True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (3 page)

So the magical terminology fit with some things that go on in real programming. And of course, magical imagery was a ready tool for me as author in describing the Other Plane. There are many ironies that grew from the magic—and what it represented in the real world. In fact, these ironies may be the most important reason that it was easy to write the story. The magic metaphor was a powerful guide in the choosing of terms (for instance, “true names”). But even a good metaphor cuts you off from other insights, and I ended up providing an excellent example of Mark Twain's notion that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” One of the central features of
True Names
is the notion that a worldwide computer network would be a kind of
place
for its users. I needed a word for that place, and the best I came up with was “the Other Plane.” Alas, that is a lightning bug compared with the lightning bolt that is “cyberspace.” (Heh, heh: And yet there is still hope for the term “the Other Plane” … the folks working with the movie option on
True Names
talk in terms of being “on TOP”—that is, being on The Other Plane.) In the long run, I think the inhabitants (users) of cyberspace will adapt different metaphors for dealing with what they find there and how they access it: almost offstage in
True Names,
we saw the werebots and other groups with other visions. In their essays, Marvin Minsky and Mark Pesce do a much better job with these ideas than I can. And the essay of Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer illustrates some of these issues with an actual implementation.

The appearance of
True Names
revealed to me a new virtue of writing hard science fiction.
Omni
magazine wanted to send some science fiction writers to the 1982 conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (Jim Hogan, Fred Pohl, Bob Sheckley, and me, as it worked out). There I met Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec. In later years, Marvin invited me to MIT for talks and meetings. Between the MIT Media Lab and Thinking Machines and Hackers and Aether Wire, I've had marvelous opportunities to talk to people who are at the edge of wonderful things. Asking them questions, listening to them, has been an inspiration. Sometimes the witness-to-history feeling gets to be very very strong!

I notice that four of the essays in this book are strongly focused on political and crypto issues. There is certainly a lot of political
attitude
in
True Names.
The political situation of the era is a pervasive background noise: people live with it. Lots of problems are envisaged—and many of them have turned out to be very real—but I provide very little in the way of solutions. One amusing misprediction (at least I hope it is a misprediction) is that network access would be licensed: having your “license to operate” revoked was as effective a career-ender as losing your automobile driver's license is in the twentieth century. The idea is typical of a writer who doesn't quite have his head around all the consequences. Network access is
so
ubiquitous nowadays that it would take some weird and retro surprise to make licensing practical. It looks like such a law would be much more difficult to enforce than the drug laws ever were.

The essays that Tim May and Alan Wexelblat and Lenny Foner and Richard Stallman have in this book are much more substantive than
True Names
in outlining problems and advocating policies. Tim May's piece is certainly the most outspoken in its predictions about power for the individual. I got a laugh at CFP '96 when I drew a spectrum of opinion on the wall: it was labeled something like “What Different People See as the Impact of Computers on Freedom.” At one end of the spectrum was George Orwell and at the other end was … Tim May. I think my CFP '96 audience recognized that Tim's ideas deserve first place as the antithesis of Orwell's vision. Up until the personal computer came along, Orwell's vision of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s (ironically beginning about calendar year 1984) people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny, perhaps the end of national governments.… Then came the 1990s and the various schemes to control crypto and maybe even use distributed automation to give Enforcement a better grip than ever before. It seems to me that it's still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt human freedom—but this is one place where the extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson's
Diamond Age.
On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It's not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described.

Richard Stallman's “The Right to Read” is the only other fiction in this book. It has one of the best features of science fiction: at first it seems to be an over-the-top parody … but then you see the seeds of the story in our present, and feel a chill. Intellectual Property rights are at a crossroads. Maybe the Information Age will force an end to such rights. Maybe technology will be exploited to enforce them in the terrifying way that Richard Stallman describes in “The Right to Read.” In any case, the next decade should be witness to incredible turbulence in this area, as new models of Intellectual Property management are devised and experimented with. However it turns out, Richard Stallman's work with the free software movement and the GNU “copyleft” agreement are among the happiest developments of the late twentieth century.

Danny Hillis's essay begins this book. He's not talking about policy issues or nightmares. He looks at the trend curves and the real world around him. The cautious hopefulness of this essay could be both the prologue and the epilogue for this book. We are all so much in the middle of things. We can't really know how high we can fly (or if we might crash). But we can see that our children may soar beyond our imagination.…

A Time of Transition/The Human Connection

Danny Hillis

Founder of Thinking Machines and the first Disney Fellow, Danny Hillis has feet both in the world of the past and in the future world that is being built every day by new technological developments. In the following essay he neatly encapsulates some of the issues faced by people today.

Faced by hitherto unheard-of rapidity of change, we have problems today vastly different from those faced by any previous generation of humans. And while many people think humans will change before long into a different kind of intelligent being, Hillis deals with the questions and problems posed by the pace and tenor of change as a human being already born and not likely to change radically. His perceptive, poignant essay is a fitting prelude to the others that follow. This piece was first published in 1997.

 

 

 

You can tell that something unusual is going on these days by the way we draw our graphs. In normal times, we would use a linear scale to plot progress. The height of our graph would be proportional to the measure of progress. But we live at a remarkable moment in history, when progress is so rapid that we plot it on a logarithmic scale.

In the field of computing we have become accustomed to measures that double every few years—processor speeds, communication bandwidths, the number of sites on the Internet—so we plot them on a scale that shows each order of magnitude as an equal step. By plotting on a log-labeled scale (1,10,100,1000) we can imagine progress as a straight line, moving steadily upward with the advance of time. This gives us a comfortable illusion of predictability.

Of course, if we used a linear scale to plot these same curves, they would not look so tame. They would be exponentials, shooting uncontrollably off the page. They would make it look as if everything that has happened so far is an insignificant prelude to what will happen next. On a linear scale, the exponents look unpredictable. The curves approach vertical, converging on a singularity, where the rules break down and something different begins.

The two ways of plotting progress correspond to different attitudes about technological change. I see the merits in both. As an engineer, I am an extrapolator. I am a believer in, and a participant in, the march of progress. As an engineer, I like semi-log scales. But I am also a parent, a citizen, a teacher, and a student. I am an object, not just an agent of change. As an object and as an observer, I can see clearly that there is something extraordinary going on. The explosion of the exponentials reveals a truth: We are alive at a special and important moment. We are becoming something else.

This century, fifty years back and fifty forward, is one of those rare times in history when humanity transforms from one type of human society to another. To use a physical analogy, we are in the midst of a phase transition, when the configuration of the system is switching between two locally stable states. In this transition, technology is the catalyst. It is a self-amplifying agent of change, in the sense that each improvement tends to increase its capacity to improve. Better machines enable us to build even better machines. Faster computers let us design faster computers, faster.

Change was not always like this. For most of human history, parents could expect their grandchildren to grow up in a world much like their own. For most of human history, parents knew what they needed to know to teach their children. Planning for the future was easier then. Architects designed cathedrals that would take centuries to complete. Farmers planted acorns to shade their descendants with oaks. Today, starting a project that would not be completed for century or two would seem odd. Today, any plan more than a year is “long-term.”

Why have we become so shortsighted? We have no less good will than our ancestors. Our problem is that, literally, we cannot imagine the future. The pace of technological change is so great that we cannot know what type of world we are leaving for our children. If we plant acorns, we cannot reasonably expect that our children will sit under the oak trees. Or that they will even want to. The world is changing too fast for that. People move. Needs change. Much of our generation is employed at jobs our parents never imagined. Entire industries, indeed entire nations, can wither in the blink of an eye.

All of this confusion becomes understandable, even expected, if we accept the premise that we are in a time of transition from one type of society to another. We should expect to understand the occupations of our grandchildren no more than a hunter-gatherer would understand the life of a farmer, or than a preindustrial farmer would understand the life of a factory worker. All we can really expect to understand is the good in what we leave behind.

So what are we humans becoming? Whatever it is is more connected, more interdependent. Few individuals today could survive outside the fabric of society. No city could stand alone without being continuously fed from the outside by networks of power, water, food, and information. Few nations could maintain their lifestyles without trade. The web of our technology weaves us together, simultaneously enabling us and forcing us to depend more on one another.

As we are becoming more deeply connected to each other, we are simultaneously becoming more connected with our creations. Each time I watch a worker on an assembly line, a violinist with a violin, or a child with a computer, I am struck by how intimate we have become with our technology. Already, our contact lenses and our pacemakers are as much a part of us as our hair and teeth. With recombinant biotechnology we will blur the final boundary between artifacts and ourselves.

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!” Now, more than a century later, we can see the signs of his vision. The collective intelligence of the world's minds, biological and electronic, already make many of our economic decisions. The prices of commodities and the rates of global growth are determined by this network of people and machines in ways that surpass the understanding of any single human mind. The phone system and the Internet have short-circuited distance, literally “vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time.”

There are other, subtler signs that we are becoming a part of a symbiotic whole. It is obvious that we have become more narrowly specialized in our professions, but we are also becoming more specialized in the activities of our daily lives.

Increasingly we fragment our activities into pure components. We either work or play, exercise or relax, teach or learn. We divide our art, our science, our politics, and our religion into carefully separated spheres. There was an older kind of human that kept these things together, a kind a person who worked and played and taught and learned all at the same time. That kind of person is becoming obsolete. Integration demands standardization. Just as a single cell in our body is adapted to a specific function and a specific time, we too must focus our roles. An earlier kind of cell could sense, move, digest, and reproduce continuously, but such a self-sufficient unit cannot function as a part of a complex whole.