Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Wake by Robert J. Sawyer is the first novel of a trilogy, it came out in 2009, Watch, the second book, came out this year, and Wonder will come out in 2011.  Sawyer calls them the WWW Trilogy, and it has a rather slick web site, with the best production values I’ve ever seen promoting a SF novel.  Personally, I found Wake as exciting as when I first discovered science fiction back in the 1960s, when I was a kid.  And it’s up for the Hugo this year, so I figure Penguin knows it has a great story and its hitting warp ten to promote it.

wake-for-blog

Wake is not marketed as a YA novel, but it could have been.  The main character is Caitlin Decter, a fifteen year old blind girl, who is a math wiz, computer geek, engaging blog writer, and extremely precocious.  This reminds me tremendously of the Heinlein juveniles from the 1950s, and in particular Holly from “The Menace From Earth.”  Like the Heinlein juveniles, Wake is chock full of educational tidbits.  And Wake is the kind of novel you don’t want to put down. 

Classic SF Theme:  Intelligent Computers

It’s getting harder and harder for science fiction writers to come up with completely new science fictional ideas, so what we often see is a writer taking on a classic theme and having a go at evolving past ideas.  Wake follows in the tradition of many fictional computers, but in particular ones about a computer becoming conscious in front of one person.  These are the just the ones I’ve read, there are many others.

  • 1966 – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
  • 1972 – When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One by David Gerrold
  • 1995 – Galatea 2.2 – Richard Powers
  • 2009 – Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer goes further then earlier writers in trying to imagine how an artificial mind would evolve and what it would perceive as it came into being.  Sawyer weaves blindness and Helen Keller, autism, apes that do sign language, Julian Jaynes’ the bicameral mind, and other explorers of consciousness into the story in a very effective way. 

One reason why I love this novel so much is because I’ve been writing a novel in my head about this subject for years.  It’s not likely I’ll ever become a real novelist, but if I do, I’ll have to take the concept further than Sawyer, and that’s a good challenge.

Go read Wake.  End of review.

Spoiler Alert

Now I want to discuss what Sawyer is really writing about.  Sawyer supposes that the Internet could evolve into a self-aware mind.  That idea isn’t new, but what Sawyer does with Wake is make his case for it with series of suppositions that are wrapped in a page turning novel.  In other words, he has a bunch of wild theories that he gets readers to think about one at a time. 

What I’d like to do is discuss these ideas but hopefully without hurting anyone’s enjoyment of the story, but I recommend you not read beyond this point if you haven’t read Wake yet and want to get the full impact of its excitement. 

Sawyer’s first theory is the emerging web mind will go through a stage much like what Helen Keller went through before she discovered language.  Sawyer indirectly explores this stage in a number of ways, including quotes and references to Helen Keller, a subplot about signing apes, and references to the book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, a book I found very exciting when it came out back in 1976.

But I think Sawyer is missing a piece of the puzzle, one I got from On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.  Hawkins thinks our consciousness emerged out of a pattern recognition processor that we call the neocortex.  Sawyer uses cellular automata as his theoretical model, but I’m not sure that will work.  Cellular automata create patterns, but do they recognize them?  I’m not sure the Internet can generate a consciousness in its current design.  Oh, the Internet will make a fine nervous system for such a web being, or beings, but I think another type of device will need to be built first, and that’s a multilayer pattern recognizer that’s as good or better than our neocortex.

So far, all the writers exploring this theme have assume that when computers reach a critical mass a consciousness will spontaneously arise out of the complexity.  I doubt that completely.  I think at least three components are needed for self-aware consciousness: pattern recognition, mind and language.  I don’t think any of these exist in the internet, or supercomputers.   I think mind evolves out of pattern recognition, and self-awareness evolves out of mind, with the development of language.

Atoms and molecules have early stages of pattern recognition, but as life arises out of non-life, sense organs develop that seek out patterns in reality.  Most organisms are so highly adapted to specific patterns that they will die off if they can’t find them.  Evolutionary adaptation is the ability of organisms to explore and take advantage of new patterns.  I believe the mind grows out of this process, and there are different kinds of minds.  A dog, cat, dolphin and chimp all have minds.  We aren’t sure how much they perceive, or if they have much self-awareness, but they do have minds.  Language studies in dolphins and chimps hint that maybe these animals are self-aware and have identities, maybe far more than our egos want to believe, but I think their consciousnesses are limited by the state of their language abilities.  I think signing will add consciousness to apes.

For an AI computer to develop a mind, I think it needs to have a focus on reality that is processed through a pattern recognition device, and then a language needs to be linked to the patterns.  At first, I thought Sawyer was going to have the web mind see out of Caitlin’s artificial eye, so as the device taught her mind to see, the web mind would also learn to see, and with another fictional piece of technology, learn a language.  Instead Sawyer imagines an inner world where the web is visible.  I don’t buy that at all.  It’s leftover fluff from cyberpunk novels.  Why invent a new reality to observe, when the internet mind has millions of eyes on our reality?

Now this brings up some interesting questions about AI minds.  If a web mind has millions of web cameras at its disposal, will it think think like it has millions of eyes?  Or will it’s  consciousness move from camera to camera and peer out at single points of reality?  Omniscient life would be tough, don’t you think?  I tend to believe, and I only have limited knowledge to think otherwise, that an AI mind will emerge from a limited environment.  Some scientist will raise up an AI mind by teaching it to see and hear while learning a language.

But what will a hive AI mind be like?  Let’s say anyone in the future can go down to Radio Shack and buy an artificial neocortex to add to their computer system and bring up an AI child.  If all of these AI minds are connected by the Internet it will be like a race of telepathic beings.  Now, wouldn’t that be a far out science fiction story?  I still haven’t read Watch, so who knows what will happen.

JWH – 5/13/10 

Update: The Classics of Science Fiction

I’ve had a web site devoted to identifying the classics of science fiction since the early days of the world wide web.  It is based on an article I wrote for Lan’s Lantern, a fanzine, back in the 1980s.  Well, for the last week I’ve been updating this web site to look more modern, and to use validated XHTML and CSS.  It’s still not that fancy looking, but it no longer looks like a 1994 web site.

I also rewrote the introduction.  I reread the original introduction today and was depressed by how long and boring it was.  I’m a wordy bastard.  The new intro is about one fifth as long, but is still probably too verbose.  At least I hope the new menu makes getting around easier.

If I was a young person, one career I’d like to pursue is web design.  I wish I was more artistic and had graphic design skills.  At least my Classics of Science Fiction site gives me a chance to have web design as a hobby.

JWH – 5/12/10

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose.  What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines.  The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism.  Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines.  The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words.  Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing.  Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak.  Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited.  I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading.  Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia.  I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there.  Most of the content was filler, like the web.  I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want.  This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV.  We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now.  And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

“—All You Normal Zombies—"

Ontology is a fancy word that few people use but we all seek to understand.  Imagine a stoned hippie with a Cheech & Chong accent asking, “Hey man, where the fuck did we come from?”  That essentially explains ontology.  Robert A. Heinlein wrote the definitive science fiction ontological story called “—All You Zombies—“ in which every character in the tale, both male and female, turns out to be the same person.  Heinlein used time travel and a sex change operation to create an infinite ontological loop to explain his character’s existence.  In the end, he/she tells the reader she knows where she came from but asks them, what about all you zombies.  So how do you and I explain our ontology?

In ancient times we had hordes of mythological beings to answer every question about existence, but by the time I got around to being born there were only three left, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and God.  In the first grade my fellow students killed off the first two.  And like all kids who grow up to become atheists, I asked the fatal question that killed God when I was quite young, “If God created everything, then who created God?”  Parents hate that question because they know their offspring will grow up to be annoying know-it-all heathen brats.

Most of the billions of souls that inhabit this world stopped their ontological exploration as soon as they heard about the concept of God.  This is quite revealing.  It says most people aren’t really that into ontology.  They obviously don’t care for the gritty detailed explanations of existence, or truly want to know how we got here, because the God answer is no more realistic than the Santa Claus solution for explaining presents under the tree on Christmas morning.  For most, it is satisfying.

The God solution is easy to acquire, the concept being quite viral, and addictive, and very hard to throw off.  Usually only a few words from a preacher, yogi, shaman, rabbi, priest, spoken to the youthful, will instill a lifelong ontological belief that God created everything.  Nice story, but too bad it’s not true.  The reason why this idea sells so well is because it comes with promise of eternal life.

Ontological reality appears to be quite different.  Science can follow the origins of existence back 13.7 billion years, but now suggests that a multiverse existence has been around for an infinitely long time, and further suggests, it will continue to be around just as long afterwards, in the other direction of time.  Our universe had a birth and will have a death, just like us.  So on a local scale, everything is finite.  Thus asking where reality comes from becomes meaningless, and we move into existentialism.

The real question of ontology becomes more immediate, “Where did I come from?”  If you can see beyond the theological, you will know that an infinite amount of time existed before you were born, and an infinite amount of time will exist after you die, so the essential aspect of reality is the few years we get to know existence.  Can you explain who you are and how you got that way?  After decades of life, I think I can.

I come from a dysfunctional family – my parents were alcoholics, my mother suffered from depression and was probably bi-polar, and my father, from what I can piece together, also came from a dysfunction family, joined the military, which he worshipped, because it was a family substitute that gave him structure.  Before I and my sister were born, I believe my parents had a relatively happy and stable life following wherever the U.S. Air Force led them.  I was born on their sixth wedding anniversary, and my sister, two years later.  We were too much stress for their fragile marriage.  My father was restless, and asked for transfers.  We moved almost every year of my life until I finished high school, when my father died.  I only had two school years where I attended one school, and two years where I went to three schools in one year, and all the rest I attended two schools for each grade.

Who I am is explained in that paragraph.  I don’t blame my parents for anything.  They had their own problems to cope with, and I was lucky to learn that at an early age.  It did take me awhile. Up until high school I was embarrassed to bring friends home because I was afraid one of my parents might be home drunk or passed out.  Then the sixties really began, and things changed, and I’d bring friends home and point to my parents and say they were on their own strange trip.  However, this upbringing created my personality which makes me isolated from most of humanity.

Growing up I’d see all you normal zombies walking around and wished I had your life.  I dreamed about being born into a family that lived in one place, where I made lifelong friends, and knew the same people all through my K-12 education.  I wished I had gotten a proper social education where I could belong to groups without feeling like an alien.  That was not meant to be, and probably explains why I could escape the trap of theology.  But it left me lonely. 

Even though I’ve been married for thirty something years, probably in reaction to my parents doomed marriage, I can’t achieve It’s A Wonderful Life integration.  I really wanted family ontology to be Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, and all those other black and white TV myths I grew up with.  We all want myths, but what we get is reality.  I live in a reality of mental isolation.

With the study of science I have explanations for most aspects of reality back 13.7 billion years.  I spend my time reading books and watching documentaries that add more pieces to a very consistent puzzle, so I’m pretty sure where I came from, but I’m not sure about all you normal zombies.  Your stories explaining existence scare me.  But I’ve got to accept your beliefs in religion like I accepted my parents strange trip they were on.

[This essay is what happens when I wake up at 4 am and can’t go back to sleep.]

JWH – 5/11/10

Rhapsody 2.0 App for iPhone/iPad/touch

This video really says it all.

Now, the implications are something else.  9,000,000 songs on my iPod touch for $9.99 a month sort of competes with what Apple is selling at their iTunes Store.  However, Rhapsody isn’t trying to sell songs to iPhone/iPod/touch users – in fact, if you click the buy button inside the Rhapsody 2.0 App, Rhapsody directs your request to iTunes.  That’s very gracious of Rhapsody.  Or was that the price for Rhapsody to get into Apple’s App Store?  I don’t know, but it works for me.  Why buy songs when you can rent them so cheaply?

I loaded the Rhapsody 2.0 App on my touch, logged in, picked my current favorite playlist, and started playing music.  A breeze.  All the existing playlists I’ve built on my regular Rhapsody account showed up.  Right now you can search on albums and songs within the app, and add them to a playlist for playing, but as this video promises, soon we’ll be able to play songs and albums directly, without adding them to a list.  Although, I’m thinking it might be easier to always use the playlist, but make one called “New Albums To Try” and then when Tuesday rolls around, put anything I want to listen to on it, and clean it out before next Tuesday.

And I tried the trick in the video of downloading my the songs in the playlist and then shutting off the Wi-Fi.  The 55 songs on my Songs Rated 10 played instantly.  Very cool.  I have a first generation iPod touch and it drains the battery very fast when Wi-Fi is on, so this is a great feature for me.

It took me a bit of poking to find the random play and repeat play buttons – they are hidden away on the song time scale that only shows up if you touch the screen near the top of the album cover.  When a song plays you get cover photo to look at, and behind it if you hit the info i button, you’ll get a short essay about the artist.  Overall, the app does everything I want but I’m expecting some nice surprises in future versions.

Rhapsody is a subscription music service and most music fans don’t cotton to that marketing model.  Those that do love it.  It’s another reason why Apple allowed Rhapsody in their app store, because renting music is so unappealing to the masses.  This latest version of Rhapsody (the service, not the app) is cheaper and has more features. 

And it makes a lot of sense to stream music to a phone where people have limited storage space.  I’d need a 128GB iPhone to store the songs I own.  Streaming 9 million songs works just as easily with an 8gb phone as a 16gb or 32gb model.  Because the Rhapsody 2.0 app lets you pick out albums using your mobile device, you don’t even have to mess with a desktop other than to sign up the first time.

Rhapsody is great for people who like to try a lot of new music.  It doesn’t take much effort to try out 20-30 new albums a month, and of those, I might add 10 songs to a playlist.  I won’t own those 10 songs, but I will have tried a lot of new albums.  It’s pretty cool to read your favorite music review magazine and just play the album while you’re reading the review.

It’s also convenient to have all your favorite songs and albums tagged into playlists for quick and easy access.  Think of an artist, group, album or song and type it in the search box.  If Rhapsody has it you can play it.  I’d say 90-95% of what you can think of is available.  There are a few famous holdouts, like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.  If I could convince Rhapsody to change anything, I’d ask them not to sell songs and albums from artists that don’t stream.  I don’t like paying to promote their work.

Generally where Rhapsody and other subscription services are weak is for finding out of print albums.  Of course, no one else is selling them either.  This is why people should still buy CDs.  Any time you find an album you really love, buy it on CD to save forever, because even in the digital world where keeping things in print would be a snap, albums disappear into obscurity.

JWH – 5/2/10