[tt] NYT: TierneyLab Blog: How to Get Smarter

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TierneyLab Blog: How to Get Smarter
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/how-to-get-smarter/

August 25, 2008, 9:32 pm

How can humans stop intelligent machines from leaving us in the
dust?

Vernor Vinge, the computer scientist and science-fiction writer
who's the subject of my Findings column, predicts that a post-human
superintelligence will emerge by 2030, creating what he calls a
technological Singularity. His critics question that date, arguing
that it's way too soon, but a lot of them acknowledge it's possible
that machines will eventually be far more intelligent than humans.

To keep humans in the game, Dr. Vinge advocates intelligence
amplification, or I.A.: let humans become smarter by collaborating
with one another and with computers. In his latest novel, "Rainbows
End," he envisions how these networks of humans and machines could
operate in the year 2025; you can get a taste of this same world in
a shorter tale published online in IEEE Spectrum, "Synthetic
Serendipity."

But how do humans start learning to collaborate? In his 1993 essay
predicting the Singularity, Dr. Vinge suggested ways to prepare
ourselves for the era of post-human intelligence. I asked him to
update these suggestions for Lab readers. Here are the original
suggestions in italics followed by his updated comments:

Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. This has also been
suggested by Garry Kasparov. It still seems to me that allowing such
entrants in human tournaments need not be obtrusive, and would ease
the general acceptance of the symbiosis idea. It would also be
interesting to see if top players came to recognize that such teams
displayed a new style of play, different from the styles of pure
human and pure machine competitors.

As time passed, it would be cool if chess tournaments became like
the one shown in my novel, "The Peace War." (Unfortunately, I
suspect that researchers are not enthused by the idea because it
would make progress milestones much more difficult to identify.) It
would also be interesting to see this in the game Go.

Develop human/computer symbiosis in art. Of course, parts of this
are being deeply exploited. However, we're still missing a very
important possibility and this is collaboration closer to the point
of creativity itself. Karl Sim's "picture breeding" was a super
example of this: The program would generate a screen full of
abstract art thumbnails and the user (artist) would select
particular thumbnails to be the "seed stock" for the next iteration
of the process. In 15 minutes, an ordinary person (such as myself)
could generate abstract graphics that were as attractive (well, to
me at least) as the best commercial art.

Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without
requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a
computer. Of course, smartphones are pursuing this avenue like
gangbusters! Hopefully, wearable computing will break out into
similar commercial success. There is lots of good research going on
there already.

Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (i.e., are
more effective than their component members). There are a lot of
commercial efforts here, with various names. The commercial efforts
are still relatively static and desktop-oriented. Hopefully we'll
see dynamic collaborations that can be used with wearables (and
small cameras and voice communication) like the equipment used by
the team of remotely guided Marines in "Rainbows End."

Will these kinds of innovations help humans keep up with intelligent
machines? And how much should we be worried about these machines?

[There will be lots of responses.]