Singularity 1998

Talk about depictions of the future in science fiction and other sources
Post Reply
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Singularity 1998

Post by Yuli Ban »

Singularity 1998
By Conor Sullivan
What if Japan's 5th Generation Computing Project actually bore fruit and gave us artificial general intelligence in the 1990s?

America swelters under an unbearable heatwave. An AutoDriving car kills a freeway jaywalker. Who is really to blame? Japan has a giant, electronic brain. And Britney Spears shocks the world, again. It is Friday, August 7, 1998. The news, in just a minute, here on 98.3: The Now!"

Sputnik Moment
Doug Lenat tugged uncomfortably at his shirt collar. It was an extremely hot August day in DC, and the White House HVAC system apparently couldn't keep up. Or perhaps Doug was just feeling the heat. He didn't particularly enjoy flying out to meet the president, but President Gingrich refused to speak by VidTel. Anyway, Advisor to the President on Computing Technology is not a job one declines.

Secretary Rumsfeld placed a black and white photocopy on the table in front of Doug. It was some kind of image, but it didn't look like much of anything to him.

Rumsfeld started into a speech. "Key Hole snapped this at 8AM JST yesterday -- That was Wednesday night for us. It's the cooling towers for their 5GC complex." Doug looked at the Secretary of Defense quizzically. "See the white clouds? That's not smoke. It's steam. It means they've started operations. Our intelligence suggests they've completed theoretical and programming work on their 'self improving autonomous learner'. That system is currently, as we speak, at full steam, solving math problems at 900 megahertz. We don't know how long it will take, but by the time it's done, they'll have an autonomous control algorithm for their Mecha 8Ks -- along with fully automated factories all across the Asian Defense Sphere to build more Mechas."

Doug's mouth opened slightly. He looked to President Gingrich. The big man took it from there. "Doug, I hope I don't have to explain to you what it would mean to the security interests of the United States -- if Japan cracks this problem before we do. Can we count on you?"

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the mid-80s, a new cold war emerged. Most Westerners laughed at the 5GC project, until the "Sputnik Moment" when ChesuKami beat Bobby Fischer in 1989. From that point on, cable TV watching Americans were enraptured, terrified to learn about the Fifth Generation Computer, a massively parallel logic system that sprawled over dozens of buildings in a Tokyo suburb. "Could it really out-strategize the greatest military in history?" they asked in bated breath. And what would that even look like? they pondered, wide awake at night. So fearful were they, that the American public voted for Republicans five times in a row. And the Republicans voted for over a trillion dollars in DARPA-led sci-fi technology concepts -- anything from nanotechnology to cold fusion to strategic defense. And the king of all the big budget Manhattan projects was Doug Lenat's self-improving discovery system SENSA.

"Doug," President Gingrinch repeated, "I need to count on you -- that you and your team can win this."

Doug mustered his courage and stood up from his chair proudly. "Mr President, you don't have to count on me," he proclaimed. "You can count on SENSA."
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Post Reply