From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 17:10:57 PDT
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From: daviddarling123
Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 8:26 AM
To: DarlingsSpace_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #13
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DAVID DARLING'S NEWSLETTER
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Issue #13
July 5, 2003
e-mail: darling_at_uslink.net
website: www.daviddarling.info
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1. Meanderings
2. Hive Minds and the Borg
3. Bookends
----------------------------------------
1. Meanderings
Well, here I am, sitting in the shade of a tree (I wanted to
say "old oak", but the nearest one of those is about ten yards
away), under a cloudless sky, with a pleasant breeze blowing off the
lake and a cold drink by my side. The old enemy is firing up the
barbecue for a Fourth-on-the-Fifth-of-July celebratory feast to
which I (a Brit in Minnesota) have been invited on condition that I
don't try to reclaim the colony for Queen and Country, and all is
well with the world (at least, my little corner of it). But I
wonder.... Out there, in the cold darkness of space, where no one
can hear you scream, what lies in wait for us?
------------------------------------------
2. Hive Minds and the Borg
I take it you're familiar with the various incarnations of Star
Trek, even if you aren't actually a card-carrying Trekker. But, in
case you missed out on the show's greatest evil entity, let me
introduce you to -- the Borg. For the complete neophyte, here are
some official facts on the species from Paramount:
http://www.startrek.com/library/xeno.asp?ID=70558
Now, I've had a bit of a discussion with one of my buddies (yes, you
Brian!) about whether Borg shouldn't really be plural. His
contention is that, since there are lots of them, we really ought to
call them "borgs." However, as we shall see, the situation is
complicated by the nature of Borgian intelligence and society.
That's really what I want to get on to. But mention has to be made
first of the prime urge of the Borg (adopting the singular by Star
Trek convention), which is to "assimilate." If you have something
useful -- a civilization or a starship, say -- the Borg will acquire
it and, as part of the assimilation process (to which resistance is
futile), turn you into a new member of the Borg collective. This is
a very unpleasant and, it seems to me, ridiculously primitive
process. Usually it involves the amputation of part of your arm,
including that most fantastically useful and adaptable appendage,
the hand, and the substitution in its place of something that looks
like it cost about $50 from Home Depot. Small circular saws or mini
pincers seem to be de rigeur. You will also receive various extra
plumbing, a substitute eye that emits a red laser beam, and,
courtesy of an infusion of "nanobes," a new, sickly skin color. Thus
kitted out, looking like a deranged Black & Decker salesman, you are
ready to begin your new career as one of the Borg. Ah, but there's
that problem with terminology again. You see, the central feature of
Borg existence is the hive mind and so the phrase "one of the Borg"
is somewhat meaningless (though "one with the Borg" would work).
Despite looking like an individual, each Borg is intimately linked
to the global consciousness of the collective and totally subjugated
to its will. Could such a state of affairs -- a single advanced
intelligence distributed among many physically distinct but mentally
unified organisms -- actually exist somewhere in the Universe? On
Earth, of course, we have social insects -- ants, termites, and some
types of bee, for example. Here's a good introduction to them:
http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/entomology/topics/societies.htm
Obviously, Star Trek's Borg are (is?) modeled on such creatures.
There are drones and, one of Star Trek's most delicious creations,
the Borg Queen, who, when questioned as to her role in the Borgian
scheme of things, remarks enigmatically "I bring order to chaos."
Well, you'd be hard pressed to argue that an ant colony has any
substantial level of intelligence. Ants communicate by pheromone
signals, it's true, and they lay down chemical trails that may be
regarded as shared cognitive maps. But they don't think or react in
novel ways to situations. They're hard-wired to keep on doing the
same things, over and over and over again. Having said this, a lot
has been written, in recent years, about what's become known as
collective intelligence or swarm intelligence. Here's a little essay
that talks about how much of the behavior of social insects, such as
how termites "decide" where to build their mounds or ants "choose"
the shortest path to a food source, comes about as a result of self-
organizing processes:
http://ai-depot.com/Essay/SocialInsects.html
Could there be such a thing as true high-level hive intelligence? I
think you could make a pretty good case that the Internet is heading
that way. When you're surfing the Web, hopping from site to site,
sharing e-mails, joining in live chat rooms, or engaging as some
alternative persona in a real-time, multi-user adventure game,
there's a genuine sense that you're part of a larger, multicomponent
mind -- your self temporarily merged with a complex web of servers,
software, and millions of other organic processing nodes like
yourself. Now imagine a time -- and it may not be too long off --
when direct brain-computer interfaces become available. Then you'll
be able to plug yourself more or less seamlessly into the great WWW
and become like a single cell, or drone, in the giant brain of the
planet. With wireless technology and high-bandwidth, 24-hour-a-day
Internet access, you'd never need be alone with your thoughts again.
Hmm. Not sure I'd want that. What happens if, or rather when,
hackers get into your brain, via its Internet interface, and start
downloading your innermost secrets -- or worse, implanting new,
unwanted memories or viruses. Can you imagine waking up and finding
that you have a sudden urge to buy 500 useless products? Yes, spam
has finally found its way directly into your gray matter!
This brings us to the pros and cons of hive intelligence. In some
classic science fiction tales, such as Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood End (Clarke, like Freeman Dyson,
was strongly influenced by Stapledon), the blending of individual
minds into a global consciousness is presented in a positive light
and as the ultimate stage of human evolution. See my encyclopedia
page:
http://www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/hiveintel.htm
There are obvious advantages to being intimately part of a much
bigger intelligence and mental support structure. But you have to
give up some or all of your individuality in the process. And, for
many, that may seem too high a price to pay. The Borg represent the
worse case scenario in which your individuality is forcibly wrenched
away and you're then compelled to carry out heinous acts, including
further assimilations, for the good of the collective. This theme of
being "taken over" was a common one in 'fifties sci-fi movies, such
as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a thinly-veiled cosmic
transposition of the perceived communist threat of that era. I think
that's why the Borg are the preeminent foe in the Star Trek
universe. Yes, they look ugly and play dirty. But what really makes
them scary is that they are the ultimate communist hardliners, bent
on quashing individuality and personal ambition, while the
Federation (an idealized extension of the United States) is all for
liberty and human rights. It's a nice irony then that the
Federation, in the long run, tends to do most of the assimilating --
even implanting a desire in the Borg break away from its
totalitarian regime.
Are there any hive minds out there? As the development of the
Internet and the promise of neural links suggests, they may be a
routine outcome of advanced information technology throughout the
Galaxy and beyond. We might be at this stage ourselves, if we allow
it to happen, within the next century or so. But what about a
naturally-evolved hive mind in which the superorganism has
intellectual powers that match or surpass those of a single human?
This seems to me much more unlikely because of the extreme
communication demands of this type of processing. Ants can get by
with chemical signals. But a colony with a high degree of mental
cohesion and corporate intelligence would have to flash vast amounts
of information between its components, in the same way that neurons
of the brain shuttle large amounts of data quickly back and forth.
Some kind of physical connection -- a nerve or nerve analog -- would
seem to be indispensable to support an adequate bandwidth. And then
what you end up with is really no more than a modified single brain -
- a colonial organism whose processing nodes are located at the ends
of biological wires that can reach out in different directions
though (because of the problem of signal delay) not over great
distances. While it's possible to imagine such a creature, it's hard
to fathom why nature would choose it as a solution, when a more
compact brain can operate far more efficiently. But I'd love to be
proved wrong!
For more discussion of all the topics mentioned here, see
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Posthumanity/WeBorg.html
--------------------------------
3. Bookends
June was newsletterless because of feverish, last-minute work on the
next Darling opus, "The Universal Book of Astronomy," which is the
companion volume to "The Complete Book of Spaceflight" published
last year. Amazon already has a page devoted to it and there's also
a description in the Wiley catalog at:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471265691.html
For more on all my books and other stuff that interests me at the
moment, stop in at my website
And feel free to write me at any time.
Until next time,
Best wishes,
David Darling
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