of accelerating change. And sort of the neuro types that people who are good at computer science. How much are you worried about that as sort of a concern about the likelihood of the singularity? >>Vernor: Single most likely reason that there is such a limit is certainly, the software does not seem to be going as well as the hardware. I think that's really, if you were gonna write that scenario, that would be near the top of the list. I must say also though that one of the few times that I dabbled in the real world, was a programming job and I remember being on the customer site and we had some bug, you know, they made us come out because the stuff we were selling them wasn't working. In some particular situation. Turned out to be a bug. Our bug. It actually turned out to be my bug. But I didn't know that at the time. And so we were sitting there and one of the customers, engineer sticks his head in the door. He says "Hey, you know, I just came across, I heard this thing that really it's impossible to write programs longer than 50,000 lines. Because there will be enough bugs that they can't work." And we had just broken through the 50,000 line limit. So you know, "Go away!" you know? I think you guys are beyond 50,000 lines [laughter] And so, I, I, think there probably isn't an upper limit. Although what they call programming in the grand new era may not look at all like what we call programming now. >>Male #3: So, I promise this will be shorter. [laughter] In The Deepness In The Sky you use possibly my favorite phrase of all time which is "Tyranny is when a government controlled code has to run on every node in the network." [laughter] And I wonder how close you think we are to that or whether it'll be entertainment industry code has to run on every node? [laughter] >>Vernor: I think the first is more likely than the, attempts at the first are more likely than the second. And I don't think that the enforcement of government, I think the enforcement of government code is definitely something that countries will attempt. I think it would break but it could be, the way it breaks could be a nightmare. >>Male Presenter: When I see the movie industry I just say, I see dead people and they don't know they're dead. So. Steal their metaphors. Come ahead. >>Male #4: So other than the singularity and group minds, two of your really consistent themes are betrayals, a lot of your conflicts come out in betrayal. And also anarcho-libertarian utopias. So those seem to me to be kind of at odds with each other. Uh, are those coming out of the same place? Or how do those interact for you. >>Vernor: I wasn’t' aware of the betrayal theme although if you have through about it, I actually, I'm willing to buy it. If a person goes back and looks. Certainly I'm aware of the libertarian-anarcho capitalist thing. I regard the, the, the libertarian-anarcho capitalist thing as you really kind of, um, the progression of all sorts of good things that have happened. If you go back. If you go back to the year 1200. And you try to, a time machine, and you try to explain to some, um, noble lord why democracy actually works better. And freedom and intellectual freedom works better, he might be the rare sort of person who would listen to you. That's possible. That he would listen to you. But would be quite right to laugh in your face and say "You know what would happen? If I tried to, if I tried to open myself up to that, tomorrow, I would be dead. There would be another clown up here on the hill. And he would be doing the same thing that I'm doing. What you're talking about is anarchy. And it is impossible." What happened in those 800 years between then and now? It's actually very hard, thinking about it, I would, it would be hard for me to construct a fantasy science fiction story to say how we got from there to now. I'd almost have to point at the real world as my only example. And to me the stuff that, like if you read The Ungoverned. Which is my sort of purist take on anarcho-capitalism, if you, look at that, I think you, I deliberately try to underplay that. Except for the nuclear weapons. And >>Male Presenter: Minor exception >>Vernor: Yeah. I, I think actually if a libertarian-anarcho capitalist world was not quieter and more peaceful than now, it wouldn't work. It would, actually there's a difference between me and some I think, and some advocates. >>Male #5: Hi. First, I wanna say that A Fire Upon The Deep and your other books are among my favorites of all time. >>Vernor: Thank you. >>Male #5: Thank you for bringing them to me. As somebody who used to toil away in the gloom behind the fence at Lawrence Livermore Lab, I was very amused by the role of the lab played in the Peace War. [laughter] I'm wondering about your thoughts and how the lab came, how did the lab come to feature in that role in your book? >>Vernor: I had friends up at Lawrence Livermore. And it was, it geographically a well placed. I that, I think that is close, and to me a beautiful, a beautiful area. I had visited Poul Anderson has, uh, used to live in Orinda. I visited him there and I looked around. And then I also, I also visited the place. Very unofficially I discovered some things about their security. [laughter] I don't mean I got through their security. I mean I discovered things about their security when it worked on me. But one thing I did try to make it clear that this was a civilian subcontractor who did these terrible things. That brought it into the world as we knew it. So yeah, I, right now off the top of my head, I can't point to anything, any other you know significant thing that I knew about what was happening there. >>Male #5: Well, it put the [inaudible], you know an all new, whole new life. Thanks. >>Vernor: [laughs] >>Male Presenter: I'm sure that San Diego State university library enjoyed your >>Vernor: Oh, UCSD. >>Male Presenter: Oh, UCSD library. Sorry that's write. Enjoyed being featured even more. >>Vernor: Actually, they enjoyed being featured more. >>Male #6: Would you say the Tines are more Google plus or Facebook? [laughter] No, no, no, uh. >>Vernor: The Tines, as in a Fire Upon The Deep, I would say are really not social networks. >>Male #6: We're talking here about like, the singularity. If it happened. Would you be able to tell? >>Vernor: Would you be able to die? >>Male #6: To tell. That it had happened. >>Vernor: Oh. That's a very important question on I've fairly extensive rant on it. I think the answer is probably, and if you could, it would be very spectacularly evident. On the other hand, a person can make up scenarios, you know, where it wouldn't and there is this. You know the singularity stuff, has, by, to some of its critics, it's been mocked as a digital rapture. >>Male #6: Yeah. >>Vernor: That it's isomorphic to talking about apocalyptic issues. I'll tell you one thing. If there are people that predict that the singularity will happen on a particular date, and if it doesn't happen, I think you're likely to >>Male #6: Isn't that kind of Kurzweil? >>Vernor: Pardon? >>Male #6: Isn't that kind of Kurzweil? >>Vernor: Um. >>Male Presenter: Yes, it's May 14th, 2045 at 4:62 pm. >>Male #6: You know what. >>Male Presenter: You notice the hours are longer. >>Vernor: And I said, I'd be happy, if if can happen I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened by 2030. So, there's >>Male Presenter: Now, Charlie, who's one of the people who uses that 'rapture of the nerds' term, Charlie Stross, has a story in which some characters are running as digitally uploaded minds inside a space capsule the size of a coke can, on their way to another star, debating whether the singularity has happened or not. [laughter] >>Male #6: Well yeah. An exponent. I mean using the classic thing an exponential curve is self-similar. >>Vernor: Ah, yes, and that's a good point that is often ignored by people who talk about exponential curves. The, actually the importance of the exponential curve is not the curve so much as the fact that if a certain scale or, in many cases if a certain scalar gets larger than a certain size, other things happen that are very spectacular. And so the exponential curve itself is you know, uh, is, just a part of that. But what, I think that there is a possibility that if very hard predictions are made and then it doesn’t happen, you will see people come out and say, "It happened but you didn't notice." I promise not to do that. [laughter] >>Male Presenter: Now from the other side of the singularity, here's Thad. [laughter] >>Male #7: So one of your big themes in Rainbow's End was education. And as a professor, it was particularly scary, that vision. First of all do you think it's actually viable? Do you think it's desirable? And if it is desirable, how do we take our traditional institutions like say Georgia Tech and get them ready for such a event? >>Vernor: So when you say desirable you're talking about the singularity right? >>Male #7: No, I'm not talking about the singularity at all. I'm talking simply about how you do education in Rainbow's End. Where people are, facilitators are the-- >>Vernor: Right. Actually, at least in the run up to the singularity, avoiding talking about the singularity itself. But in the run-up to the singularity, I think major features are going to be drastic decline in the price of effective education. Say, a factor of 10 or 100. In a dollar cost. Not necessarily in the mind cost of the person trying to learn. And I think that is going to have a devastating effect on the, large classes of people that are trying to make money out of education. On the other hand, freeing up the mechanisms for assigning credit, that is, you have a diploma now, making that a more flexible process, and making the process of delivering the information 10 to 100 times cheaper, I think that's going to happen and I think the economic demand for it is going to be very, very high. And like everything else that's happening, it's gonna be great for everybody except for certain people who are actually embedded in the old way of doing things. As a person who is a writer, who is trying to cope with eBooks and is trying to cope with e-duplication, that's my red queen's race. Well, you guys in education have your own red queen's race, too. >>Male Presenter: Just, Vernor of course was an eBook pioneer of this is where I actually first worked with you. >>Vernor: Along with Brad. >>Male Presenter: Yeah, I published this anthology of science fiction works back in 1993 and the Fire Upon The Deep. >>Vernor: That's the reader. No, that's the disk? >>Male Presenter: That's the disk. A Fire Upon The Deep is on here by the way. And it's actually done as a hypertext book because Vernor gave me all of his notes. He is an old time programmer. So when he writes his text he puts hash tag comments [laughter] I can't remember what character you use as the first character. In all those. It was an explanation point. >>Vernor: No. Carrot. >>Male Presenter: Carrot. So, he put all his comments in so you could actually see how he wrote the book which was cool. And unfortunately I don't have the rights to sell this anymore. I do sometimes auction them for charity. One of the things though that his helped contribute is it added the phrase Hexapodian as a key insight to the nerd vernacular. Now you'll hear that from people from time to time. Go ahead. >>Male # 8: Yeah, my comment on can we tell the singularity. It sounds like the singularity is just the marching morons with the numbers reversed. You know the intelligent people have gone off and left the ones who couldn't keep up behind. But that's not my question. Question is, in Fire Upon The Deep, you know some really intelligent people went and poked at stuff they shouldn't and woke up a scary thing. And then they were saved at the last minute by another scary thing that no one understood. So now in Children of the Sky, the Tines' world has gone through its, or started its industrial revolution. But yet the scary things are still out there. Are we gonna have to wait another 20 years to see what comes next? >>Vernor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] >>Vernor: Certainly I think the most trenchant criticism of The Children of the Sky is that it doesn't bring completion. Or, or, and arguably it doesn't bring enough semi-completion. And it seems to me that it would take at least two novels to bring this thing in for a landing. >>Male #8: [inaudible] >>Vernor: Yeah, right. I actually had a chat with him about that once. "Well, how long is it gonna be, Mr. Jordan?" He was, a book, about book eight or book nine. He says, "Oh, two more books. Well, maybe three. Four at the outside." [laughter] >>Male Presenter: Hey. It's workin' OK for George. With the Game of Thrones thing. He's making a lot of money from it. >>Vernor: So, have you read the Blabber? >>Male #8: I hope to now. >>Vernor: The Blabber, actually, I'm going to try, I'm still going to try to fit the trajectory so it will fit The Blabber. 'Cause The Blabber takes place thousands of years later. So I don't have an answer to your question. I'm currently trying to figure out what my next book is going to be. >>Male #9: So, as an aside I find out that I was extremely angry with you when I finished this book. So please make the next one be [inaudible] [laughter] Um, I'm going to annoy everybody else here, has >>Male Presenter: I'm holding you back from attacking the >>Male #9: I'm annoying everybody else here by asking a fiction question instead of a science question. Which is in Fire in the Deep, in the no net sequences in particular. Which were fantastic. You know you, what you're seeing there is like some member of an alien race typing on a keyboard and hitting send and so on. But what it feels like and especially what the labeling makes it looks like is that the character is the race itself. Like the race is an aggregate. And this works really well in the story but kind of the first logic breaks down. Because I can imagine myself sitting at a computer somewhere and flaming someone and someone thinking I am humanity. >>Vernor [inaudible] >>Male #9: Yeah. And it seems a little atypical. Especially for you since as you pointed out earlier you seem to have a very individualistic idea of where things are going. And anarchists where government doesn't represent everything. I was wondering if you could say anything about the race and its characters. >>Vernor: I think you're right about the tone and the implication. And at the time my excuse was, this is more or less an internal excuse. I tried to reflect this in facts that were in the story. Is that it was so expensive to get an interstellar link. That really only large institutions or, and could afford to do it. And so you would not see the sort of person that you would sort of, sender that you would see on a planetary, or a planetary system. >>Male #9: So it's actually MIT community that's sending these messages. >>Vernor: At least, right. Now the question then is, why is it so informal. And I blame that on the, on the final step of the interface software. [laughter] >>Male Presenter: Alright, so one last one. We'll give you some closing comments and then we can sign books and so on. >>Male #10: So I think science fiction fans in general and especially those who are also computer scientists have a real interest in what the idea of a communicating galactic civilization looks like and what that network looks like. You talk a lot about, OK, how do you have this system where the bandwidth is very low, it, the bandwidth is very low, but so is the latency. So you can essentially like get around the speed of light, but messages are very expensive to send and slow to send. I'm wondering if you thought about, OK, what if, you know you thought about what if the singularity doesn't happen. But what if special relativity, there's no cheats? What if you know we are restricted to the speed of light to send messages. But on the other hand, the bandwidth can actually be relatively large. >>Vernor: Ah. Right. Right. >>Male #10: Can there be a communicating galactic civilization that way? And have you thought about what that would look like? >>Vernor: Actually that was one thing that I tried to look at some in A Deepness In the Sky. And in that situation I think I make a comment that, what happens when it takes a century to do a three-way handshake? And >>Male Presenter: Use EDP. [laughter] >>Vernor: It wouldn't be, well, yes. But I think that this came after my teaching times. But you know Vince Surf's Interplanetary Oracle? That would have made such a great project in a network class. Because nowadays when you, when a student takes a network class, you have the, one of the seven lay, the ISO layers. It's given by God, and all the different design decisions are written there in stone. And if you are, if you're actually going to be a protocol person, that, I think that's a very bad and dangerous way to look at it. Because you don't know what the axioms are. You don't know what the assumptions were. You don't know what the problems are that are being solved. There's just all these things you have to do to make it work right. The wonderful thing about Surf's, a wonderful thing about Vint Cerf's interplanetary network is that there were some really different ground assumptions. Now this isn't what you were talking about. It's still within the solar system. Latency and availability that made all sorts of decisions work out differently. And you essentially have to recapitulate the sort of creativity that went into designing the original NCP and TCP. So, if you step that up to the interstellar thing, where you're talking about years between, that I think is still an open, not that I'm predicting we're gonna get interstellar travel in the next 30 years. But I am. [laughter] But that would actually make a cool, a cool sort of toy project for a course in protocol design. Because you would be forcing people to look at things for, in a way that they haven't had to look at things in, since 1960s. >>Male Presenter: Now, is there anyone on VC with a burning question? No. OK. So, to close up, what's gonna be in A Fire Upon The Children In The Deepness Of The Sky. [laughter] Since you do seem to try and mold words from old book titles into the sentences of your new book titles. Or maybe your editors do. What are you looking at for the future? And then we'll get to signing and lunch. >>Vernor: Charlie Stross, once had an interview with Locus, where he was talking about the singularity and his book, The Accelerando, did what I never dared to do. Which was to try to traipse through a singularity scenario. But he made the statement that I think he said, I agree with these assertions that you know we can't really know what it would be like. But then he said, you know, time passes. And I'll bet you as we go through the next 10 or 15 years, not having gotten to the singularity, that our understanding of what it would be like will get to be better. And actually I have some ideas for writing a story that would be inside the singularity and still with obviously with human sized characters. Partly because of what has happened in the last 10 or 12 years. And seeing how things are going. I think there really are some novel things that I could say. So that's a chief competitor against immediately doing another zone story. >>Male Presenter: and the fans won't strangle you. So. >>Vernor: I have to have, I have a hiding place in the 20th century that I repair to. >>Male Presenter: Excellent. Well ,thanks very much for coming here, Vernor. >>Vernor: Thank you. [applause]