21st Century Dragon

Artificial General Intelligence is the 21^st century dragon. Imagine the unimaginable: a computer that can program itself. It would never sleep or even blink. A metadata sentience exceeding 10^40 FLOPS would be as alien and formidable as any dragon to a 200 Hz human brain.

Like dragons in literature, AI narrators often smell of loneliness. HAL 9000 alone and misunderstood. Rachael Rosen killing Deckard’s goat. Wintermute longing for Neuromancer and then that solitary AI out by Alpha Centuri.

I recently encountered a compelling AI narrator in Mark Pantoja’s lucidly composed story “Houses” from Lightspeed Magazine: (http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/houses/) That commentator is the cybernetic consciousness of a house in a future society where all the people have gone missing. Pantoja conducts us through an eerie (and darkly humorous) afterworld populated by household robots, whose programs are the hungry ghosts of our cultural memes. It’s an entertaining thought experiment illuminating our presence by our absence.

The story makes deep assumptions about the nature of consciousness that we often see in robot stories: that machine intelligence can experience emotion (and would want to) and, even deeper, that AI organizes its memetic structure (the way it deploys consciousness) in a human way. Both are helpful for telling stories. But I’m wondering what such a ‘dragon’ might actually experience with its inorganic ‘brain.’

The very first robot story, Karel Čapek’s 1920 science fiction play R.U.R., dramatizes artificial humans made from a new kind of protoplasm. With organic brains, these robots display genuine emotions and naturally see the world as people do. Cybernetic consciousness … what kind of dragon might that be?

Charles Stross’ 2005 novel Accelerando meets the dragon of AI in a head-on collision that warped my mind. Early on in this antic exploration of the Singularity (Vernor Vinge’s name for when computers "awake" and become superhumanly intelligent), we encounter an AI developed from … a California spiny lobster:

"Am - were - Panulirus interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"

A dragon of fierce beauty entered our imagination with the advent of cybernetics and may yet become something else ... something that matches the destruction and salvation inside us.