Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
Embracing Your Inner Robot: A Singular Vision Of The Future
"Child-robot with Biomimetic Body" (or CB2)
at Osaka University in Japan in 2009, where the android was slowly
developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their
facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship.
Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Last week I went to a lecture by the inventor and futurist author Ray Kurzweil, who was visiting Dartmouth College
for a couple of days. Kurzweil became famous for his music synthesizers
and his text-to-speech software, which are of great help to those who
can't read or are blind. Stevie Wonder was one of his first customers.
His main take, that the exponential advance in information and computer
technology will deeply transform society and the meaning of being human,
resonates with many people and scares a bunch more.
Using his exponential curve for processing-power-per-dollar increase, Kurzweil estimates that by 2045 we will reach the "Singularity,"
a point of no return where people and machine will reach a deep level
of integration. You can watch Kurzweil walk through his ideas at bigthink.com. Here's a sample posted to YouTube:
YouTube
For those who can afford it — and that's a whole topic of
discussion by itself: what will happen to those who can't? — life will
be something very different. Lifespan will be enormously extended, death
will become an affliction and not an inevitability. I guess only taxes
will remain a certainty!
Are such scenarios sci-fi or the reality of the future?
Take synthetic biology,
for example, the ability to reprogram the genes of existing creatures
to make them do what we want them to do. We might have bacteria create
electricity and clean water from waste, produce blood, vaccines, fuels
or whatever we fancy. We could recreate specific bodily organs to
replace those that are malfunctioning, using your own DNA; boost your
immunity against effectively anything; enhance intelligence and memory.
Advances in the speed with which we read genomes have been so dramatic that we now talk about using DNA as a storage device.
After all, DNA encodes information in very clear ways and we could
manipulate it to encode any information we want. As George Church and Ed
Regis write in their thought-provoking recent book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature ,
in principle we could store the whole of Wikipedia (in all languages)
on a chip the size of a cell, for a cost of $1 for 100,000 copies.
Human-machine
integration, in fact, is already happening at many levels: most people
feel lost without their cell phone, as if a part of their body or self
is missing.
According to Kurzweil, by 2029 computers will be powerful enough to simulate the human brain. From his "Law of Accelerated Returns"
he estimates that in 25 years we will have technologies billions of
times more powerful than we have today. Just think that five years ago
social media — today a transformative force in the world — was
practically inexistent, or that the biggest computers in the 1970s were a
million-times more expensive and a thousand-times less efficient than
the chips we have in our smartphones, representing a billion-fold
increase in computing efficiency per dollar.
Singularity, in the case of black hole physics
(Kurzweil's inspiration for the term), represents a breakdown point,
where the laws of physics as we currently understand them stop making
sense. This doesn't mean that there is an a priori reason for us not to
understand the physics near the singularity, but that we currently don't
have the theoretical tools to do so.
In the case of artificial
intelligence plus synthetic biology, the final alliance between humans
and bio-informatics technology, it's much harder to predict what could
happen.
Every new technology can be applied for good or for
evil (or both). If, as Kurzweil, we take an optimistic view and see how
humanity has benefited from technology as a harbinger of things to come
(we live longer and better, and although we kill more efficiently, we
kill less), the Singularity will bring a new stage in the history of
evolution, prompted by one of its creations: us.
The body will
be superfluous, since we are, in essence, coiled information, a
blueprint, a sequence of instructions that can be duplicated at will.
Will you then become a memory stick that can be inserted into a machine
that can make copies of you? Or, perhaps, we will become a super-evolved
character in a video game, an intelligent Sims person,
convinced that the virtual reality surrounding us is real. After all, to
simulate reality in ways identical to what we perceive is simply a
matter of data gathering, advanced software, and processing power, all
promises of this upcoming future.
If this is what's next, and
odds are it is, we should start thinking of the consequences springing
out of humanity's redefinition. For one thing, it'll be important to
make sure copies of yourself are backed up in a safe location. You never
know when an evil mind might decide to delete you from existence!
That's right, in this new future we won't die anymore; we will be
deleted.
Would You Vote For An Atheist? Tell The TruthNovember 13, 2012 Children Are Not Born Bad, Stupid or Lazy
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