This is my obligatory essay about how chatGPT might help change the future using the viewpoint of a Science Fiction Author. Actually, I am not that impressed with chatGPT so most of the essay is about how Science Fiction might deal with the future.
A GPU is a Graphic Processor Unit. GPUs are a piece of hardware that makes the calculations in the geometry of graphics extremely fast. They are also capable of quickly performing a variety of mathematical calculations. GPU cards are a requirement if you want to play Call of Duty or mine crypto coins.
For the last few years, large arrays of GPUs have been hooked up and people are using the fast neural networks on the cards to crunch all kinds of data. The latest trick is LLMs or Large Language Models. Buy millions of dollars of GPUs, feed them all kinds of data and you get chatGPT. There is lots of discussion in the news about chatGPT and artificial intelligence. LLMs are deceivingly clever applications. They are not intelligent, at least not in the sense that my chickens are intelligent. They mostly barf up the data that has been used to load them. They are like speaking into a mirror, but they can fool some people into thinking that they are sentient. My chickens are really dumb, but I have gotten to know them, and I am convinced that they are sentient in a limited way. They are good at being chickens. So far, chatGPT is not particularly good at being human.
To a Science Fiction author, LLMs like chatGPT are a step into the future. Science Fiction authors have been predicting computers with human-like intelligence for hundreds of years. The trouble is that Science Fiction authors have trouble getting the timeline correct.
Predicting the future is a difficult thing. Science fiction authors have been doing it with mixed results for many years. Arthur C. Clark describing satellites in synchronous orbit 15 years before Sputnik is the classic example of a successful prediction. Robots like the ones predicted in 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. by the Czech writer Karel Čapek have taken their time in showing up.
John W. Campbell, possibly the greatest Science Fiction editor of all time, wrote an essay for every issue of the original Astounding Magazine. He very often predicted the future, and he was often right on the money. His fault, if he had one, was that he was far too optimistic. He thought that by the time the 21st century rolled around, that we would have colonies on several planets and that we might be on our way to the stars. Campbell could not have predicted the influence of a political system where long-range thinking is dead and replaced with the conviction that science is a tool of the Devil.
In reading my collection of old science fiction magazines, I came across a real Campbell goof. In an editorial from the late 1940s, Campbell predicted that the upstart technology of Television would never succeed. He felt that it was too expensive, and the picture and sound quality was poor. He felt that a theater was a much better choice for visual entertainment. He also felt that radio offered a much better experience because it stimulated the listener’s imagination. TV would fail when trying to substitute the rich experience of imagination with a flat gray flickering screen.
In most ways, Campbell was right. The TV experience was low resolution, banal and shallow. We have been laughing at TV and its pretensions at art for years and for the most part, TV is a wasteland of programming for the dull thinkers of America (except for early Star Trek, of course).
Nevertheless, how could Campbell be so wrong about TV’s success? Campbell’s problem was that he looked at the world through the eyes of an intelligent and thoughtful man of good taste. He totally fell into Menken’s trap: “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”. Most of America spent the equivalent of a new car to buy a TV in the early 1950s. Even John W. Campbell could make a mistake. He correctly described all the reasons why television is a dumb idea and missed completely how mesmerizing TV can be.
Even I can be wrong! At the introduction of cell phones, I thought it was stupid to pay hundreds of dollars a month so that you could chitchat on the phone. I thought that only business-related cell phones would ever find a niche. I never considered that eventually, 75% of all cell phone bandwidth would be generated from pre-teens watching Tick Tock videos. I should have known.
So how do you make predictions about the future without making a fool of yourself? Well, you can’t. You can try, but the essential nature of the future is that it is unpredictable. The future is not deterministic. The future is fractal. It is the effect of an almost infinite number of small changes in the fabric or reality. There are trends and patterns, but they are the shadows of things that we can’t see, and trends mislead us as often as they point to the correct path.
There are two methods of predicting the future, neither of which works very well. The first is to assume that the future will behave very much like the past and the variations in the future will be continuations of trends that we can find in the past. I call this the evolutionary approach to predicting the future. (The term evolutionary here refers to the slow accumulation of small changes and is not a reference to biology.)
We use the evolutionary approach to the future to forecast weather, control the economy, and to decide what to watch on TV next week. It is only partially successful. I can never find my favorite programs. Weather forecasting is often wrong, the economy winds up being a political issue and the past means nothing if it conflicts with a politician’s opinions.
Observing trends that involve slow, and often predictable change is like using a betting scheme in Las Vegas. Eventually, all betting schemes fail. There is even a mathematical proof that shows that you can’t create a betting scheme that will not eventually bankrupt anyone who uses it.
The second approach to predicting the future is to dream. Ray Bradbury said, “Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but Science Fiction”. Anything you can dream up, as long as it is not obviously impossible, is a good candidate for a possible future. This “dreaming the future” is exactly what Science Fiction is all about. The kicker, of course, is how do you know what is impossible?
The future comes along in unpredictable chunks. It is a series of surprises. Which of us would have predicted COVID-19 and if anyone had, who would have believed it? It was definitely possible, but no one dreamed of it beyond a small group of academics studying the history of plagues, and a few Science Fiction authors.
The science part of Science Fiction is what we must rely on for our future predictions. Science is the only prediction that we can use and reuse to frame a future.
Even with Science as our guide, there is no scientific experiment that we can use to consistently demonstrate the future state of the universe. All science can do for us is eliminate the obviously wrong predictions about the future. Science can only act as a filter for our dreams.
If we dream the future, we must dream big. The future tends to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary. The future should surprise us. Evolutionary prediction seems to work well in the short run (I believe it will be sunny and warm this weekend). It fails when something revolutionary happens. A revolutionary event is a change in the basic state of things. It is a spike on the graph. It is snowfall in July. It is not impossible, just not expected. As in the case of COVID-19, it usually changes everything.
I am an amateur Science Fiction Author. I like to think that I am in the business of predicting the future. There are more than a few of us in the business of predicting the future. Quite a few futurists like to take themselves seriously and don’t count themselves as Science Fiction authors.
Here are a few common views about what the future will bring.
My favorite view of the future is the idea of a singularity. I like this idea because it appeals to the evolutionary side of me and satisfies the revolutionary in me.
There are many easy to spot trends that curve exponentially. The famous one is “Moore’s Law” which states that the number of components that will fit on a computer chip doubles every 18 months. This law has held up since Moore started making computer chips, although there is no reason to think that it will continue to hold. There is no basis to Moore’s Law except the observation that it has held for nearly 60 years, and there is no reason to suspect that it won’t continue to hold.
Moore’s law is important to futurists because it predicts as a corollary that the speed and power of computers also follows an exponential curve because computer speed and power are related to the component density of integrated circuits. Simple math shows that there will be very powerful computers in the not-so-distant future. In fact, according to Moore-like computer curves, there should be a truly thinking computer that is smarter than a human brain very soon. I think that I can put it at 2043 (but I keep moving the date). That’s a prediction of the future based on an evolutionary view of future events. It is a conservative prediction, but very interesting.
The increase in available information, the speed of communications, the progress in the science of genetics, the decline of personal security, and the loss of the ozone layer and hundreds of other measurable trends are all rock steady curves that can be extended into the future with a little confidence – not much, but enough to think about. Many curves are totally unrelated, but they all have something in common. If you draw them on graph paper with the proper scale, they all seem to reach unsustainable highs (or lows) at about the same time.
This convergence of trends is termed the “singularity.” John von Neumann, the mathematician and one of the fathers of computer science, in a conversation with Stanislaw Ulam said there is a point in time: “centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”.
The singularity is the point in the future where the future becomes so different that we can’t possibly understand it. It can be a good thing, or a terrible thing. It is the Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin describes. It is the technological equivalent to the second coming. One problem with the Singularity is that it always hovers 10 to 20 years in the future. Whenever we seem to catch up with it, it moves a little further away.
The singularity makes Science Fiction authors uncomfortable because after the singularity, anything is possible. The trouble with that, as far as storytellers are concerned, is that this makes for lousy stories. As H. G. Wells said, “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.” Editors routinely reject stories from guys like me about cyberspace, virtual reality, nanotechnology, and “jacking into the net” for the simple reason that too much is possible, and most authors go over the edge when writing about them. Many authors who insist on making up post-singularity stories wind up writing bad sequels to the movie The Matrix.
If there is a singularity, it kills Science Fiction. Literally, anything is possible. Anything a writer could describe is short of the mark. The science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who wrote about the singularity, eventually had to write about people who missed the singularity and were left behind.
So, what if the curves are wrong? What if they don’t all converge? What if all the curves flatten out? This is the second kind of predictable future. It is easier to write about because it predicts a steady state future, where everything is the same as now, only faster, cooler, smarter, bigger. Take a look at futuristic movies from the 1950s. They depict a 1950s world with cooler gadgets, but essentially, it’s still 1955, even in 2255 AD.
The steady state future is the future that most science fiction authors see. It has the advantage that it is easily recognizable to readers and requires very little explanation. Take any story, add a flying car and a ray gun, and you’ve got a science fiction story.
Writing a story by just adding futuristic elements is called a Smeerp. James Blish (or perhaps Theodore Sturgeon, or Robert A. Heinlein – exactly who said it first is not clear) called this “Calling a Rabbit a Smeerp”. If the thing is small, furry, has floppy ears and a cotton tail, you can call it a smeerp and make your story Science Fiction.
One thing I know about the future is that it won’t be anything like now. There will be no smeerps in the future. It may not be as different as the singularity promises, but it won’t be the “same shit, different day” experience that you see so much of in bad Science Fiction.
Another common view of the future is the global apocalypse scenario. There will be a war or famine or plague, ecological breakdown or other disaster that puts a temporary hold on the singularity. The Star Trek timeline uses a global war on earth to explain why the men of the future have advanced so little. Frank Herbert uses the Butlerian Jihad to explain why the technology of Dune is so primitive after thousands of years of history.
Blaming a global apocalypse for a delay in technological advances gives a writer a much bigger future to play with. Unfortunately, man has avoided many disasters and has not lost more than a few percentage points of population in any year. Perhaps as technology increases, it will become easy to craft a virus aimed at some ethnically specific genes, or an asteroid will hit North America, or there will be a nuclear war. But I like to think that the future will be self-correcting, and any threat will be answered with a cure or work-around.
Finally, I have to consider a very non-scientific change. This is not Science Fiction or even science, but I feel that I have to mention it. By far the most common view of the future in the United States is the belief in the second coming of Christ. Statistically, more than half of the citizens of the United States think that Jesus is coming in the next few years and that doing anything except preparing ourselves for the Rapture is a waste of time. I don’t know what to say about this. I believe it is wrong, but I don’t want to deny anybody their beliefs. I find biblical predictions of an imminent appearance of Jesus unconvincing and even bizarre. It doesn’t seem to be an important part of the New Testament’s message. My guess is that some sects find it easier to preach judgment day than “love they neighbor” because the latter is a hard sell and contrary to our basic American values.
I blame the belief in the immanent second coming for the failure of man to solve some of the world's basic problems. Since 1970, the quality of life in the United States, in my opinion, has been slipping. We have lots of new gadgets, but our lives are not really improving. We get more and more things, but our lives don’t get better. We have less time to enjoy ourselves. Our children perform poorly in school and don’t achieve. We lag behind the rest of the world in quality-of-life issues and the environment and health care.
Why strive for the stars next year when the rapture is scheduled for next week? Why protect the environment or conserve our resources when we won’t have to worry about it in heaven? Why educate our children when all they need to know is in the bible? Why cure cancer when Gabriel will blow his horn any day now? I don’t know.
To recap, we have four basic views of the future: 1) The Singularity, 2) The Steady State, 3) The Global Apocalypse, and 4) The Second Coming.
The first and second might offer us a better world eventually. The third could mean the death of most of us and at least a delay in reaching Utopia. The fourth is based on faith and a peculiar interpretation of some obscure scripture, and I find it to be a difficult sell. Number four is included only because so many people believe it is a valid idea.
I like the singularity concept and hope it happens. I want to see what happens when super computers find cures for all diseases and technology can prevent war and the environment can be cured instead of destroyed. I want to be there when man’s lifespan is stretched out for centuries. I want to be there when we start exploring the stars. I’d like to see it, but some back woods Senator will probably cast the deciding vote against it on religious grounds.
I pray that scenarios two and three don’t happen. I don’t believe in number four, but I will go along with it in the event that it actually happens.
Singularity, here I come.