Koen Hendrickx

Interview to Rudy Rucker

for Planet Internet (ISP) based in Antwerp. Erasmus, Belgium.

Q:  There  seems  to  be a  central  theme  in  your science  fiction:
Artificial Life forms resemble biological life forms because they both
reproduce themselves and they both evolve according to the laws of the
survival of the fittest?

A: Yes, this idea was implanted in me by the mathematician Kurt Gödel,
who remarked  that although  it is  absolutely impossible  to design a
machine as  intelligent as  oneself, it  is possible  to bring about a
situation where such a machine can evolve. Of course at this stage  in
history, we are still nowhere  near the limits of the  intelligence of
the machines that we actually can  design. But in some far future,  it
will be necessary to use artificial evolution to go beyond what we can
design. I might remark that I was a little over-optimistic in  setting
Software in the year 2020, which is now just around the corner.

Q:  In  your  Ware  tetralogy,  Artificial  Life  and  biological life
increasingly coincide. With Software, you were way ahead of your time,
but writers like Hans Moravec and  Kevin Kelly have done much to  make
your  ideas  more acceptable  in  America. Do  you  think that  people
distinguish too much between human and machine?

A: I remember when  I was writing Software,  I was wrestling with  the
notion of whether a machine can  ever be alive like a person.  How can
chips have  soul? But  then I  hit on  the idea  that the  “soul” is a
universal mystical  jelly that  imbues everything.  A rock  is already
alive like a person.  This said, of course  there is a big  difference
between a machine and a person.  But if machines became soft and  wet,
that would be a step toward being more like us. That’s why in Freeware
I liked having the moldies.

Q: One of  the sites in  the Ware tetralogy  is a colony  on the moon,
built by robots. The Dutch  astronaut Wubbo Ockels works on  a similar
idea in the project Euromoon (http://www.estec.esa.nl/euromoon/),  but
the ultimate goal of Euromoon  is human settlement. Is human  presence
on the moon necessary?

A: It would  certainly be interesting  to have a  human colony on  the
moon. I went and  looked at that the  Euromoon page of Wubbo  Ockels —
what a wonderful name he has! The page refers to the discovery of  ice
at  the lunar  South Pole;  this is  indeed something  which is  very
encouraging. As  a practical  matter it  would be  easier in  the near
future to have  a human colony  on the moon  than to have  a colony of
selfreproducing robots. But a middle  path might be the best:  to have
robots with fairly  low level of  intelligence that are  instructed by
the (slow) remote link  to people on the  Earth. Given that there’s  a
several-second-lag in the communication with Earth, the robots have to
be smart enough not to fall off a cliff, and so on. I think this could
be  a very  popular form  of entertainment,  to rent  time running  an
actual lunar  robot, especially  if a  good Virtual  Reality interface
were in place.

Q: Studly in The Hacker and the Ants is a speaking household robot you
can relate to  as a friend.  Do you think  there’s a real  chance that
such a tool will be developed in the next ten or twenty years?

A: Oh, yes, I think so for sure. Descendants of the Furby. Your  robot
friend would  not really  have to  be so  very intelligent.  We humans
anthropomorphize relentlessly and  can already easily  image ourselves
to be  having a  conversation with,  say a  cat or  a dog.  Why not  a
machine?