Awakenings

When I was about 12 years old, my parents enrolled me by mail in the Science Fiction Book Club. After getting the initial set of books that came with membership, every month a flyer would arrive and I would peruse the books that were available. Through SFBC I read Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, J. G. Ballard's eerie novel The Crystal World, Fred Hoyle's October the First is Too Late, and D. F. Jones' Colossus. Colossus was my first exposure to the concept of artificial intelligence. In this story the eponymous computer, responsible for U.S. defense, becomes self-aware and very dangerous to its creators.

Since the time Colossus was published there have been many science fiction stories and novels of self-awareness arising from the collective action of otherwise simple "non-intelligent" components of a system. Recent examples include M. M. Buckner's Watermind and Frank Schatzing's The Swarm, as well as Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom. While we have yet to actually see true self-awareness arise in real life, there are many real-life examples of self-organization, a concept of key importance in the work of Ilya Prigogine (see last post). Self-awareness is the ultimate example of self-organization as an emergent property.

So what have I done? You guessed it. Bought another book, Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Watch. This is the sequel to WWW: Wake, in which a form of consciousness arises across the millions of nodes on the Internet and only a blind girl is witness to it. Enjoying the first book as much as I did, I'm looking forward to the sequel.