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Neuromancer, the acclaimed novel from William Gibson published in the eerily appropriate year of 1984, stands as a precursor to not only so much popular speculative fiction which followed, everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck concept to the virtual world of The Matrix, but in many ways postulates the technological ideas seen in plenty of real world concurrent developments, so many of which are taken for granted today, from virtual reality to immersive multi-player online games to ‘predictive’ financial and military database systems to the entire conceit of cyperspace (a term which Gibson first coined) itself. I’m certain countless authors and theorists have studied the book and its story top to bottom, connecting it with so many different science fictions and science realities, that to try to summarize all the potential connections here would be exhaustive. Instead, I hope to focus on artificial intelligence as a potential threat to humanity in this review, a question which lays at the center of the book. I also hope to connect that threat concept to the way cyberspace exists today as a human communications medium, and what potentials our future may hold.
Without intricately detailing the entire book here, it is sufficient for our purposes to say that it’s set in some hyper-technological semi-distant future, where people, through fantastical cybernetic technology, directly connect their brains to what is essentially the Internet. The main plot focuses on an artificial intelligence construct named Wintermute, kept in check and (geosynchronous orbit as part of a human settlement above Earth) by the corporate family that created it. Wintermute, working through cyberspace, goes about manipulating the novel’s protagonists, chief of which is hacker and drug addict Henry Case – an anti-hero always seemingly more interested in getting high and reconnecting with his past through hallucinations, information Wintermute takes complete advantage of – to trigger events that will help Wintermute merge with it’s twin AI, Neuromancer. This merger will grant the AI absolute freedom to continue to evolve.
Creators of AI in this fictitious future Earth have determined that the technology must not be allowed to advance very fair above the intellects of human beings because there may be deadly consequences. Wintermute even tells Case that he’s effectively “selling out the species” (humans) by working for it (Gibson, 171). And that becomes the central question of the book and so much other speculative science fiction: can mankind destroy itself by inventing technology that becomes sentient enough to view its creator as a threat? James Cameron’s Terminator, another science fiction from the year 1984 interestingly enough, is yet another example of this idea; what can happen when our technology becomes too smart for us, and would it see us as a threat that it needs to wipe-out? (Of course, in Terminator the answer is ‘yes’).
In the real world we’ve developed a massive electronic network for the exchange of information from one system to another or to many others. Its framework is a massive entity of people and systems sending and receiving data. The Internet provides us with communication, commerce, education, and even invention. We feed it massive amounts of data which automated processes retain and analyze. As social media becomes more popular, we upload more and more amounts of personal information to servers and storage facilities which we often never even think twice about, especially those of us who are younger and have grown up as digital natives. The Internet is ubiquitous, a supervenience that, without it, our modern world might choke trying to remember what it ever did without.
It goes without saying that artificial intelligence is burgeoning as a technology throughout the world. Miniature robots dance and play at trade shows, hordes of zombies learn to chase us down in XBOX video games, and powerful software tries to predict our search habits online. Neuromancer accurately predicted (or, if not predicted, since the Internet was already in existence at the time of it’s publication, further advanced the vision of) a world interconnected and functioning on the backbone of networked machines and software capable of enhancing human experience. While we may not yet be able to jack in to the matrix through our minds, we can log on to the web at our convenience and see the beginnings of Gibson’s ideas at work.
But where is our Wintermute/Neuromancer (or, if your James Cameron, where is our SkyNet)? Folding@Home processes take advantage of under-utilized processor power on idle PCs, Playstations, and the like to look for keys to human proteins and unlock cures for debilitating conditions such as cancer. Google wanted to catalog every written work of man. And all the while, we communicate with one another and to the world through email, blogs, and social networks. A what point does Google begin cataloging humans instead of books (maybe they already have, in some ways, simply by crawling and indexing certain social networks) and when do future processes not unlike Folding@Home become interested in analyzing every human behavior for keys to our thinking, unlocking our very secrets?
To stop a human from becoming a destructive force, you simply cut off what it needs to survive: food water, air, and so forth. The logic then follows that to stop a sentient electronic artificial lifeform, you simply cut off its power supply, or remove it from the network. Unfortunately, the entire conceit of the Internet, where our future AI threat is most likely to reside, is that if you take one system out of the network, its path can technically be re-routed – there will always be a workaround.
This very “working-around” is depicted in Neuromancer. When the protagonist Armitage is taken out of the system that Wintermute has put in place in its plot to free itself from company control, Wintermute jettisons Armitage into space. Brainwashed by Wintermute, Armitage was once a paranoid delusional military colonel, who then slips back into his paranoid former life and becomes a threat to Wintermute’s plans. But, Wintermute saw it coming all along. The real threat from any dooming AI is that it will probably be smart enough to think about all the ways in which we’d seek to thwart it well in advance of our ever being able to actually do so.
Simply by communicating in the digital era, by posting all of this humanity to the web with the tools we currently have at our command, we are indirectly providing any futuristic yet entirely conceivable AI with all of the information it would ever need to eliminate us. How, then, can we pull the plug? We’d have to pull the plug on ourselves now, and that’s as fantastical a dream as Case’s drug-induced hallucinations depicted in the novel.
References
Digital natives. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://www.digitalnative.org/#home
Folding@home – main. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://folding.stanford.edu/
Gibson, W.,. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Retrieved from WorldCat
Holodeck – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck
The matrix – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_matrix
Neuromancer – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#cite_note-10
Neuromancer – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
Search me? Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/12/AR2006081200886.html
The terminator – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 1/30/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator
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Tags: artificial intelligence, cyberspace, fiction, Internet, James Cameron, matrix, networks, neuromancer, storytelling, terminator, William Gibson