Companion or rival of the future?
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Machines
and the man
Science at
its most hairbrained, or the incisive portrait of a future where humans and machines
blend seamlessly into one? The debate over Massachusetts-based scientist Ray Kurzweil’s
predictions for a post-biological era not far from now have stirred angst and controversy
in about equal measure.
The one thing that cannot be doubted is Kurzweil’s track record in artificial intelligence.
In 1976, he pioneered the first print to speech machine for the blind, in 1984 the
first computer music keyboard and the first speech recognition programme three years
later. His vision of the near future was set to paper in a book in 1990 that predicted
the world wide web, the spread of “smart” military weapons and the emergence of a
computer that would conquer the world of chess by 1998. He was one year out.
No litany of inventions or honours, however, could spare Kurzweil a hostile reception
to the ideas laid out in his latest volume of prophecies, The Age of Spiritual Machines
(Viking, 1999). For many in philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence,
full human consciousness hovers beyond even a super-machine’s potential—and possibly
beyond all scientific understanding. Writing in The New York Review of Books, philosopher
John Searle castigated Kurzweil for supposing that a computer simulation of a brain
can be conscious: the computer, Searle argues, “just shuffles the symbols.”
On a different note, Bill Joy, head of Sun Microsystems, drew from Kurzweil’s work
to rail against technologies that might eventually exterminate humankind. His fears
have even been echoed by robot researchers such as Hugo De Garis, who recently called
for urgent debate over what might happen if machines turn conscious and treat us
much as we now treat dogs and cats.
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I
let my body do what it wants. When you are in love, you cannot organize your body.
Roberto
Benigni, Italian film director (1952-)
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Do
we really need our flesh and blood? Ray Kurzweil, guru of Artificial Intelligence,
believes that the conscious machine is only decades away—so get ready to download
How
close is Artificial Intelligence to creating something that resembles a human?
There are broadly two levels of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The narrow level is
about getting non-biological systems to perform activities that require human intelligence
when we perform them. Strong AI is about applying the full range, depth and subtlety
of human intelligence in a machine.
We have many examples of narrow AI today. Machines can diagnose blood cells, guide
cruise missiles and play games likes chess better than any human. They can read books
and they can understand human speech. In comparison to humans, their memories are
more accurate, they are faster and they can share their knowledge instantly by quick
downloading.
There are two basic requirements for moving onto the next stage. One is just the
brute force hardware capacity. Already, we are working on certain circuit technologies
that will be a million times more powerful than the human brain, at least in terms
of raw capacity. But the more important issue is the software of intelligence. In
this regard, the most compelling project underway is one to reverse engineer the
human brain, possibly by using billions of tiny high-resolution scanners or nanobots
that can travel through capillaries and scan the brain from inside.
My feeling is that by 2030, we’ll be able to recreate how several hundred regions
of the human brain work in non-biological mediums.
Would that non-biological medium then be equivalent to a human?
We already have technology called a neuron transistor—an electronic circuit that
can communicate wirelessly in two directions with biological neurons. We also have
examples of intelligent machines placed in human brains via neural implants. A treatment
for Parkinson’s Disease, pioneered in France by Dr Alim-Louis Benabid replaces the
biological cells destroyed in the first seven or eight years of the disease. The
doctor demonstrated this by controlling the device from outside: when turned off,
the patients remained in an advanced stage of Parkinson’s—they were rigid like statues.
He flicked a switch, and it was as if they had suddenly come alive.
By 2030, we will be able to send billions of nanobots inside the human brain to communicate
wirelessly with billions of different points in the brain. They will give us the
ability to combine our biological intelligence with non-biological intelligence.
Ultimately you will have entities that are completely non-biological, with copies
of human brains derived from reverse engineering, and you will have biological humans
that have billions or trillions of nanobots in their brains augmenting their intelligence
or enabling them to exist in virtual reality. So we will no longer be able to say
humans on the left, machines on the right.
One of your most startling ideas is that of downloading the brain of an individual
onto a computer system. Is this truly possible?
I discussed in my book some thought experiments of what that would be like. Is that
the same person, for example? One simple thought experiment argues that it’s not,
that if you scan my brain while I’m sleeping and then reinstate it in a non-biological
medium, I would not even necessarily know about it. I’d wake up, feeling nothing
was different. Someone would come up to me and say: ‘Good news, Ray, we don’t need
your old brain any more.’ I would probably not accept that perspective. If you spoke
to the new Ray, he would have a memory of having been me, but at that point he is
a different person.
There’s also the issue: is he a person at all? Is he conscious, or is he just acting
that way? But the core essence of consciousness is ultimately not penetrable by scientific
examination. We have a shared assumption about humans that they are conscious, but
that shared consensus breaks down if you go outside humans. I’m really making a political
prediction that humans will accept non-biological entities as conscious because they’ll
be so convincing in their behaviour.
What would be the benefits of being transferred onto a non-biological medium?
A lot of profound scenarios emerge, one of which is full immersion in virtual reality.
These virtual reality environments will incorporate all of the senses, and will also
be able to augment human intelligence. Right now we’re restricted to a mere hundred
trillion neuron connections per second, millions of which are needed to operate one
chunk of knowledge. We’ll be able to vastly expand the human brain—think faster,
think bigger, more complex thoughts, have more knowledge and download knowledge.
But many neurological theories argue that consciousness is in fact very much mixed
up with emotions, with a sense of being in the body and having objects act upon the
body.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems using finite resources, including time.
And the problems we solve have much to do with our body—protecting it, feeding it,
clothing it, providing for its needs and desires. A lot of our thinking has to do
with our bodies: a disembodied human intelligence would quickly become depressed.
But as virtual reality becomes more and more compelling, human civilization will
be spending more of its time in it. By 2030 or 2040, these virtual reality environments
will be extremely competitive with real ones through the ability to meet with people
regardless of physical proximity and emulation of earthly and imaginary environments.
These non-biological entities will be able to have human-like bodies in virtual realities.
Also, through nanotechnology1, they’ll be able have human-like bodies in real reality.
What is driving this technology?
Ultimately we as a species have adopted evolution’s goals, and they are in my
mind virtual ones. If you look dispassionately at biological evolution, it has created
entities that are more and more intelligent, creative, beautiful, more capable of
higher emotions like love. God is a term that has been used to denote infinite levels
of these qualities. What the new paradigm signifies is the end of biological humanity
as the cutting edge of evolution. I see what we have been talking about as the next
step in evolution through humanity merging with its technology and continuing its
exponential growth in intellectual, creative powers.
1.
Nanotechnology is the construction of materials or circuits on the basis of complex,
self-replicating chemical molecules. |
