Reflections on Technology and Society

[originally published May 2005] With all due respect to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, spring is the best time to plan your summer reading (besides, this magazine isn't the place to explore the racier topics in his poem Locksley Hall ). If you go to the beach in August without a couple of good, fat, books already researched and acquired, you risk spending your precious time in expensive resort bookstores, browsing among stacks of trashy titles, embarrassing yourself with plaintive requests to friends or relatives for books, or, even worse, reducing yourself to working your way through a stack of moldering Archie comics. Your reading time is too precious to waste—don't become a poster geek for the Wasted Summer Reading Foundation! A good summer book must meet several exacting requirements. It must be entertaining without being taxing — we're on vacation here, so War and Peace won't do. The book should be long, preferably very long — the number of hours we have at the beach is s...

[originally published November 2004] What presents a greater threat to our future? If we listen to sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge along with Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and their ilk, transcendent AIs threaten the very foundations of our world. But if we listen to Eric Drexler and Neal Stephenson (among others), we should worry more, or perhaps less, about threats from nanotechnology -- in other words, death by gray goo. Are we living in denial? Vinge's basic argument for singularity is compelling, give or take any real understanding of what a transcendent AI's software might look like. Nanotech is similarly compelling, although the gray-goo thesis is less likely than some alarmists would have us believe -- autonomous nanofactories that can "live off the land" won't happen any time soon or by accident. In this final installment of Biblio Tech, we'll examine some of the various views of life and intelligence that have thriven in sci-fi over the years...

Recently the editorial board of IEEE Security & Privacy magazine suggested that we revive Biblio Tech . The flattery was effective, and I agreed to write several more installments of the department, the first of which will probably appear in the March/April issue. I've been reading a lot of older SF recently, notably a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories and Robert A. Heinlein's " Starship Troopers ". In addition, I've recently completed John Scalzi's wonderful " Old Man's War " and its sequels " Ghost Brigades " and " The Last Colony. " I have my good friend Hal Stern to thank for the introduction to Scalzi's work, for which I'll get a suitable revenge at an appropriate later date.

[originally published September 2004] One of the special pleasures of the Harry Potter stories is their send-up of modern consumer culture - from Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans (and they do mean every flavor) to Chocolate Frogs, which come complete with a collectible card featuring a celebrity witch or wizard. Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, pokes fun at contemporary marketing and advertising with tongue-in-cheek warmth that manages to make her simultaneously attractive to Madison Avenue and the rest of us - a remarkable achievement. Down the Rabbit Hole Max Barry's Jennifer Government , the satirical successor to his well-received first novel Syrup , takes a different angle on the consumer-marketing-gone-mad theme. Although Rowling's products are entirely fanciful, they're unmistakably patterned on things we all instantly recognize. Barry, however, doesn't make up the company names he uses: rather, he includes a defensive paragraph at the front of his novel...

[originally published July 2004] What happens if the artificial intelligence community, in its quest to build intelligent systems, succeeds too well and creates an AI whose intelligence exceeds the threshold marked out by our own? Up to now, it is humans who develop the software and hardware and who drive all progress in capability. After crossing the threshold, however, the AI itself will rapidly augment its own capabilities. What's the intuition here? Although we use technology to help us conceptualize, design, and build today's computers and software (and other technological artifacts such as airliners and skyscrapers), there's no doubt that we remain in the driver's seat. But imagine the software design process reaching a level of complexity at which human designers exert only executive oversight. Most practitioners can't really see us getting to this point anytime soon, but remember that compilers astonished assembler programmers in the late 1950s and early 196...

[originally published May 2004] In this installment of Biblio Tech, we'll look at some science fiction cult classics that challenge classification. Each is a perennial favorite with the SF community, and several have become fixtures in the computer science community. Two of these works, Dark Star and Alien , are movies, while the other, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , began as a radio show whose universe and characters have taken on lives of their own. What turns these kinds of works into cult classics? Is it some particularly strong appeal to a preexisting community, or is it some intrinsic merit that creates the community? In Space No One Can Hear You Scream Alien is the movie that made Sigourney Weaver a star in 1979, a year that otherwise featured movies like Apocalypse Now , Kramer vs. Kramer , and The China Syndrome . The US withdrawal from Saigon had occurred four years earlier, and Hollywood movies were either very much about Vietnam or very much not about Vietn...

[originally published March 2004] In the same way that Windows introduced the masses to mice and graphical user interfaces without having invented them, Dan Brown's books explore for the general public some important themes in security and privacy and their sensitivity to technological change. These are themes that we've usually only seen treated in the more rarified zone of hard science fiction. This installment of Biblio Tech departs from the normal pattern of examining more obscure, idea-driven books and stories to focus on the works of a contemporary best-selling author. This departure is unusual because neither this department nor this magazine is part of the star-making machinery behind the popular book. By choosing to look at current popular fiction we run the risk of discovering later that we should have delved deeper. Nevertheless, these works are going to be broadly influential, so let's look at them. Blending Popular Fiction With Science Fiction Each of Dan Brown...