To grab the printable copy of the puzzle, click the banner at left.

Don’t forget to submit your solution to the puzzle to Chris for a Summertime Puzzle Contest code. Please be a good sport; don’t post the answer to this puzzle in the comments or elsewhere while the puzzle contest is still going on.

For more free puzzles, check out my work over at The Griddle.

The ethical consideration of new technologies is nothing new. Discussions of the effects on society and the environment from technologies has been going on for decades. These discussions have involved a diverse set of technologies ranging from petrochemicals to mining to the internet. However, it seems clear from the history of these ethical analyses that rarely are the possible negative effects of a new technology given near as much consideration as the positive outcomes before the implementation is executed.

We most often let our intelligence run out in front of our wisdom in matters of technology implementation. For example, would the internet work the way it does today had we considered the possibility of viruses and worms and internet attacks? How about predatory attacks on children on social networking sites? I contend that the answer would be an emphatic “no”. The anonymous aspect of the internet would have been seen for the problem it has become and we would have traceable addressing (like phone numbers) and other protections. Of course there is talk about these features being implemented into a second-generation internet, but why shouldn’t this have been done up front?

We seem to be more than capable of taking an infant technology and predicting all kinds of benefits and products. Why are we not equally capable of considering the negatives ahead of time?

The answer, of course, is about dollars. There is money to be made in implementation that overwhelms any attempt to discuss negatives because that would slow down the wheels of industry.

Regardless of this, it is becoming equally clear that there is money to be lost on the back end by not considering the negatives, pre-implementation; not to mention the nonmonetary effects. The BP oil spill is only the most media visible of these effects that have become huge financial, social, and environmental catastrophies.

Still, the push toward implementation is definitely stronger than any pressure to consider the entire ethics panorama, regardless of the historical precedents. So, how do we change this culture?

I want to hear your ideas.

To grab the printable copy of the puzzle, click the banner at left.

Don’t forget to submit your solution to the puzzle to Chris for a Summertime Puzzle Contest code. Please be a good sport; don’t post the answer to this puzzle in the comments or elsewhere while the puzzle contest is still going on.

For more free puzzles, check out my work over at The Griddle.

Artificial intelligence has been explored in stories and movies from the Golden Age of Science Fiction with the likes of Isaac Asimov in ‘I Robot’ to Spielberg’s movie A.I.

I’ve explored the deviant side of A.I. in my novel CyberKill.

Now, two recent news articles explore the possible future of intelligence on this planet and decided that mankind may not be in the equation.

Take the “Singularity”’.

Ray Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called ‘The Singularity Is Near’, and predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology. He states, “What I am predicting is that we will have machines—we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.”

In other words, the “Singularity” is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.”

Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

But what about the ethical implications?

What troubles Christian Brugger the most is the notion that technology will one day replace God. “If we start to think about technology as a kind of savior, is it going to overcome our misguided ambitions? Is it going to overcome those kinds of prejudices that cause us to hate our neighbor? To many of us who follow a religion, we’d say that God would help us to overcome those things.”

In response, Kurzweil has said, “We are the species that does change ourselves. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay with the limits of our biology. If you want to speak in religious terms you can say that’s what God intended us to do.”

But will this “Singularity” be in the form of what normally comes to mind – individual robots?

Not necessarily.

The Economist has an excellent article on what is called “Swarm Intelligence”.  Swarm intelligence is the collective, decentralized intelligence found in ant colonies and bee hives, where the community acts intelligently but there is no individual or group planning or leading.

It turns out that swarm intelligence is a great fit for AI, and explains how simple, inexpensive agents (robots) can one day handle complex, or otherwise impossible tasks.

For example:

Digital ants and birds, then, are good at thinking up solutions to problems, but Dr Dorigo is now working on something that can act as well as think: robots. A swarm of small, cheap robots can achieve through co-operation the same results as individual big, expensive robots—and with more flexibility and robustness; if one robot goes down, the swarm keeps going. Later this summer, he will be ready to demonstrate his “Swarmanoid” project. This is based on three sorts of small, simple robot, each with a different function, that co-operate in exploring an environment. Eye-bots take a look around and locate interesting objects. Foot-bots then give hand-bots a ride to places identified by the eye-bots. The hand-bots pick up the objects of interest. And they all run home.

When the “Singularity” arrives in whatever form, where would mankind fit in?

Or to paraphrase one Golden Age Science Fiction author — man will create the perfect artificial intelligence and that will be the last thing he will be allowed to create.

Note: The original posting of this puzzle had two solutions. If you plan to redeem this puzzle for a code for the Summertime Puzzle Contest, please re-solve rows 6 and 7 using the new shapes to ensure a correct answer!

To grab the printable copy of the puzzle, click the banner at left.

Don’t forget to submit your solution to the puzzle to Chris for a Summertime Puzzle Contest code. Please be a good sport; don’t post the answer to this puzzle in the comments or elsewhere while the puzzle contest is still going on.

For more free puzzles, check out my work over at The Griddle.

My novel CyberKill is no exception.

Many years ago I read an article in Time Magazine dated March 25^th, 1996 about a young artificial intelligence (AI) programmer who created a series of AI agents and sent them out over the internet to see if they would evolve.

“An ecobiologist and bottom-up computer theorist will soon launch onto the Internet a single, tiny self-reproducing program which will spread among hundreds of computers around the world. If all goes well, this artificial organism will quickly populate the network and begin to evolve……’

I thought to myself, what if the programmer terminated his experiment? If the Artificial Intelligence evolved into a real intelligence, would they take his act of shutting down the experiment as attempted murder? From there, I thought “How far would an artificial intelligence go for revenge?”

In CyberKill, the technology the geographic locations, government and military installations and organizations, information warfare scenarios, artificial intelligence, robots, and the information and communications technology in the book all exist. I wanted to show the reader that what happens in the book could very well happen today.

The idea of an artificial intelligence program as described in CyberKill becoming sentient in the AI character of Dorian is no longer a fiction.

An recent news article in the UK Telegraph states that computer-simulated life forms which reproduce themselves inside their electronic world can evolve to produce basic intelligence. It is hoped that the discovery may in future lead to artificially intelligent brains “bred” within a computer.

The “Avidians”, a race of digital beings in a computer world called Avida run by scientists at Michigan State University, with computer code instead of DNA that is copied – not quite perfectly – every time they breed. The random copying errors create differences in their code which dictate how well, or badly, they will perform in their simulated world.

Early experiments put the Avidians on a grid of cells, and let them live and die there. The grid had a gradient of food – cells at one end have more than the ones at the other, where the Avidians begin. After 100 generations of breeding, a mutation led to one of them evolving a “gene” instructing it to move forward. When it landed in a more food-rich cell, it reproduced more quickly, and had more offspring than its rivals.

After thousands more generations, the Avidians had evolved something more impressive: a rudimentary memory. They had started moving towards the food source in a zig-zag motion, changing direction when they were going in the wrong direction. To do that, they had to be able to compare their current cell to the previous one. Robert Pennock, one of the scientists behind the experiments, told New Scientist: “Doing this requires some rudimentary intelligence. You have to be able to assess your situation, realise you’re not going in the right direction, reorient, and then reassess.”

A later experiment added a new twist: cells that contained instructions on where to go to find food. Some of those instructions were simply “do what you did in the last cell”. In order to make sense of those instructions, Avidians had to evolve a more complex memory – and duly did so. Laura Grabowski, another of the researchers, said: “The environment sets up selective pressures so organisms are forced to come up with some kind of memory use – which is in fact what they do.”

This sheds some light on how intelligence originally evolved: MSU zoologist Fred Dyer says: “Laura’s work suggests that the evolution of an ability to solve simple navigational problems depends on first evolving a simple short-term memory – and this in digital organisms that still don’t exhibit something you would call learning.” But the findings may, in the future, allow researchers to create true artificial intelligence.

Dr Grabowski says: “In the past, the approach has been to start with high-level intelligence and reproduce that in a computer.

“This is the opposite. We’re showing how complex traits like memory can be built from the bottom up, from things that are really very simple.”

Bottom up? Exactly like what that young programmer tried to do back over a decade ago and became the initiate of CyberKill.

Are the Avidians the precursor to Dorian in CyberKIll.

Time will tell. In the meantime, you can check out the future of AI in CyberKill.

Dorchester Publishing – famed for its mass-market romance novels – has seen sales of traditional books fall by 25% last year. This is interesting because their primary market focus has been on older women readers who have embraced new e-book readers – supposedly because of the ability to change font sizes. Maybe someone should come up with a Fabio-inspired case for the Kindle to mimic the cover art that my mom so cleverly hid with her “book caddy”.

Some authors and imprints have decried the move by Dorchester, and I agree that mass-market paperbacks still have a place in the book world. The challenge is that the current supply chain dynamics will have to change to make this work. Retailer and wholesaler percentages are out of whack for this market segment, return policies provide no incentive for retailers to order the right books, and distributors provide very little value for a significant cut of the pie.

While we have no plans for mass-market paperback releases for our titles, I would hate to see the demise of the format. What would we do with all those book caddies without them?

I like the adjectives used by the publishers to describe the new generation of e-books: enriched, amplified, enhanced. Very cool. While publishers can’t decide what to call these new book formats, there seems to be general agreement that this phenomena has been kick-started by the arrival of the iPad – which really opens up the possibility of what interactive books are all about.

Videos and author interviews in Nixonland, research photos and alternate endings in Deliver Us from Evil, and Pillars of Earth television clips are good stuff – early attempts to compete. Is this a fad like 3D movies – which are already meeting resistance by movie goers? I don’t think so. Well, not if done right. Like any new technology, there has to be some lasting value after the initial hype has died down.

In my mind, this value is in extending the experience – not merely putting some movie clips into an e-book file. The reader needs to feel that they are immersed in the new format and connected with a community of like-minded folks who share their interest and passion. In the end, it is all about making the experience fun and compelling. We’re not there yet, but it’s going to happen.

Electronic reading devices are transforming the concept of a book – LA Times.

This article dismisses the myth that reading is a solitary endeavor – reading is a community affair; readers have a desire to reach out to authors and each other for collaboration and fellowship. It shows that new technology can make learning more interesting and add a meaningful new dimension to novels and storytelling.

I disagree with the premise that the barrier to entry is lowered for self-published authors – the cost of making videos and doing the coding necessary for this new generation of e-book is well beyond the means of most individual authors. That said, I am hoping that the viral nature of the technology will allow undiscovered authors to get noticed and break the stranglehold of formulaic “blockbusters” that the big six publishers seem to be fixated on publishing.

Finally, I really like the educational advances promised by making textbooks interactive. The idea that learning can only be accomplished by reading long chapters out of a linear textbook is crazy. Yes, that’s how we old people learned. But – and I don’t know about you – my research abilities have improved vastly in this internet age where I can bounce between subjects with a click of the mouse. Short attention span? Maybe. But who says that making learning more entertaining and dynamic isn’t the right way to go.

Overall, this is a great article that puts the technology into good context.

To grab the printable copy, click the banner at left.

Don’t forget to submit your solution to the puzzle to Chris for a Summertime Puzzle Contest code. Please be a good sport; don’t post the answer to this puzzle in the comments or elsewhere while the puzzle contest is still going on.

For more free puzzles, check out my work over at The Griddle.