From: Cole Kitchen (kitchenc@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Nov 01 2000 - 14:34:46 MST
THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW, a novel by "hard"-SF writer James P. Hogan, may
be of interest to those concerned with mind-building and the question of
"friendly AI" (don't be put off by the garish cover of the current
paperback edition). Worried that the increasingly sophisticated global
computer network might someday "wake up" in an unpredictable/dangerous way
that humanity couldn't handle, a group of twenty-first century computer
scientists decides to conduct a worst-case-scenario test by deliberately
developing an AI with a strong survival instinct and then provoking it into
a duel of wits. Of course, there are safeguards. The experiment is isolated
on a space habitat, a military force is on the scene, and the whole thing
can be nuked by remote control as a last resort. However, the rapidly
self-improving and increasingly feisty AI defeats the fail-safes. Then, the
AI makes an unexpected choice.... (See
http://www.jamesphogan.com/twoface/twoface.html for further details about
this book.)
Hogan is also the author of the recent nonfiction work MIND MATTERS:
EXPLORING THE WORLD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. (See
http://www.jamesphogan.com/mmatters/mmatters.html for details.)
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