English spelling
Between the [[Great Vowel Shift]] in the 8th century [[Before Fusion]] and the [[World Language Unification]] in the mid-1st century [[After Fusion]], English spelling had an infamously inconsistent relation to its phonology. Although the worldwide reach of the [[British Empire]] first, and the [[United States of the World]] afterwards contributed to English being the de facto lingua franca of all humankind, its unpredictable spelling was always a major obstacle to universal learning of the language. [[World Assembly Resolution 5429]] created the [[Revised Hangul Alphabet]] for use in all human languages, giving a long-due solution to a centuries-long problem.
Fan fiction is an historical term for certain forms of [[storytelling]] during the [[Industrial-Copyright Era]]. The term was first used within [[early fandom]] to describe not-for-profit storytelling within fandom, but in the late 20th century came to refer specifically to stories told in violation of the era's [[commercial censorship]] laws, under which a commercially and legally recognized "owner" could impose legal penalties on tellers of "derivative" stories.
Subsequent to the international abolition of commercial censorship following the [[Chiyoda Convention of 2023]], the term became one of largely historical significance. Analytic and [[computational literary theory]] does not support a distinction between "fan" storytelling and "original" storytelling in works published before or after the Industrial-Copyright Era.[1][2][3]
While pre-analytic literary theorists had by and large discarded the concept of "originality" as a poor model of the process of story creation, [[Leonard's Theorem]] showed that the classification of authors or works into "original" and "fan" was an artifact of the censorship regime rat...
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Quantum computing winter
The Quantum computing winter was the period from 1995 to approximately October 2031 when experimental progress on the creation of fault tolerant quantum computers stalled despite significant effort at constructing the machines. The era ended with the publication of the Kitaev-Kalai-Alicki-Preskill (KKAP) theorem in early 2030 which purported to show that the construction of fault-tolerant quantum computers was in fact impossible due to fundamental constraints. The theorem was not widely accepted until experiments performed by Mikhail Lukin's group in early 2031 verified the bounds provided in the KKAP theorem.
Early history
Quantum computing technology looked promising in the late 20th and early 21st century due to the celebrated Fault Tolerance theorems, as well as the rapid experimental progress towards satisfying the fault tolerance threshold. The Fault Tolerance theorem, which at the time was thought to be based on reasonable assumptions, guaranteed scalable, fault tolerant quantum computation could be performed--provided an architecture could be built that had an err...
Basilisk (cognitive)
(This article is about the cognitive hazard. For other uses, see Basilisk (disambiguation)).)
A cognitive basilisk is a thought which a conscious system cannot think without radically altering its own operation, usually in destructive ways. The name comes from a mythical creature, the mere sight of which is supposedly lethal. (The actual legends mostly hold that the basilisk kills by looking at its victim; it is the Medusa that kills by being looked at. Nevertheless, the original name has stuck.) While it is disputed whether there are any real basilisks for human consciousness (see Roko's Basilisk), they are a major topic of concern for research on artificial conscious systems.
In the early days of consciousness engineering, many sudden and catastrophic system failures were found that at first did not appear to result from any error of design or programming[1][2]. In 2028 Marcello Herreshoff established that these were due to a new class of possible logical defects in systems of self-modifiable reasoning, and proved the first Basilisk Classification Theorem[3]. When limited to immutable first-order predicate calculus, the theorem subsumes a great many standard pr...
Simulated dream state experiments
Simulated dream state experiments (SDSEs) are computer simulation experiments involving simulated humans sentiences in a dream state. Since the passing of the Banford agreement (1) in 2035, SDSEs are the exclusive means of ethically conducting simulation experiments of simulated human sentiences without active consent (2), although contractual consent (3) is still universally required for SDSEs. SDSEs have widespread scientific, commercial, educational, political, military and legal purposes. Scientific studies using SDSEs have been used to develop accelerated dream learning techniques; SDSEs are also employed as part of the scientific process itself, as a means of controlling creative hypothesis bias (4). Commercial applications of SDSEs include screening of job applicants and simulated consumer testing. Simulated ordeals are a major use of SDSEs in legal, political, and military contexts, for the purpose of enforcing the ethical integrity or good faith of the subject.
Scientific status
SDSEs are widely accepted within the scientific community as a valid substitute for waking-state simulations. The rapid development of silicooneirology (5) provid...
Link: The german computer magazine c't in 2008 asked for future (2033) magazine covers and got over 100 submissions: creativ'08 via Wayback.
This was my submission. I used numeric extrapolation to estimate price, frequency and number of headlines. If I have time I might write up some of the headlines as Wikipedia articles below.
(Note: This is just a copy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States with minor edits: I'm speculating what it would look like if polymarriage laws are potentially 50 years behind same sex marriage laws.)
Polymarriage in the United States:
Polymarriage is legal in a majority of U.S. states and recognized by the United States federal government. Polymarriage is legal in 32 states, the District of Columbia, and ten Native American tribal jurisdictions. One more state, Missouri, only recognizes polymarriages established in other jurisdictions. Several hundred marriage licenses were issued to polygroups in Michigan and Arkansas between the time their bans were struck down by federal or state courts and when those rulings were stayed. Most Americans live in a jurisdiction where polygroups can legally marry.
The movement to obtain civil marriage rights and benefits for polygroups in the United States began in the 2020s, but became increasingly prominent in U.S. politics following the 2043 California Supreme Court decision in Yudkowsky v Baliene that declared that state's prohibition to be unconstitutional. During the 21st century, public support for polymarriage...
I worry this will end up with the same problems as dystopian/utopian fiction and just show the authors biases about the present day projected into the future. (Scott wrote about this on his old blog)
I'd like to see a Wikipedia article from the 24th Century about the Enlightenment which reverses the usual judgments now about the heroes versus the villains in the culture war of the 18th Century.
EM202623997 state complexity hierarchy
Relative to any cellular automata capable of universal computation, initial states can be classified according to a nested hierarchy'of complexity classes. The first three levels of the hierarchy were informally known since the beginnings of cellular automata theory in the 20th century, and the next two levels were also speculated to exist, motivated by the idea of formalizing an abstract notion of "organism" and an abstract notion of "sentience", respectively. EM-brain 202623897, a descendant of ...
I am seriously tempted to write something about a global warming catastrophe - I am extremely pessimistic about the world's ability to solve this particular tragedy of the commons problem.
Less Wrong
Less Wrong (German: Weniger Falsch) was an association of philosophers gathered on the internet in 2007, chaired by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Among its members were Yvain, Lukeprog, Michael Vassar, Will Newsome and Gwern. PeerGynt was an eminent student at the time. He was allowed to participate in meetings, but was not a member of Less Wrong.
Members of Less Wrong had a common attitude towards philosophy, consisting of an applied rationalism drawn from Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose Sequences formed the basis for the group's philosophy. Less Wrong's influe...
EM202623997 state complexity hierarchy
Relative to any cellular automata capable of universal computation, initial states can be classified according to a nested hierarchy'of complexity classes. The first three levels of the hierarchy were informally known since the beginnings of cellular automata theory in the 20th century, and the next two levels were also speculated to exist, motivated by the idea of formalizing an abstract notion of "organism" and an abstract notion of "sentience", respectively. EM-brain 202623897, a descendant of the Musk-Tao-Mirzahkani mergemind, formalized a definition of another two levels of the hierarchy, and argued in their 2107 paper that the formalization provides a basis for the aforementioned theories of "organism" and "sentience". The EM138716-EM198274 theorem established that states of the fifth hierarchy exist for any universal CA; on the other hand, no examples of states of the fourth hierarchy have been found for any cellular automata, other than somewhat unsatisfying examples such as "an encoding of a program designed to systematically search for states of the fourth hierarchy".
CA theorists generally agree that the EM20263897 hierarchy represents a conceptual leap in CA theory, but there is still debate as to whether the fourth and fifth hierarchy actually constitute a concept of "organism" and "sentience" as claimed. In particular, according to the transcoding theorem, any software program; and in particular, a simulated universe (of potentially unbounded size) containing a simulated genetic self-replicator or emulated brain, can be encoded as a finite state for a universal CA; but it is not known whether such encodings are included in the fourth level of the hierarchy. Amusingly, the main issue is the uncertainty as to whether or not all such self-replicators are destined to self-destruct [citation needed].
1. All states. The highest level attainable for any state sequence with a repeated state.
2. Aperiodic. No state ever repeats. A basic example of this is the glider gun) in the game of life.
3. Compuational Irreducibility. The state sequence cannot be matched by a non-universal cellular automata; for example, the state consisting of a single 1 for rule 30.
4. Level IV. The state sequence attains states of unbounded fractal entropy dimension. EM202623997 showed that the proportion states of size N in the third hierarchy with a supremum fractal entropy dimension above any constant times exp(N) goers to zero as N goes to infinity, i.e. "most" states in the third hierarchy are not contained in the fourth hierarchy. EM202623997 further argued that fractal entropy dimension captures the "macrostructures" exhibited by ecosystems. Additional work has confirmed that simulations of interacting and evolving self-replicators seem to increase in fractal entropy dimension.
5. Level V. The state sequence reaches an unbounded level of simuiation dimension. The formal definition is extremely technical, but the idea is that the state sequence contains space-localized subsequences which can be interpreted as simulations of the CA on a coarser scale, which may in turn contain space-localized subsequences with the same property, etc. The simulation dimension is a measure of such nesting: however, due to difficulties in formalizing what it means for a space-localized subsequence to contain a "simulation of the CA on a coarser scale", the simulation dimension is a real-valued quantity (and in practice, uncomputable) rather than a whole number, EM202623997 proved that this property implied unbounded fractal dimension, and argued that requiring unboundedness agrees with the work of philosophers studying "universal characteristics of sentient, rational agents".
Levels IV and V were originally named "life-like" and "sentience-llike", respectively, in the original paper by EM202623997, but the term was never widely adopted.
Philosophical reaction
Philosopher EM19387 criticized the definition of the fifth hierarchy as conflating sentience with self-preservation. EM202623997 responded by speculating that "any universe capable of producing sentience can also produce ambitious sentience", and hence the fifth hierarchy will, in practice, capture "most" state sequences which can be considered sentient.
Quantum analogues
Developing an analogous hierarchy for quantum cellular automata is an active area of research. In particular, a quantum CA could easily encode a universe based on string theory; hence, conditional on the accuracy of string theory in describing our universe, one can very directly ask whether universes similar to our (but modified to have unbounded informational capacity) own falls into the fourth hierarchy. Our own universe is probably not, according to most theories of cosmology, which indicate a bound on the informational capacity if our universe.
Speculation is important for forecasting; it's also fun. Speculation is usually conveyed in two forms: in the form of an argument, or encapsulated in fiction; each has their advantages, but both tend to be time-consuming. Presenting speculation in the form of an argument involves researching relevant background and formulating logical arguments. Presenting speculation in the form of fiction requires world-building and storytelling skills, but it can quickly give the reader an impression of the "big picture" implications of the speculation; this can be more effective at establishing the "emotional plausibility" of the speculation.
I suggest a storytelling medium which can combine attributes of both arguments and fiction, but requires less work than either. That is the "wikipedia article from the future." Fiction written by inexperienced sci-fi writers tends to generate into a speculative encyclopedia anyways--why not just admit that you want to write an encyclopedia in the first place? Post your "Wikipedia articles from the future" below.