There. Okay, now it's recording. Okay, now I'll just repeat everything else. But anyway, the idea in software was that you could build a sort of Android copy of yourself, of a human, and then you'd extract the software from a person, maybe slicing up their brain, getting all the neural maps, getting all the chemicals out. And there's a problem that I was interested in. It was sort of a philosophical problem. People maybe used to debate it more than they do now.
Could we upload our brain out of our body? And now it's sort of not such an unusual concept. But when I wrote this novel in 1979, it was not a familiar idea to most people. And anyway, so actually that book did fairly well. But as I say, it wasn't nearly enough to live one. Now, my children were gearing up to go to college. I got married quite young. I had my children. My wife and I had our children in my early 20s. So I was about 40, and college was looming. And I came to San Jose State. And I knew a man who worked here.
I came out here for an interview. I remember I met John Pierce then. I was wearing a coat and tie. I was like, why are you wearing a tie? Why don't you wear a leather coat like on your book jacket? Are you scared? So I got the job. And then they said, well, it was a combined department of mathematics and computer science. And they said, well, if you teach computer science, we'll give you 10% more on your salary.
And at that point, I was getting a little tired of mathematics. I like the idea of doing something with physical things and being experimental. I mean, mathematics is a very, very stark, difficult field. If you have a proof and there's something wrong with it, then the proof is nothing, you know. But you have a computer program and it has a little bug in it. Well, maybe the bug's a feature. You know, maybe to make something interesting anyway. And you can keep experimenting and turning it around. And you get this feedback. You're working with something physical. So I was happy to start teaching computer science. And I was just telling some people at the...
the snack section beforehand, that the first course they gave me to teach was assembly language, which I actually literally didn't, I couldn't find the on switch on the computer they did. It was around in back. I didn't know why they kept using this word DOS. What is that supposed to be? So I was really in deep, but I learned how to do it. And then I remember there was something I was interested in called cellular automata.
I'll show you some faster cellular automaton in a minute. But at that time, the computers were very weak. They had very little memory. They were extremely slow. And a cellular automaton, the idea is you want to take a grid, and you have a state in each of these cells. In this case, I think the state was 0 to 256, maybe. Maybe not even that many states.
At the update, each cell looks at its neighbors and makes its new state. This rule we're looking at here, this is the so-called rug rule, and each cell takes average of its neighbors and adds one, and when it rolls up to past 255, then it drops back to zero. So you get an effect that's a little bit like boiling water, because it'll heat up, and then it goes to the surface, and poof, gives up a bunch of heat and cools off. And this was, I didn't know how to do graphics then, so this is ASCII graphics. There's a certain set of...
characters, they're, you know, ASCII, you use the hexadecimal numbers. So these are the D brothers. There's DB, DC, DD. These are these great ASCII characters that are, you know, different shades of squares, which are not a well-known thing anymore. That was an important thing to note back then. Let me minimize this for a second, and I'll show you some other cellular automata. Over the years, I did a lot of cellular automata, and let me open, let me make this big, and let's see if I can open a better pattern. Let's see.
Well, let's see. I guess, I don't know. This one might be good. Okay. And so I was writing those cellular automata with my, yeah, these are good ones, with my assembly language students. And then I actually got a grant from the Electric Power Research Institute. That was a good deal. Because one of the things, professors are always looking at a way you cannot have to teach. That's one of our main missions. We want to try to get, somehow get time off. You know, you get research time off. But I had this grant from the Electric Power Institute. And then,
We were writing singular time, and supposedly these were going to help with preventing power blackouts. Whatever. And so this is a very nice, cool rule. If you single step it, it's a little bit jagged to look at. It's running a little too fast. This was another issue. We used to have so much trouble making these things run fast that it was... Let's make it go slow.
There's these nice patterns emerged. These are called Belisov-Javotinsky scrolls. And they emerge spontaneously in these rules. And they're an interesting example of, let's see, how can I get back out here? Let's see. I think I can do right-click. No? Oh, I know. Okay. This is probably a bad thing to be doing. Okay. Let's just look at one other one. This is a very pretty one. And the thing that's significant about cellular automata...
They're sort of models of physics because we've got a space here. Every cell, in this case, it's more complicated than taking the average of its neighbors. We actually have two states in each cell. There's one as an activator and one as an inhibitor. And rather than being discrete values, we put continuous values in here. And then this generates, it turns out that the patterns that you see on animals, the patterns you see on shells, are generally generated by this kind of process. You have these things called activators and inhibitors. Alan Turing was working with these for a while. So this, I really got to love these things. Now, but I'm not going to do too much more of that. Let's get back into the PowerPoint.
Let's see. And let's go up here to the slideshow. And so that's me playing with, there's this man called Stephen Wolfram. I don't know if you've heard about him. He wrote Mathematica. He's sort of, he's an unusual person in computer science. A lot of people don't like him. He's very arrogant. He's been very successful. And he was one of the people who was really interested in cellular autonomy. There's a certain kind of shell you see in the South Pacific, and it has these patterns that are essentially, fairly, you can make a pretty good argument that those are generated by cellular autonomy patterns.
And it's sort of, I like those shells. I wrote a science fiction novel where there's some that are three feet long and they eat people. These cone shells are very vicious little things. They shoot out the thing like a harpoon. It's got this poison called conatoxin. It's attached to a tendril. They shoot it into a fish and the fish right away dies. And then they go over and slam over the fish and swallow it.
And that's like the most, it can be used as a pain reliever, conotoxin, but it's not something you want to take. Because they can inject it into your spinal cord and then they have to put you in an iron lung to keep breathing while you're in the effects of it. It's not really a party drug. But it's kind of a funny thing. Now, that's the cellular automata. Now, I used to imagine that cellular automata would be a huge use of them. And I still think it could happen. Like the, it would make more sense for our TV screens to be living tissues that were basically functioning like cellular automata. One of the things that,
Cephalopods, in particular, well, they're squid, but the cuttlefish is sort of the best at this. It can change its color very quickly. And you may or may not have seen videos where you put a cuttlefish over a checkerboard and actually it'll make its skin be in its pattern of checkers. It can pretty much emulate any pattern. And so that's clearly, I would say, in the future, one tendency I'm going to be talking about here is that I think we're going to see chips going away. I think we're going to see biocomputation taking over. People used to talk about nanotechnology.
But really nanotechnology, the real nanotechnology is biology. Biology is things are happening at the molecular scale, it's reproducing, it's making things. And there used to be this sort of misguided idea that we were going to make tiny little gears and put them down a molecule size, which is not the right way to do nanotechnology. We've got nature doing nanotechnology, nature's very good at it. So biotech is the way we want to go. So instead of a TV, you have something called a squid skin.
And here's a man sleeping on a squid skin that has pictures of some of the things he likes. Now, I'm just going to jump past this now to a somewhat different topic. And I'm just going to stick this in since you all are computer scientists and any of you. And there's this idea I've had that's not as well known as I'd like it to be about how to have... We've often talked about, can we make intelligent systems? And then, can we kick it up a notch if we make conscious systems? You know, computing systems are conscious. And the game world is really, I've always felt that computer games is really the best laboratory we have for doing computer science. You've got a whole world in it, you've got agents in there doing things. And it's really, I think it's one of the most important fields. And I used to teach a course on computer games and software engineering. And actually, I had the trouble getting that course approved. But I think people slowly saw the light. And then,
The thing about computer game programming is it brings together every skill in computer science. You've got the graphics. You've got software engineering. You've got interface. Now, this is an idea. It has to do with something. There's a man called Damasio. He's written a couple of books trying to describe what consciousness is. And he has this theory that what it means to be conscious, he thinks it's like a four-step process. Well, you're perceiving the world, so you've got the movie. So you've got the movie and the brain. And that's the sort of, here's a world. Here's like...
This is the guy that we're focusing on. That's somebody, clearly that's an enemy, and this is something he wants. So this is the good thing, the bad thing. And so we put him in the movie, in the brain, meaning you're aware of where everything is. Now, what we do in a computer game, this is easy for us, because we don't actually have to emulate him having a vision. I mean, you can do that. That adds another interesting level. But you can just simply, he has access to a list of where everything in the world is. So that's the easy way to do it. Then, the thing is,
as well as having the movie in your head, you have to have the idea of singling out yourself. So these are sort of different. First, you can see the world, then you realize that you're in it and you're a distinguished object in the world. And that's also, that's very easy to do in computer science. You have this pointer inside your methods. So that's easily done. Then, the next thing is that you want to...
you're going to have values that you set on the things in the world. You might have a lookup table. That's the easy way to do it. Or you might have a neural net. A little bit harder, but probably a little creature behavior. So here we've just drawn something where there's weights. There's plus one for this and minus two for this. Then, this is the next level of consciousness. He becomes, he not only is using these weights, but he's aware of the table. He's sort of aware of his lookup table. In other words, he has the ability to adjust the lookup table. And this is where you, or his neural net, and this is where you get into learning. Where you don't want to just stick.
with the lookup table that you were born with, you know, if your score is going down and down, you're like, I've got to do something different. And so this is where he becomes, he has the ability to start tweaking his table as time is going on. So not only is he aware of his self, he's sort of, this is the level where he's sort of watching himself. He's observing his score. He's keeping tabs on how well he's doing. And according to Damasio, that's the essence of consciousness, is that you have an image of yourself in the world, but you also have, you go a step beyond that. You're a step, you're watching yourself watching the world. So it's that second, that final step, where you get into consciousness, where you're not just simply reacting.
then this is sort of too many lines. This is empathy, okay? So not only does he see his lookup table, he sees how he's reacting, he also has an image of what's going on in the other player's head. And that's where it gets really interesting. Anyway, so that's some thoughts on games. Does anybody have a question? If you ask a question, you'll get something. Okay. Did you draw those pictures? Yes, I drew them. Anybody who asks a picture gets a free book by me. Any more questions? Yeah.
The cellular automata, those just look so much like the pictures you would see in the 1960s, mind-altering drugs, movies, types of things. Did anybody ever catch on to that, that that could be... Well, I always wanted to do that. Because I'm a 60s person. I wanted the cellular automata to look like cool light shows.
I've tried sometimes to get gigs where I would be running those shows at nightclubs and so on. And once, I had a gig in Japan, in Tokyo, there was a club called the Gold Club, and I was running my cellular time on a TV there, and that was cool. And then I've done them at a concert, but I'm not really connected in the right. A lot of times if you go to shows, there's a whole scene of people that do videos, they call it the demo scene. They do demos at concerts in Rage.
Not many people use cellular automata. I don't know why they don't. I think there's one trick in programming them that people, it's like they have trouble doing that step. And the key step is that you have two buffers. I actually need three buffers for the really good ones. Like you've got the past, the one that's now, and then the next stage. And the idea is if you're updating this cell, you're looking at his neighbors, you can't...
look at your neighbors, sum them up, add one, and then put the new value in here. Because then that's going to screw up updating the next one. Because then he's going to be using the past here, and the future's going to be here. So you have to fully update over to here. And then you don't have to copy, you just need to flip the pointers. You say, oh wait, this is the now buffer, and that's the future buffer. You also, it's good to have a pass, because if you want to get wave motion, there's this great rule where the next state is equal to, well, you basically take the present, you take the now.
Minus the past. Something like that. And that will give you waves. I can show you some of the waves. It's an incredibly simple rule, and for reasons, as I say, I still don't understand. It's never caught on. Aren't you going to fully answer Marty's question now? Let me show you a wave rule. Let's see if I can find it. So let's do a... Let's try a wave here. Okay, and let's put in... Oh, this will do. People don't look at chains at all because this is too much memory? I don't know. I don't know why they don't.
This is me on. It's so easy. Here's if you can get a 3D view of it. Let's see. Can I make this work? Let's try this sheet. There we go. So these are actually, these are doing waves here. And we can jack it up a little bit. There's a way to stretch this. Whoops. You can get this software for free online, by the way. It was written at San Jose State, so you can stretch this up a little bit. There. And now we can, let's ding it a few more times. So you get these nice.
Oh, this is running too slow now. So let's make it go fast. That's more like it. And then we can maybe load a better pattern. Yeah, here's a good one. Okay, so let's go cursor. Now I've broken it. Okay, I don't want to be doing this. There's nothing more boring than watching somebody do this. Okay. Anyway, you can download this for free from my website. And it's RudyRucker.com. It's pretty easy to find. Whoops. Okay, so let's get back into the slideshow.
Okay, so that was my bit. Telepathy is another thing I'm interested in. And you might say telepathy, that's like woo-woo, that doesn't mean anything. But, I mean, just think, when you're walking around with your cell phone, your pocket, you know, maybe you're wearing headphones, you're talking to your friend, they're down in San Francisco, they're in New York. I mean, you've got the mental processes that's connecting you. You're using email. We have this way of getting really miraculous, very rapid conversation with people that are far away.
Telepathy is just how much further can we kick up the bandwidth on this? And what does this picture have to do with this? Well, I painted it. But let's see. What it really has to do with it, it's sort of an image of a... One thing if you work with computers, you get frustrated with how hard it is to interact with the computers and you'd like something more direct. Now, look at it this way. If you want to send somebody an image, there's a couple of ways to do it. One way, you can just send them a JPEG, basically pixel by pixel.
And that's sort of a hassle because that's sort of a large file. If you're lucky, it might be procedural, so you can send them an algorithm, okay? Like a computer graphic, a Mandelbrot set, certain kinds of things, you can just send them an algorithm and they can generate it. Like the cellular automata, you send them a little algorithm. But the sort of easiest way to do it is send them a hyperlink. Okay? So you have the image on your machine, and then here's the other person, and then you just tell them, go over there and sort of look at it on my machine. And that's the sort of levels of telepathy because
I have some mental state and I sort of want to communicate it to you. Well, then typically what we do is something like this. This is sort of what language is for us. You describe what you're thinking and you're basically giving them an algorithm for building a thought in their head. And you think about it's surprising how well language works. It's just this arbitrary system of grunts and squeals that we make. And then you have these very complicated mental states and they've learned to evoke that. So it's already sort of a miracle. We very rarely communicate a thought this way in the JPEG style. That's just hard to give somebody.
a thousand megabytes of information just to tell them what you're thinking. Well, maybe writing a novel is like, okay. But the hyperlink thing, I think that's the sort of intriguing thing. If you could find a way to, with protections, of course, find a way to have somebody access your mental states without you having to take them out of your brain. So I think that would be an interesting future. Now, the brain does have an electrical aspect to it. So there might be some way of possibly using electromagnetic waves. Yes?
I was going to ask a question, who wrote this, and then you answer it. But anyway, you say that, you know, you foresee, and one reason that many things didn't work out, I think, is because you are too far ahead. So it's kind of hard to do marketing. But anyway, I went to talk about, you said that if there could be a way that, you know, somehow your mind or your brainwave was measured and then happening to some other places. It's already happening.
Right. Not in the extreme case. It's very complicated. But people are wearing these bio devices. Yes. And it's recording everything that's happening. When do you sleep and a lot of things. And then they just, again, with a protected channel, upload to whatever cloud site that they want. Yes. Well, yeah, you're perfectly right. It is something that I think we'll see more and more of it happening. One thing, certainly, the interface. Well, everybody, it's funny.
I mean, seven years ago, nobody had a smartphone. Everybody used to see tapping, you know. And that's obvious that this is not an interface that we're going to be using indefinitely. It's just, I mean, it's tiny, you're hunched over, it's slow. They've tried voice recognition. It's to some extent that's going on, but people feel it may be a little uneasy talking out loud in the street.
So there's got to be some better way to do it. And the one thing, if you can have something that's sort of like a patch that sits on the back of your neck and just picking up your brain waves and then doing it that way, I think that would be a nice interface. I've put that in a lot of my science fiction novels. It's sort of soft and it's like a slug that crawls under you. Oh, we have the patch that picks up the brain wave. We just did a hackathon last week on that. What we're missing is the patch that induces those brain waves and someone else. Look at this. He didn't get his. The guy behind you. Oh, you got one? Who else wants a book?
I'll take a question. You can ask a question. Oh, well, I can say a comment. All right. University of Washington conducted an experiment back in August where they connected a man's brain to a computer and he touched his finger. And then that impulse was sent through the computer to a transcranial magnetic device and then his colleague's finger twitched. Yes, I heard about that. Yeah, it was pretty interesting. Yeah, controlling it for somebody.
You said you had a book? Do you have a question? I'm just wondering if we are just a character in the game. A character in the game? Yeah, I mean, who knows? I always have this kind of question in my mind. Well, that's the thing. Aren't we living in a computer simulation? I tend to think we aren't, because most computer simulations suck. And the world doesn't, you know? The thing is... Well, you don't always get what you want, but... I mean, if you go and you look in the dirt, I mean, there's these little bugs there, you know? There's always more, so much more detail in the world.
It's things in the computer. They're always there's a cutoff very soon so Another way of looking at by the way, which I'll talk about a little while is up the world itself You can think of the world as a computer. It's just not a silicon computer Didn't you have a proof that we aren't living in a computer simulation? The title was The Universe is Not a Computer, but it had nothing to do with that question. Didn't you have an opinion about this? Did you have some kind of physical argument? Well, can you just ask Rudy the question? All right. Did you have a question? A comment. I asked John McCarthy once, how do we know that we're not living in a computer simulation? I never expected him to have an answer, but he did. He said if we were, there'd be round-off air, so you should look for a round-off air.
Jaggies on the shadows and things like that. I've heard of that too. You don't see it, so we're not. Yeah, yeah. I had a comment about the implications of having devices that read your brainwaves because some neuroscience studies have shown that they can predict what a person will choose a few seconds before they choose it. Yes, I've heard that too. Your body knows before you say it. A few seconds before you know you choose it. Yeah.
Well, let me get back to the slides for a minute. This is just, see, they're wearing the things I call Ubbies, the telepathy thing. And there's an interesting thing that's going to happen that we'll have to be a little worried about. You know when you point a video camera at the video monitor, you get this funky regress. You ever seen people do that? You get a hole of mirrors. If you twitch it, you get chaotic patterns. So these people are each looking into each other's minds and seeing each other, seeing the other. See, that's him, and that's her. That's him, and that's her. So it's endless regress, yin-yaks.
So when I look at this, I'm reminded of these sort of experiments where they had grid patterns for blind people, and they will, like, poke the grid pattern from a camera or something, and they can sort of learn to recognize what they're looking at by the poking of grid patterns on their sensitive piece of tissue. Oh, I know. For blind people. So you can imagine that you don't have to even do anything particularly clever, like hooking into the neurons in the brain or anything. You just have, like, this way that people can transmit these poking things on the back of their, like, probably you don't want back up the neck. You want a place with lots of nervousness.
You know, my wife pokes me a lot. I'm getting old, I forget things a lot. What else do we have here? Biotech. Okay, this is one of my personal, something I'm really interested in. I wrote a novel about this called Franken the Alexer. It's set in the year 2003, and there aren't any more. I always feel like the chip's going to go away. I mean, we don't use things made of ears, you know? And the chip's only been around for 50 years, you know? Not all that long.
Humans have this great ability to forget that time changes, to forget history. I mean, things do change. We're not going to keep, things aren't going to be the same. Most of you, you younger computer science majors, in your own life, you're going to see things change really very substantially because of things that you're working with. That's why we make you learn a little bit of theory as well as language. Because the language is going to change, the devices are going to change. Now, I like this idea of the biotech future. This is just sort of...
One image I have, I think house trees will be very big. You'll have the seed about the size of a pizza. You push it into the ground, and you'll put really a lot of water on it. Lots of water. And it'll grow. And the tree will have squid skin on the inside walls, so you can see video displays. It'll get metal out of the soil, so it'll have enough metal in it to have antennas. For plumbing, you'll have little things that bulge out that will fill up with water, or things that function as toilets.
And then, you know, you can get these wing-like things, sort of like a stingray you put on your back, fly around. So this is, I think, this is something we probably really will see happen. We won't see it happen, but within a thousand years. I mean, look at how things have changed since the year 1000. I want to comment a little bit on that you will see that chips probably would go away. So in computer networks, chips or electronics actually is a bottleneck. So we have optical fiber that can run like, you know.
potentially 10 bits per second. And then you come to this electronic switch that can only go maybe gigabits per second. That's a good point. So there's a big bottleneck that. And people are working on pure optical switches. So no electronic, just pure optical. And so that it will not be a bottleneck there. So there's really great potential different mediums about it. Well, all sorts of physical things can be computers. Yeah. Probably you wouldn't want, I don't know if you could use an organism for the switch or not. Organisms tend not to be that fast. But yeah, certainly something on the nature of a light computer or a quantum mechanical computer.
Another thing about, let's see, whoops, that's the wrong button. Okay, and this, there's some drawings I did. There's a novel, a book I wrote called Saucer Wisdom. It was about, I have predictions about the future, and this doesn't have much to do with anything, but these are, they're growing knives. See, they're like corn plants, but they get the metal out of the ground and they form this knife blade, and then you have this sort of sock. Doesn't have much to do with anything. Here's a city that's grown with biocomputation. I like the idea of the building's just growing, being all sorts of weird shapes. This thing we're already seeing thanks to,
Because we have computer graphics, you can do AutoCAD. Things don't have to be squares. You can have things that are weird hyperboloids, even weird cubic cortex surfaces. So things can be a lot more interesting. They used to imagine that when things became computerized, they would be boring. Because all people do is that they'll hold clean boxes in the basements. And then we see, actually, we can build much more fanciful things thanks to computer-aided design. So when did you do this, Rudy? Do you remember? When I drew this? It says 2001.
Well, I'm waiting for the movie of my book. Yeah, Stan Lee, his stuff is getting out there quite. quite a bit. I just, I was kind of wondering, what is a wear series? Well, my best-known novel, or what he calls the wear series, there was software, then there was wetware. And that's then I got into the idea, wetware is your DNA, but also the chemicals that live in your body, the biotransmitters. And so they got into programming that, and then they got, basically in software they built intelligent robots, and then the robots just sort of get even, they learned wetware so they could start programming people, and they could put their personalities into people. So it works both ways. And then there was freeware.
Which is largely set in Santa Cruz. It's sort of a song cat novel. It's where we have, well, the idea there is one way to travel from world to world. Instead of, we have this idea now that we might put our meat body in this metal can and then fly for a thousand years to another world while we're asleep. It's not very practical. It's sort of like in the ancient times, they would say, well, maybe we'll sail a ship to the moon, you know, or maybe we'll take a magic carriage. I mean, I think the chances of flying there in a metal spaceship are equally unrealistic.
A better way to do it would be to encrypt yourself. You know, zip. Zip yourself. Get your webware, get your software. Just zip it into this file and then send it as a very energetic cosmic ray that has a lot of information on it. And then the one catch there is actually a receiver out there somewhere. You know, so it has a... That's a little bit tricky. So...
You might just hope that if it hits something sufficiently computationally dense, then it would be diverse enough to be able to decrypt itself. So that's what happens in freeware. There's these things like cosmic rays, and there are these robots in there that are now made of sort of soft plastic. They're like three-dimensional cellular automata. And when one of these rays hits the one, the ray unzips itself and then takes over the piece of plastic, and then the alien is there. So that's freeware. You didn't order it. You didn't really want it, but here it is. So the aliens visit the Earth there. And then in the last one, realware, people find a way to directly program matter.
But yeah, there's been talk for years of making those into movies. At one point, I was involved with some people in Hollywood for about five years, and they went through ten scripts for software. And the writers would get $100,000 for writing the script. And I was like, let me write a script. That's going to suck. You've done ten of them. No, you wouldn't know how. Here, we'll give you $5,000. Just keep quiet for a year. So it didn't work out, but it might get.
There's a big mania for making movies of Philip K. Dick's novels and stories. So you have to wait until they've made a movie of everything Philip K. Dick ever wrote. Unfortunately, he wrote a lot, so they've made 20 movies of his stuff. There's still 300 of them to go. Or maybe they'll get tired of it someday. But it's not something I'm hung up on waiting for anymore. Why don't you make your own movie? Yeah. Rome wasn't built in today. So one of the last things I want to say a little bit about... How about another question?
I've got some books to give away here. Come on. What's quantum computation? Oh, you have all my books anyway. Who wants a copy of Freck and the Elixir? Oh, you already got a book. Oh, okay. Who wants a copy? Okay. Actually, I have a question, too. In the background. So what do you think of current quality singularity? My read on it is that basically it's just yet another form of artificial intelligence and that he won't have to live long enough to be a computer to the prophecy. But also that it's kind of passe in the sense that computational devices direct us in very discreet ways in our everyday life.
So in a sense, they are embedded. I mean, if we're walking around with a cell phone in our hand, that's embedded. We certainly didn't do that 10 years ago. And they're guiding us, directing us towards places and people. And can actually lead us to our dads in the event of texting while driving. So in a sense, they are in control. So it's really an AI question and failures of AI, ultimately, to mimic the human brain. Well, there's several issues you're raising. One is there's this idea that people like called the singularity. And there's this idea that
computers will get to our level and then they'll start designing even better computers and there'll be this exponential increase. Then there's the other idea that computers might take over the world. Well, that's already happened. You spend all your time taking care of your computer. It's upgrading it, whatever it needs. It's amazing. They used to say they would be labor-saving devices. But you ever look at an old movie of people in the 1950s, and they don't have any computers. They're so relaxed. They're hanging around, looking at the window, taking walks. But it's a mixed blessing. But the whole singularity thing, there's a group of people in Silicon Valley. They call themselves post-humanists.
And they sort of made something, in a way, it's like a cargo cult or a religious cult out of the idea of singularity. They're something called the Singularity Institute. I mean, they do teach some interesting courses, but it's this sort of millennial fervor that the end of the world's going to come and the computers are going to change everything. And I think we could say, in a way, the singularity already happened. We sort of didn't notice. When you fall into a black hole, there's no clear-cut moment when you're across the event horizon. You sort of don't exactly notice that it happens. But that's how it was with the computer singularity. We're deep into it now.
I wrote a novel. I got so tired of hearing about the singularity, I wrote a novel called Post-Singularity. And I suppose that had already happened. For a while, science fiction writers had trouble. They're saying, well, we can't write about the future. We can't see what happens after the singularity. And then I slowly came to realize it's just piling on the BS and keep a straight face. It's just more interesting stuff. That's a book, by the way, you can get for free. A lot of my books you can get for free. We still have some I should give out here. Let's give a few of these out. Who wants a book? All right, here you go. You take one and get one to the guy behind you.
I didn't bring any more. You can get a lot of my books for free, I should tell you. Let me quickly jump here. I made a number of my books. I put out as what we call Creative Commons. So these are LegsReadyRucker.com, Lifebox, Squares, PostSingular. You can get all three of these books for free, assuming that you're willing to read an e-book instead of a paper book.
Almost out of time, let me just say a little more about the very last thing I wanted to mention. Quantum computation. I used to be uneasy about quantum computation because it's hellishly difficult to understand the articles about it. And then somebody said something and that just clicked and made it easy for me. They said whenever light is hitting a piece of matter and it's bouncing it back, the matter is doing a quantum computation. I was like, oh. So basically, that's just what, it's a way of talking about what an object is doing. It's always doing a quantum computation.
One way to think about it, if you look at a rock, you say that rock isn't doing jack. Okay, the rock, nothing going on there. But if you think about what's inside there, you've got, I don't know, maybe a septillion atoms in there, and they're all connected by these little sort of van der Waals forces or electrical forces, and they're all vibrating. It's like you take whatever, you know, a quadrillion or septillion, whatever it is, that many points, you put springs between them all, and it's vibrating. It's fairly clear that that can compute anything that's possible to compute. To be a universal computer, the bar is actually rather low. If you can add and multiply, you can, in principle, do any computation. So those are doing these intricate computations.
So we can even imagine you can have a mind living inside the stone. The only trouble is the input-output. That's where telepathy is going to help us. We need to get into the physical computations taking place. Now this book, I wrote a book called The Life Box, The Seashell and the Soul. That was the only reason I retired. I wanted to write this long book about the meaning of computation. And that, again, you can get as a PDF online. So there's a word. And I wrote a couple of you. I gave an novel called Hylozoic.
And that's a real word in Wikipedia. If it's in Wikipedia, you know it's real. So it's the philosophical point of view that all matter, including the universe as a whole, is in some sense alive. And that's a notion that was more popular, oh, before about 1900, when sort of the Industrial Revolution hit, machines kind of took over. But it's an interesting way to think that objects might be alive.
I know some of you probably have to go somewhere before, so maybe at this point I'll wrap it up. I already have a book, so this is actually a genuinely interesting question. What do you think of Kurt Gödel, and does his work figure in that? Oh, well, Kurt Gödel, he's my guru. When I was a grad student, I got to meet him once, and he was one of the high points of my life. He's the most intelligent human being I've ever met. Stephen Wolfram is pretty close, but Gödel is more. So Gödel...
Well, he proves in some interesting things about robot consciousness, basically. Some of his work and Turing's work is related. And to make a long story short, you can have intelligent robots. It's just that you won't be able to understand the program. And I used to think, well, that means it's impossible. But then, now we know about neural nets. We say, well, I mean, if you have a neural net with, you know, you have a thousand neurons, a million neurons, you really can't. You've trained it. It's evolved. It's doing something. But in a sense, you don't really know what the program is. And so we can bring into being systems as intelligent as ourselves.
won't ever be able to fully grasp how they operate. So that's sort of a nice... We do that already by having children. So it's not so different. So it's great to be back at San Jose State. Great to see you all. I have time. If you have to leave, don't be embarrassed. So you said there's computation going on inside of the rock. Yes, I would say that. Well, actually, you said there could be. I would say any physical process can be regarded as a computation in the sense that it's...
I mean, for a classical navigation, isn't there like an energy cost? I mean, they've got all sorts of energy considerations that are actually going to be interesting. Okay, that's an interesting point. It's a difficult point. You're a physicist. There's one in every ground. Really? But that's worth thinking about. Usually to say a computation, you have to sort of... You can have reversible computations, and then there's not so much... I guess that would be one way out of it. Interesting computations. Yeah, reversible is not necessarily interesting.
Is it true that you have a character in one of your books, Hacker and the Ants, that's based on Dr. Pierce? Well, I would say based on it. Are you just a character? Well, John has a, I don't know, John's an inspiring person. There is a character called Ben Bree, I think he's his boss in Hacker and the Ants. He's maybe a little bit reminiscent of Professor Pierce.
That was my Silicon Valley novel. I think that was a pretty good one. It's not as well known as it should be, but it's The Hacker and the Answer. I went and worked for Autodesk for four years while I was teaching here. I got some leave and then went to Autodesk. And that was when I really learned a lot about computer science there. And then the stock price went down and they laid off some people. That's an experience many people want to have a chance to enjoy over your careers. But then I had fun writing a novel about that. Also, I think you have a character in Mathematicians and Love the Boost.
I thought I recognized myself in there as well. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You might disagree about which character you were. See, I had a book on artificial life. Was that written at Autodesk? Well, one thing I was doing there that we thought I was doing, they wanted to do a series. Their real business is AutoCAD, but for a while they had so much money they didn't care. So they said, let's do a popular science series. So we did a product on cellular automata, and then we did a book, and this would be a program in a book, a program of chaos, a company of James Lee's book, Chaos. And then towards the end, I was working on something there called Artificial Life Lab. And then...
When I was laid off there, they said, well, you can keep this on the real one. And then I got a company called The Way Group to publish it. So there's a book and some software. All of the software, you can download it from my webpage. You can go to rudyrucker.com and you can find a way to find it.
Yeah? So you said earlier in your talk that language was a way of transmitting information that we can't, you know, we don't have a better way to transmit. So do you think that at a certain point, maybe after hypothetical telepathy, do you think that the need for individuals to exist will be non-existent? Because since we're so efficiently transmitting information, then everyone will just be collective. Well, that's an interesting theme, is the sort of idea of the hive mind. And often we view, there's sort of a tradition in science fiction to view, if you meet some aliens and they're a hive, then people are, ah, you know, this is terrible. But we already are a hive, in a way. I mean...
Like an ant by itself can't live. A human being, if you were just alone, I mean, everything you know you learned from other people, all your skills you learned, most of the things you consume are made by people. So we are a hive, but we have this feeling that there's this certain private part which is shrinking every day. But if you had telepathy, then... You know, there's lots of scenarios you can imagine. That's what science fiction is good for. You say, well, let's sort of play with this. Could it be a nice thing to be in a telepathic eye? It's easy to imagine bad things. You know, you're getting spam in your dreams and people are watching you every thought. But there might be some, the idea of merging in and feeling empathy with the people around you, that's sort of a positive thing. So you have to weigh that option.
Speaking of telepathy, that painting you had on telepathy, there was a torus with a circular cross section. I guess there's some mathematical manifold idea in there, but what were you thinking of that, Taylor? Well, that was actually meant to be the cover. I wrote a novel. My first science fiction novel was a book called Space Time Donuts. And I painted this as a cover for that. That book was reissued not so long ago. One of the things, if you're a writer...
It's a constant struggle to keep your books in print. So it's something you have to spend an hour or two hours every day thinking about it. And e-books are good because then you can, if you get something in an e-book, it's sort of safe. It'll be sort of in print. But receiving standards are going to be changing all the time. So even there, it's going to pass. But what was the connection to telepathy of that particular geometry? Oh, because there's a, there's a...
There's a cable connecting the guy's head to that torus. So sometimes I sneak in a picture that's for another purpose and I claim it's illustrating something else. I thought it sort of reminded me. It's a nice picture, so that's why I was there. Have you heard of the Three Buddy? It's a trilogy written by a Chinese science fiction writer. It's called Three Buddy? Three Buddy, yeah. That's, you know, I don't know very much about Chinese science fiction. I heard somebody, I had a friend who's a game designer, and he said in China they almost don't have the notion of science fiction. Oh, this is the best one. Oh, yeah? Yeah, even if I'm not a fan of science fiction, but I'm just going to know his story. Well, why don't you send me a link to it? Yeah, okay. I'm Rudy at RudyRucker.com. He has a very big, huge fan in China. That's good. Yeah, my friend, he said mostly the computer games in China were usually set in...
Some sort of medieval time, there's sort of nights in a certain period. No, I don't think so. This one is about, yeah, it writes a lot about computation too. It's set in the future. Yeah, and it talks about telepracy. Is it in English? Translated? I don't think there's an English version yet, but it's quite popular in China. I'd like to see that. Well, you can translate it. I hope so. Okay.
Have you ever considered chaotic my job? Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Thank you. Thank you.