From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Sep 05 2003 - 01:11:06 MDT
At 11:13 PM 9/4/03 -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>Also consider: 10 people simply wouldn't have the
>bandwidth to tend to the details of controlling much
>of the world. They would necessarily have to act
>through others - and barring AI (which, at that level,
>could arguably be counted as more "people"), would
>these extra humans not become junior
One of the best benevolent-AI-runs-the-world-(until something worse
happens) stories I know is Algis Budrys's very fine MICHAELMAS (1977),
where a global news anchor and his laptop AI actually *do* run the world,
in effect. Of course it's just an sf novel, not a totally thought-out
scenario for a real future, but I'd recommend it to everyone interested in
this topic. Like everything by Budrys, it conveys a sense of powerful
conviction while you're reading it. I used to think the ending was a
completely gratuitous cop-out, but now I'm not sure; it has a sort of Greg
Egan-*avant la lettre* quality to it.
Damien Broderick
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