Abstract
If you can imagine machines that evolve, you will be right at home in Bruce Sterling’s short story “Taklamakan.” The tale tells of two NAFTA agents in a world of trade wars who are sent to examine what appears to be a site for subterranean nuclear experiments in the remote desert of northwestern China. Pushing into the complex, they wind up inside enormous “generation ships” that were never launched, starships now abandoned after experiments on their occupants—or perhaps a bizarre kind of ethnic cleansing—have run their course. The horrific glimpse of life inside these vessels, where some of the occupants really believe they are on their way to the stars and some know better, is matched by the goings-on in the slime at the bottom of the pits that surround the ships. There, new generations of machinery are reproducing in “...tidepools of mechanical self-assemblage,” modifying themselves through a kind of genetic evolution, and putting to work ideas they have acquired by studying the equipment the NAFTA agents have accidentally dropped into the primordial stew.
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Notes
“one of its ropy tentacles”—“Taklamakan,” which won Sterling a Hugo Award in 1999 was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction (October/November 1998).
“the extinction of the human race.”—For more on Hans Moravec’s views of robotics, see his book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
“gray goo.”—Joy’s warnings appear in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine in the article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” The Drexler reference is to his book The Engines of Creation (New York: Doubleday, 1986). The section called “Dangers and Hopes” is particularly insightful.
“a high degree of mobility and autonomy.” —T. J. Grant, “Project Daedalus: The Need for On-Board Repair,” in A. R. Martin, ed., Project Daedalus Final Report. Supplement to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1978, pp. 5172–5179.
“the ship’s fusion drive.” —As noted in Alan Bond and Anthony R. Martin, “Project Daedalus: The Mission Profile,” in A. R. Martin, ed. Project Daedalus Final Report, p. S41.
“to choose an alternative method of repairing the crack, or some acceptable combination.”—T. J. Grant, “Project Daedalus: The Computers,” Project Daedalus Final Report, p. S141.
“monitoring onboard oxygen and pressure, perhaps, or making minor repairs.”— Catherine Zandonella, “It’s Tiny, It’s Round, and Every Astronaut Should Have One,” New Scientist 163, issue 2195 (July 17, 1999), p. 7. See also “Smart Robot Orbs to Aid Space Crews,” Science News 156, issue 13 (September 25, 1999), p. 197.
“the Daedalus warden in almost human shape.”—Duncan Graham-Rowe, “Robonaut Takes the Risks So You Don’t Have To,” New Scientist 163, issue 2205 (September 25, 1999), p. 20.
“result in increasing sophistication of the resulting self-designed systems.” —Telephone interview with Jordan B. Pollack, November 5, 2003.
“locomoting robots called genobots”—For more on generative encodings and genobots, see Jordan B. Pollack et al., “Three Generations of Automatically Designed Robots,” Artificial Life 7, no. 3 (2001): 215–23.; also see Jordan B. Pollack et al., “Computer Creativity in the Automatic Design of Robots,” Leonardo,Journal for the International Society for Arts Sciences and Technology 36, no. 2 (2003):115–21. The DEMO Web site at Brandeis offers background documents and updates to current work at www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu.
“we virtually build the blueprints.”—Jordan B. Pollack, telephone interview, November 5, 2003.
“galactic distances ultimately also must be developed.”—R. A. Freitas and W. P. Gilbreath, “Advanced Automation for Space Missions,” NASA Report CP-2255, 1982.
“the next series of operations.”—For more details on this aspect of Deep Space i’s mission, see John McHale, `Remote Agent Software on NASA’s Deep Space 1 Spacecraft Is a Success,“ Military 6 Aerospace Electronics, lo, issue 9 (September 1999) p. 1.
“lacks the planning capabilities of Deep Space i’s Remote Agent”—These details come from Douglas E. Bernard and Barney Pell, “Designed for Autonomy: Remote Agent for the New Millennium Program,” Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space, 1997.
“controlling a robot that used evolving circuits to avoid walls.”—Adrian Thompson, Hardware Evolution: Automatic Design of Electronic Circuits in Recon figurable Hardware by Artificial Evolution, Distinguished Dissertation Series (London: Springer-Verlag, 1998).
“HAL-9000 of Arthur C. Clarke’s design, immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, was the product of the same University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”—Clarke made HAL’s point of origin clear in a 1997 letter to UIUC, saying he chose the school because his old math professor, George McVittie of Kings College, London, spent his last years there.
“an operating system called Viva to continually reconfigure itself to deal with new situations.”—Brice Wallace, “Hyper-Drive for Computers,” Deseret Morning News, June 9, 2003.
“for measuring the software’s performance.”—In a letter to the MIT Technology Review in the spring of 2003, LaForge wrote “… we would have a much better sense of how good (or bad) our autonomic computing is, were we to properly instrument our software. Ironically, there is plenty of research in place to do exactly this, with much of it due to NASA’s own experts… But NASA has never had the discipline or common sense to properly apply this research… Until NASA makes it a priority to properly instrument software… claims of improvements in reliability fall to the dustbin of snake oil remedies.”
“as long as 600 years.”—LaForge’s NIAC study is available at the agency’s Web site: www.niac.usra.edu. Its title is “Architectures and Algorithms for Self-Healing Autonomous Spacecraft,” a Phase I study that ran from May 1,1999 to October 31 of the same year.
“the star probe’s projected io,000 bps.”—Ibid.
“eventually make it incapable of communicating.” — For the immune system comparison, see A. Avizienis, “The Hundred Year Spacecraft,” Proceedings of the First NASA/DOD Workshop on Evolvable Hardware, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., July 19-21,1999, pp. 233–39.
’the bit-level analogy of a common cold.“—LaForge, ”Architectures and Algorithms,“ 14–15.
“unrelated failure in a power system control module.”—Press release, “Diagnostic Software to Keep Launch Vehicles Healthy,” Marshall Space Flight Center, July 8, 2002.
“with nanomachines fabricating repair materials out of nearby molecules in the hull.”—Kevin Bonsor, “How Self-Healing Spacecraft Will Work,” posted on HowStuffWorks at www.howstuffworks.com.
“about 7 percent of the mass of the payload, unacceptably high for interstellar work.”—See John H. Mauldin’s Prospects for Interstellar Travel, vol. 8o of the American Astronautical Society’s Science and Technology Series (San Diego: Univelt,1992), p. 193. Mauldin cites T. J. Grant’s “Need for Onboard Repair,” in the Journal of the British Astronomical Society’s Project Daedalus supplement, 1978.
“it has an Earth-like atmosphere, continents, and oceans of liquid water.”—Bear’s Queen of Angels was published by Warner Books in 1990.
“It will have to make judgments heretofore reserved for human beings.” —Ibid., 8i.
“he means the creation of superhuman intelligence that may end the human era”—Vinge’s original paper on the Singularity is widely available on the Internet at sites like http://www.ugcs.caltech.edut—phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html.
“in the form of future-looking reproductive efficiency.” —Jordan B. Pollack interview, November 5, 2003.
“to survive and perform at optimal functionality during long duration in unknown, harsh or changing environments…”—Adrian Stoica, Didier Keymeulen, and Jason Lohn, preface to proceedings of the First NASA/DOD Workshop on Evolvable Hardware, July 19–21,1999.
“Adrian Thompson’s FPGAs actually worked in an analog fashion.”—For more on this, see Clive Davidson’s “Creatures from Primordial Silicon,” New Scientist 156, issue 2108 (November 15,1997) p. 30. Writing in 1998, Thompson described the analog behavior this way (the XC6z16 is the FPGA chip from Xilinx used in the experiment): “It is operating as a continuous-time analogue dynamical system, even though the XC6216 is intended to be used as a digital device. The design constraints of a digital methodology were not imposed, so evolution has used whatever behaviours the chip manifested.” This is from Thompson’s “Exploring Beyond the Scope of Human Design: Automatic Generation of FPGA Configurations through Artificial Evolution,” extended abstract, 8th Annual Advanced PLD and FPGA Conference, 1998.
“you are moving toward genuine autonomy.”—The work of Stoica, Keymeulen, and Zebulum is deftly explained in Anil Ananthaswamy’s article “Space Babies,” which ran in New Scientist 169, issue 2276 (February 3, 2001), p. 26.
“This has the potential to largely enhance the capabilities of future space systems.” —Adrian Stoica, “Evolvable Hardware: From On-Chip Circuit Synthesis to Evolvable Space Systems,” in Proceedings of the 3oth IEEE International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, May 23–25, 2000.
“You go simply because you are expendable”—Cordwainer Smith, “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul,” in The Best of Cordwainer Smith (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1975), p. 57.
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Gilster, P. (2004). A Spacecraft that can Think for Itself. In: Centauri Dreams. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0_9
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