Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Software

  When I worked for Autodesk in the 1990s, the sole model of selling software was that of putting the software onto disks and selling the disks in boxes. But now only a very few high-end software products are sold on disks. Most software is distributed online by a download that is, at least initially, free. How does this software earn money?

  Trial basis. Stops working after a few weeks unless a license is bought.

  Upgrades. Offers extra features at a cost.

  Begging. Continues working but repeatedly asks for donations.

  Ads. Carries commercial advertising, possibly from third parties.

  Branding. Builds a brand awareness of the producer, creates large user-base.

  Sellout. Entices a deep-pocketed speculator to buy the software company.

  Stepping back a little, it’s worth noting that, in an older sense, recipes, chemical formulae, and trade secrets are a type of software as well. And, looking ahead, genomic data is a type of software too—which is often known as wetware, as in the novels of my Ware Tetralogy.

  The Not So Long Tail

  It’s worth noting that for the vast majority of artists or software producers, the pay for selling any kind of intellectual property will always be low. The earnings are subject to a so-called scaling law, also know known as an inverse power law distribution. The scaling law applies to all natural phenomena—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books.

  In a nutshell, the graph of remuneration versus rank isn’t a down-slanting straight line, it’s a curve that swoops down fast and hugs the horizontal axis like a graph of 1/x. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular author, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand dollars. This is a law of nature, it’s not something one can change.

  The curve shows the inverse power law Advance = $1,000,000/Rank. The double lightning bolt indicates where I had to leave out miles of paper so as to fit in the point marking where the most popular writer gets $1 million. Despite this big spike, the total area under the curve between one and one thousand is only about $6 million, which represents the total in book advances that society hands out to the top thousand writers. [Image and caption from The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul.]

  The bad news is that the tail drops down very precipitously as one passes below the most successful handful of information creators. The good news is that the tail is long, and decays slowly. But there’s more bad news: in the real world, the tails don’t extend indefinitely far. The thousandth-most popular author may sell no books at all.

  Data and Content

  Traditional forms of informational data are travel suggestions, restaurant guides, and the current market values of things.

  In the past, dealers in antiques have profited from having a superior knowledge of the current market values of things. As this kind of information becomes transparently available on the web, dealers will morph into something more like advisors on matters of taste.

  Art and data are both a form of what website designers prosaically term content. With our current state of AI, it’s not practical to automatically generate art, but most of the online data we value is in fact produced by algorithms.

  We see many kinds of automatically generated data-based sites. Generally of a poor quality are the aggregator sites and the social sites that encourage and get the users to provide the content. Search engines are the great success story of automatically generated data.

  Services

  There remains a lasting appeal to live, in-person interactions. People will turn out for an author reading a book or, even more so, for a band performing their music. Some producers distribute electronic copies of their work at low cost or for free, planning to earn their money from appearances.

  Interactive services are tailored to the individual user. The work of a physician or a financial consultant falls into this category as well. As this is Garum Day, I should also mention the informational in-person services provided by chefs.

  At this point, our quality of AI isn’t really up to the task of emulating all such personal services.

  The Lifebox

  Looking down the road, we can automate our personal services if we can create lifeboxes, that is, on-line simulacra of the self.

  I don’t think it will be too many more years until we see a consumer product that makes it easy for a person to make a copy of their memory along these lines. This product is what I call a lifebox.

  As you continue feeding stories and information to your lifebox, it builds up a database of the facts you know and the tales you spin, along with links among them. Your lifebox will have a kind of browser software with a search engine capable of returning reasonable links into your database when prompted by spoken or written questions from other users.

  Your lifebox will give other people a reasonably good impression of having a conversation with you. Their questions are combed for trigger words to access the lifebox information. A lifebox doesn’t pretend to be an intelligent program; we don’t expect it to reason about problems proposed to it. A lifebox is really just some compact digital memory with a little extra software. Creating these devices really shouldn’t be too hard and is already, I’d say, within the realm of possibility—it’s already common for pocket-sized devices to carry gigabytes of memory, and the terabytes won’t be long in coming.

  As I’ve been saying, my expectation is that in not too many years, great numbers of people will be able to preserve their software by means of the lifebox. In a rudimentary kind of way, the lifebox concept is already being implemented as blogs.

  In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to (1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base, and (3) Provide a nice user interface.

  I made a first crude stab at this a month ago, with my Rudy’s Lifebox page. This page lets you Google-search my rather large website.

  We can view a person’s memory as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. The memory is structured something like a website, with words, sounds and images combined into a superblog with trillions of links.

  For a fully effective user experience, I’d want my lifebox to remember the people who talked to it. This is standard technology—a user signs onto a site, and the site remembers the interactions that the user has. In effect, the lifebox creates mini-lifebox models of the people it talks to, remembering their interests, perhaps interviewing them a bit, and never accidentally telling the same story twice—unless prompted to.

  If I use my lifebox while I’m still alive, some other options arise. I might start letting my lifebox carry out those interview or consulting gigs that I don’t have the time or energy to fulfill. Moving on, my lifebox could be equipped to actively go out and post things on social networking sites, raising my profile on the web and perhaps garnering more sales of my books and more in-person speaking invitations.

  With the lifebox technology in place, you’ll be able to sell yourself!

  * * *

  Note on “Selling Your Personality”

  Written in 2011.

  Unpublished.

  I presented this a talk for an event called Garum Day in Bilbao, Spain, on February 16, 2011. I had a very large audience, perhaps a thousand people, and many of them were businessmen and bankers. The theme of the conference was to find ways for a relatively poor country like Spain to start low-capitalization-cost businesses by basing them on websites. Most of the talks were fairly business-oriented, but naturally I took a futuristic tack. As an author and a painter, the courses of action that I discuss are in fact very real to me. The world of publishing and copyrights is undergoing a critical transition and we “content creators” are a bit like nimble little dinosaurs doing their best to evolve into birds
—overnight.

  The Great Awakening

  The Singularity

  On the theme of computational futures, there’s an interesting idea first proposed by the science fiction writer and computer science professor Vernor Vinge in a famous 1993 talk. Vinge pointed out that if we can make technological devices as intelligent as ourselves, then there seems to be no reason that these devices couldn’t readily be made to run a bit faster and have a bit more memory so as to become more intelligent than people. And then—the real kicker—these superhuman machines might set to work designing still better machines, setting off a chain reaction of ever-more-powerful devices.

  Vinge termed the potential event the Singularity. Although Vinge’s analysis is sober and scientific, in the last couple of decades, belief in his Singularity has become something of a cult among certain techies. Science-fiction writers, who have a somewhat more jaded view of predictions, have a saying about the enthusiasts: “The Singularity is the Rapture for geeks.” That is, among its adherents, belief in the Singularity has something of the flavor of the evangelical Christian belief in a world-ending apocalypse, when God will supposedly elevate the saved to heaven, leaving the rest of us to fight a final battle of Armageddon.

  [Vinge’s talk “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” appeared in the Winter, 1993, issue of the Whole Earth Review, and is available online—just Google for “Vinge Singularity”. Regarding the Singularity / Rapture comparison that I quote, I first heard this phrase from Bruce Sterling, who ascribes it to Cory Doctorow, who says he got it from Charlie Stross, who in turn says he nicked it from Ken McLeod—cynical SF writers one and all.]

  At one level, belief in the Singularity is indeed an instance of people’s age-old tendency to predict the end of the world. Once we have the Singularity, the machines can copy our brains and make us immortal. But once we have the Singularity, the machines may declare war on humanity and seek to exterminate us. Once we have the Singularity, the machines will learn how to convert matter into different forms and nobody will ever have to work again. But once we have the Singularity, the machines may store us in pods and use us as components. Once we have the Singularity, the machines will figure out how to travel faster than light and into the past. But once we have the Singularity, the machines will screw things up and bring the entire universe to an end. And so on.

  Vinge describes several kinds of scenarios that could lead to a Singularity of cascading superhuman intelligence. We can group these somewhat science-fictional possibilities into three bins.

  Artificial minds. We design or evolve computing devices as intelligent as ourselves, and these entities continue the process to create further devices that are smarter than us. These superhuman computing devices might be traditional silicon-chip computers, nanotechnological assemblages, quantum computers, or bioengineered artificial organisms.

  Cyborgs. Humans split off a species, part natural and part engineered. This could result either from bioengineering the human genome, or from giving people an effortless, transparent interface to supercomputing helper devices. The resulting cyborgs will advance to superhuman levels.

  Hive minds. The planetary network of computers wakes up and becomes a superhuman mind. Alternately, people are equipped with built-in communication devices which allow society to develop a true group mind of superhuman powers.

  Ubiquitous Nanomachines

  Molecular nanotechnology is the craft of manufacturing things on the molecular scale. One goal is to create programmable nanobots: tailor-made agents roughly the size of biological viruses. The comparison is apt. What’s likely to play out is that, over the coming centuries and millennia, we’ll be capitalizing on the fact that biology is already doing molecular fabrication. The nascent field of synthetic biology is going to be the true nanotech of the future.

  One immediate worry is what nanotechnologists have called the “gray goo problem.” That is, what’s to stop a particularly virulent, artificial organism from eating everything on Earth? My guess is that this could never happen. Every existing plant, animal, fungus, and protozoan already aspires to world domination. There’s nothing more ruthless than viruses and bacteria—the grizzled homies who’ve thrived by keeping it real for some three billion years.

  The fact that artificial organisms are likely to have simplified metabolisms doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be faster and better. It’s more likely that they’ll be dumber and less adaptable. My sense is that, in the long run, Mother Nature always wins. Cautionary note: Mother Nature’s “win” may not include the survival of the pesky human race!

  But let’s suppose that all goes well and we learn to create docile, biological nanobots. There’s one particular breed that I like thinking about; I call them orphids.

  The way I imagine it, orphids reproduce using ambient dust for raw material. They’ll cover Earth’s surface, yes, but they’ll be well behaved enough to stop at a density of one or two orphids per square millimeter, so that you’ll find a few million of them on your skin and perhaps ten sextillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, the orphids reproduce only enough to maintain that same density. You might say they have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. And, as a side benefit, they’ll hunt down and eradicate any evil nanomachines that anyone else tries to unleash.

  Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural human language. One can converse with them quite well. I’ll suppose that an individual orphid is roughly as smart as a talking dog with, let us say, a quadrillion bytes of memory being processed at a quadrillion operations per second.

  How do we squeeze so much computation out of a nanomachine? Well, a nanogram does hold about a trillion particles, which gets us close to a quadrillion. According to quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, if we regard brute matter as a quantum computation, then we do have some ten quadrillion bytes per nanogram. (See his book, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos.) So there’s only, ahem, a few implementation details in designing molecular nanomachines smart enough to converse with.

  The orphids might be linked via electromagnetic wireless signals that are passed from one to the next; alternatively, they might use, let us say, some kind of subdimensional faster-than-light quantum entanglement. In either case, we call the resulting network the orphidnet.

  Omnividence and Telepathy

  We can suppose that the orphids will settle on to our scalps like smart lice. They’ll send magnetic vortices into our occipital lobes, creating a wireless human interface to the orphidnet. Of course, we humans can turn our connection on and off, and we’ll have read-write control. As the orphidnet emerges, we’ll get intelligence amplification.

  So now everyone is plugged into the orphidnet all the time. Thanks to the orphid lice, everyone has a heads-up display projected over the visual field. And thanks to global positioning systems, the orphids act as tiny survey markers—or as the vertices of computer-graphical meshes. Using these realtime meshes, you actually see the shapes of distant objects. The orphids will be sensitive to vibrations, so you can hear as well. We’ll have complete omnividence, as surely as if the earth were blanketed with video cameras.

  One immediate win is that violent crime becomes impossible to get away with. The orphidnet remembers the past, so anything can be replayed. If you do something bad, people can find you and punish you. Of course someone can still behave like a criminal if he holds incontrovertible physical force—if, for instance, he is part of an armed government. I dream that the orphidnet-empowered public sees no further need for centralized and weaponized governments, and mankind’s long domination by ruling elites comes to an end. Another win is that we can quickly find missing objects.

  The flip side of omnividence is that nobody has any privacy at all. We’ll have less shame about sex; the subject will be less shrouded in mystery. But sexual peeping will become an issue, and a
s omnividence shades into telepathy, some will want to merge with lovers’ minds. But surely lovers can find some way to shield themselves from prying. If they can’t actually turn off their orphids, the lovers may have physical shields of an electromagnetic or quantum-mechanical nature; alternately, people may develop mantra-like mental routines to divert unwanted visitors.

  Telepathy lies only a step beyond omnividence. How will it feel? One key difference between omnividence and telepathy is that telepathy is participatory, not voyeuristic. That is, you’re not just watching someone else; you’re picking up the person’s shades of feeling.

  One of the key novelties attending electronic telepathy is the availability of psychic hyperlinks. Let me explain: Language is an all-purpose construction kit that a speaker uses to model mental states. In interpreting these language constructs, a listener builds a mental state similar to the speaker’s. Visual art is another style of construction kit; here an idea is rendered in colors, lines, shapes, and figures.

  As we refine our techniques of telepathy, we’ll reach a point where people converse by exchanging hyperlinks into each other’s mind. It’s like sending someone an Internet link to a picture on your website—instead of sending a pixel-by-pixel copy of the image. Rather than describing my weekend in words, or showing you pictures that I took, I simply pass you a direct link to the my memories in my head. In other words, with telepathy, I can let you directly experience my thoughts without my explaining them via words and pictures. Nevertheless, language will persist. Language is so deeply congenial to us that we’d no sooner abandon it than we’d give up sex.

  On a practical level, once we have telepathy, what do we do about the sleazeball spammers who’ll try to flood our minds with ads, scams, and political propaganda? We’ll use adaptive, evolving filters. Effective spam filters behave like biological immune systems, accumulating an ever-growing supply of “antibody” routines. In a living organism’s immune system, the individual cells share the antibody techniques they discover. In a social spam filter, the individual users will share their fixes and alerts.