[ExI] self-accelerating AI sf?

[Tomasz Rola]

Hello,

Just in case anybody here would like to know more about Stanislaw Lem and 
his take on subject of self-accelerating AI...

(And I hope that after some DNS glitches this is the only copy that made 
it to the list :-) )

The usual suspect is:

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV ]

There are few stories by Lem which, depending on mood and other factors 
could be read as dealing with AI.

>From "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" 
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Pirx_the_Pilot ]

- The Hunt - mining drone goes rampant on the Moon and Pirx joins 
hunting expedition - there is a bit more than action movie, however.

- The Accident - during research exploration of distant planet, it seems 
that Aniel (this name is made up and in Polish has some closeness to 
angel and feminine name Aniela-Angela), kind of multipurpose servant bot, 
decided to hike in the mountains without assecuration (just like it took a 
challenge to prove itself) but after slipping down, trashed on the rocks 
below. Pirx doesn't share his thoughts with others about this and he 
agrees that robot must have suffered some kind of failure.

- The Inquest - during test flight of robotic pilots (mixed crew, Pirx is 
unable to tell who is human and who is not), one of them tries to kill all 
humans and establish his own kind-of-empire somewhere in a distant part of 
space, but fails because another non-human cooperates with Pirx.

- Ananke - Pirx takes part in an investigation, trying to discover reason 
behind failures of advanced space ship navigation units and learns how, 
during their training by human supervisor, they not only take his good but 
his wrong traits from him, too.

And in "The Star Diaries"
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries ]
the protagonist, Ijon Tichy, has few encounters with advanced proto-AIs. 
But I am not sure if those stories had been translated into English (I 
guess that no, unfortunately). Seems that stories about his voyages have 
been translated, while second part of Polish version ("Ze wspomnien Ijona 
Tichego", "Memoirs of Ijon Tichy") seems to have been left. Anyway, here 
goes:

After traveling through space and time, Tichy spends some period on Earth 
and he meets a few original types, each one described in his own story. 

"Professor Corcoran" is arrogant scientist (they happen to find Tichy with 
their sixth sense, obviously) specialising in cybernetics, who stores 
artificial brains in big boxes and makes them believe they are humans, 
with their own lifes, emotions etc. He also believes that he himself is 
such brain stored in someone's else basement. 

Later on, in "Professor Decantor", he meets another scientist, who makes 
brain copies of living people, so that they can live "forever" (as long as 
material lasts, maybe even through the end of Universe) and calls those 
copies their souls. However, souls are unable to make contact with outside 
world, so this is more like preparated brain in a glass container... And 
to make things even more problematic, copying involves death of original. 
The story is also a play on religious beliefs and promises of eternal 
life. Decantor shows to Tichy a soul of his wife and Tichy is shaken. He 
later goes on to bargain the soul, and after disgusting negotiations Tichy 
is allowed to destroy it.

Next, in "Laundry opera" ("Tragedia pralnicza", verbatim translation = 
"laudry tragedy"), Tichy describes a number of consequences of introducing 
intelligent washing machines, kitchen stoves and other such home 
appliances. Some of them became pregnant with their owners, some made 
billions on speculation and other black market stunts. When producers, 
horrified as events unfolded, decided to limit parts production, in effect 
controlling robot population, robots formed bands robbing other robots on 
the streets. Some space ships decided to try their luck pirating other 
ships and fighting with cybernetic police ships, etc etc... Finally, there 
are news of strange object in Crab Nebula, looking like monstrous human, 
making moves like a swimmer. The object makes contact with a ship sent to 
check it, explains his name is Mattrass and it is formed from robots (a'la 
cells in a body), and asks humans to not disturb him as he swims in gasous 
cloud and does as he pleases. The problem of Mattrass ownership or 
citizenship arises and the court trial is under way, but during this it is 
discovered that some people in the room are in fact robots in disguise. So 
they start removing robots from the room until Tichy remains alone. Being 
alone and having nothing to do, he walks home. BTW this story, in my 
opinion, plays on capitalism and it's reliance on lawyers. And what 
happens when we pair this with emergent automata (mostly: a lot of 
nonsense, which looks very funny in a story, but might be not so funny in 
real life).

In "Doctor Diagoras" Tichy meets with another eccentric. This one hates 
professor Corcoran so much, that he put his copy into cuckoo clock, so 
that every hour Corcoran-bis is shouting, asking for help, crying and 
trying to negotiate his delivery out of prison, all for entertainment of 
Diagoras, who pleases himself while he insults and mocks Corcoran-bis... 
Who even went so far as to enabling Corcoran-bis a phone call to his 
original, so that his imprisonment is even more humiliating (i.e. a copy 
knows that he is a copy and thus cannot have much hope about freedom). 
Diagoras tours Tichy through his spacious labolatory and shows him cages, 
in which he holds cybernetic organisms created by himself. However, he - 
contrary to other cyberneticians - does not want them to be obedient so 
that he can make another evolution rather than imitate and "plagiarize" 
the one that had already happened. Creatures are not really intelligent, 
rather similar to lower animals, driving on primitive control mechanisms 
like various forms of tropism. However they can be spontanically 
aggressive and they all rather sooner than later try to escape, hence 
cages. Also, Diagoras criticises idea of building perceptron and 
developing Eniac, as a way to build "electric slaves and computing 
idiots".

Next, they come to a panzer well, in which there lay remains of another
cyberorganism. Diagoras gave it a way to replicate and self organise, and 
as soon as it went on, it tried to liberate itself. So, somehow it was 
able to rebuild its body made of weak steel into hardened one, and started 
to dig and ram into the wall made of steel plates and reinforced concrete. 
To stop it, Diagoras sunk it in liquid oxygen (throwing Dewar flasks 
straight into the well), so its moves became discoordinated and before 
oxygen evaporated (and before creature had chance of adopting itself to 
superconductivity) he managed to saw a creature into pieces with a small 
remotely controlled saw.

Further on, Diagoras presents to Tichy two isolated rooms, in every room 
there is glass tank with "thinking polymer". He proudly claims to train 
this chemical substance into solving problems of growing complexity by 
using electric and magnetic shocks on them. However, as he noticed, they 
started to exchange radio messages, so he isolated them from each other 
with metal sheets. Again, they changed medium to infrasounds, prompting 
him to isolate them acoustically. After that they somehow overcame an
obstacle and resumed their talk, this time by unknown means. Also, they 
ignored his attempts to enter this exchange. As they talk and go from one 
tank to another, carefully closing heavy doors behind, Tichy notices that 
Diagoras' hand taps onto the glass. They realise that Diagoras was 
creatures' medium and that he became their experimental subject. Shortly 
after Diagoras bursts in anger and wants Tichy to leave immediately, which 
he does calmly and without opposition. Later, recalling this, Tichy is not 
certain about causes of both this anger and his own silence. A month 
passes, and Tichy reads in a newspaper that technicians trying to repair 
electric cable have found Diagoras house silent and empty, with two empty 
undamaged glass tanks, and Diagoras himself is assumed missing and never 
to be seen again.

That's all, for some time at least.

BTW, the funny fact is that Tichy memoirs are from 1961 and Pirx tales I 
mentioned above are from years 1965-1971, AFAIR.

The subject of mechanistic intelligence is a common subject of "Robot's 
Tales" ("Bajki robotow"), "The Cyberiad", "The Mask" ("Maska" - stream of 
consciousness of a killer bot that gradually fails in love with its 
running away target), "The Invincible" (space cruiser lands on a planet 
and has to deal with - as one could say today - microbots that are 
possibly a product of mechanistic evolution, kind of "grey goo" but made 
of macroscopic elements, however question of sentience level of those 
clouds is left unanswered).

Oh, to be frank I could go on and on - I would risk to say that AI and 
it's relations with humanity was the main and real subject of Lem's works, 
both "action books" and philosophy pieces (like "Summa Technologiae"), 
even thou thanks to him being among the firsts to explore such themes, he 
had to invent his own terms and words, so in Summa there is a part devoted 
to Intellectronics rather than to AI, Phantomology rather than "virtual 
reality" and so forth (Summa had it's first Polish edition in 1964, so 
even if some terms had been used before, it would be too strange to 
import them into Polish language and Lem, being great erudite, choosed 
to go his own way). And in his "action books" action wasn't the main 
raison d'etre of the books, or at least this is how I am reading them 
today.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **