"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

embryonic god that had not yet reached full omniscience, or internalized all that it
meant to be human.

The shop was just about open. I had two hours to kill, so I bought a couple of
newspapers and headed for the food hall, inside an ornately cheesecaked lump of
Victorian architecture that squatted like a vagrant beneath the grimy glass ceiling of
the station.
The papers made for depressing reading; the idiots were at it again. I've worked in a
variety of world-lines and seen a range of histories, and many of them were far
worse than this oneтАФat least these people had made it past the twentieth century
without nuking themselves until they glowed in the dark, exterminating everyone with
white (or black, or brown, or blue) skin, or building a global panopticon theocracy.
But they still had their share of idiocy, and over time it seemed to be getting worse,
not better.

Never mind the Balkans; tucked away on page four of the business section was a
piece advising readers to buy shares in a little electronics company specializing in
building camera CCD sensors with on-chip neural networks tuned for face
recognition. Ignore the Israeli crisis: page two of the international news had a piece
about Indian sweatshop software development being faced by competition from
code generators, written to make western programmers more productive. A lab in
Tokyo was trying to wire a million FPGAs into a neural network as smart as a cat.
And a sarcastic letter to the editor pointed out that the so-called information
superhighway seemed to be more like an on-going traffic jam these days.

Idiots! They didn't seem to understand how deep the blue waters they were
swimming in might be, or how hungry the sharks that swam in it. Wilful blindness ...

It's a simple but deadly dilemma. Automation is addictive; unless you run a
command economy that is tuned to provide people with jobs, rather than to produce
goods efficiently, you need to automate to compete once automation becomes
available. At the same time, once you automate your businesses, you find yourself
on a one-way path. You can't go back to manual methods; either the workload has
grown past the point of no return, or the knowledge of how things were done has
been lost, sucked into the internal structure of the software that has replaced the
human workers.

To this picture, add artificial intelligence. Despite all our propaganda attempts to
convince you otherwise, AI is alarmingly easy to produce; the human brain isn't
unique, it isn't well-tuned, and you don't need eighty billion neurons joined in an
asynchronous network in order to generate consciousness. And although it looks
like a good idea to a naive observer, in practice it's absolutely deadly. Nurturing an
automation-based society is a bit like building civil nuclear power plants in every city
and not expecting any bright engineers to come up with the idea of an atom bomb.
Only it's worse than that. It's as if there was a quick and dirty technique for making
plutonium in your bathtub, and you couldn't rely on people not being curious enough
to wonder what they could do with it. If Eve and Mallet and Alice and myself and
Walter and Valery and a host of other operatives couldn't dissuade it...

Once you get an outbreak of AI, it tends to amplify in the original host, much like a