I'm currently plowing my way through Charles Stross' excellent Merchant Princes series in preparation for reading the sequel Empire Games trilogy. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and having trouble putting my Kindle down, despite the fact that I read the books when they came out almost a decade ago. Stross is good.
I just came across an old (2013) post by author Randy Rucker about Stross' novel, Rule 34. It's a near-future police procedural set in Scotland and a sequel to Halting State. Among other things, there's quite a bit about AI, which was a theme in several of Stross' earlier books.
Coming back to Stross’s Rule 34 , this book, like its loose prequel, Halting State , are quite close to the present-day world. It’s a world where some AI type behaviors have emerged among the applications that run on the Web. What do we mean by AI?
Stross observes, “If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore. Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text… Perhaps we overestimate consciousness?”
He makes the point “We’re not very interested in reinventing human consciousness in a box. What gets the research grants flowing is applications.”
And, again: “general cognitive engines [are all] hardwired [to] project the seat of their identity onto you … what we really want is identity amplification.”
Rucker's comments about Stross are interesting and more relevant than ever, given the current focus on AI in everyday computing. His post is worth reading as are his and Stross' novels that deal with the subject.
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