"Vernor Vinge. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" - читать интересную книгу автора

of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital
signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others
might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_
that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of
these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the
closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J.
Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the
advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a "Meta-Golden Rule",
which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you would be
treated by your superiors." It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and
most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff
is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some
sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness
in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity,
that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural
competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet
... we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by
small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions,
make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of
course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the
right guiding nudge really is:


_Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification_

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings,
they are usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the
beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity.
Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than
AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this
contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something
that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized
by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access
information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense
we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the
team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net
workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in
existence.

And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the
achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest
development problems have already been solved. Building up from within
ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really
are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at
least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has
speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still
more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in
[15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a