Physics of the Future_ How Science Will Shape Human Destiny... Part 6

But on the whole, animals do not have a well-developed sense of the distant past or future. Apparently, there is no tomorrow in the animal kingdom. We have no evidence that they can think days into the future. (Animals will store food in preparation for the winter, but this is largely genetic: they have been programmed by their genes to react to plunging temperatures by seeking out food.) Humans, however, have a very well-developed sense of the future and continually make plans. We constantly run simulations of reality in our heads. In fact, we can contemplate plans far beyond our own lifetimes. We judge other humans, in fact, by their ability to predict evolving situations and formulate concrete strategies. An important part of leaders.h.i.+p is to antic.i.p.ate future situations, weigh possible outcomes, and set concrete goals accordingly.

In other words, this form of consciousness involves predicting the future, that is, creating multiple models that approximate future events. This requires a very sophisticated understanding of common sense and the rules of nature. It means that you ask yourself "what if" repeatedly. Whether planning to rob a bank or run for president, this kind of planning means being able to run multiple simulations of possible realities in your head.

All indications are that only humans have mastered this art in nature.

We also see this when psychological profiles of test subjects are a.n.a.lyzed. Psychologists often compare the psychological profiles of adults to their profiles when they were children. Then one asks the question: What is the one quality that predicted their success in marriage, careers, wealth, etc.? When one compensates for socioeconomic factors, one finds that one characteristic sometimes stands out from all the others: the ability to delay gratification. According to the long-term studies of Walter Mischel of Columbia University, and many others, children who were able to refrain from immediate gratification (e.g., eating a marshmallow given to them) and held out for greater long-term rewards (getting two marshmallows instead of one) consistently scored higher on almost every measure of future success, in SATs, life, love, and career.

But being able to defer gratification also refers to a higher level of awareness and consciousness. These children were able to simulate the future and realize that future rewards were greater. So being able to see the future consequences of our actions requires a higher level of awareness.

AI researchers, therefore, should aim to create a robot with all three characteristics. The first is hard to achieve, since robots can sense their environment but cannot make sense of it. Self-awareness is easier to achieve. But planning for the future requires common sense, an intuitive understanding of what is possible, and concrete strategies for reaching specific goals.

So we see that common sense is a prerequisite for the highest level of consciousness. In order for a robot to simulate reality and predict the future, it must first master millions of commonsense rules about the world around it. But common sense is not enough. Common sense is just the "rules of the game," rather than the rules of strategy and planning.

On this scale, we can then rank all the various robots that have been created.

We see that Deep Blue, the chess-playing machine, would rank very low. It can beat the world champion in chess, but it cannot do anything else. It is able to run a simulation of reality, but only for playing chess. It is incapable of running simulations of any other reality. This is true for many of the world's largest computers. They excel at simulating the reality of one object, for example, modeling a nuclear detonation, the wind patterns around a jet airplane, or the weather. These computers can run simulations of reality much better than a human. But they are also pitifully one-dimensional, and hence useless in surviving in the real world.

Today, AI researchers are clueless about how to duplicate all these processes in a robot. Most throw up their hands and say that somehow huge networks of computers will show "emergent phenomena" in the same way that order sometimes spontaneously coalesces from chaos. When asked precisely how these emergent phenomena will create consciousness, most roll their eyes to the heavens.

Although we do not know how to create a robot with consciousness, we can imagine what a robot would look like that is more advanced than us, given this framework for measuring consciousness.

They would excel in the third characteristic: they would be able to run complex simulations of the future far ahead of us, from more perspectives, with more details and depth. Their simulations would be more accurate than ours, because they would have a better grasp of common sense and the rules of nature and hence better able to ferret out patterns. They would be able to antic.i.p.ate problems that we might ignore or not be aware of. Moreover, they would be able to set their own goals. If their goals include helping the human race, then everything is fine. But if one day they formulate goals in which humans are in the way, this could have nasty consequences.

But this raises the next question: What happens to humans in this scenario?

WHEN ROBOTS EXCEED HUMANS.

In one scenario, we puny humans are simply pushed aside as a relic of evolution. It is a law of evolution that fitter species arise to displace unfit species; and perhaps humans will be lost in the shuffle, eventually winding up in zoos where our robotic creations come to stare at us. Perhaps that is our destiny: to give birth to superrobots that treat us as an embarra.s.singly primitive footnote in their evolution. Perhaps that is our role in history, to give birth to our evolutionary successors. In this view, our role is to get out of their way.

Douglas Hofstadter confided to me that this might be the natural order of things, but we should treat these superintelligent robots as we do our children, because that is what they are, in some sense. If we can care for our children, he said to me, then why can't we also care about intelligent robots, which are also our children?

Hans Moravec contemplates how we may feel being left in the dust by our robots: "...life may seem pointless if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultraintelligent progeny as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby talk that we can understand."

When we finally hit the fateful day when robots are smarter than us, not only will we no longer be the most intelligent being on earth, but our creations may make copies of themselves that are even smarter than they are. This army of self-replicating robots will then create endless future generations of robots, each one smarter than the previous one. Since robots can theoretically produce ever-smarter generations of robots in a very short period of time, eventually this process will explode exponentially, until they begin to devour the resources of the planet in their insatiable quest to become ever more intelligent.

In one scenario, this ravenous appet.i.te for ever-increasing intelligence will eventually ravage the resources of the entire planet, so the entire earth becomes a computer. Some envision these superintelligent robots then shooting out into s.p.a.ce to continue their quest for more intelligence, until they reach other planets, stars, and galaxies in order to convert them into computers. But since the planets, stars, and galaxies are so incredibly far away, perhaps the computer may alter the laws of physics so its ravenous appet.i.te can race faster than the speed of light to consume whole star systems and galaxies. Some even believe it might consume the entire universe, so that the universe becomes intelligent.

This is the "singularity." The word originally came from the world of relativistic physics, my personal specialty, where a singularity represents a point of infinite gravity, from which nothing can escape, such as a black hole. Because light itself cannot escape, it is a horizon beyond which we cannot see.

The idea of an AI singularity was first mentioned in 1958, in a conversation between two mathematicians, Stanislaw Ulam (who made the key breakthrough in the design of the hydrogen bomb) and John von Neumann. Ulam wrote, "One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the human race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." Versions of the idea have been kicking around for decades. But it was then amplified and popularized by science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge in his novels and essays.

But this leaves the crucial question unanswered: When will the singularity take place? Within our lifetimes? Perhaps in the next century? Or never? We recall that the partic.i.p.ants at the 2009 Asilomar conference put the date at any time between 20 to 1,000 years into the future.

One man who has become the spokesperson for the singularity is inventor and best-selling author Ray Kurzweil, who has a penchant for making predictions based on the exponential growth of technology. Kurzweil once told me that when he gazes at the distant stars at night, perhaps one should be able to see some cosmic evidence of the singularity happening in some distant galaxy. With the ability to devour or rearrange whole star systems, there should be some footprint left behind by this rapidly expanding singularity. (His detractors say that he is whipping up a near-religious fervor around the singularity. However, his supporters say that he has an uncanny ability to correctly see into the future, judging by his track record.) Kurzweil cut his teeth on the computer revolution by starting up companies in diverse fields involving pattern recognition, such as speech recognition technology, optical character recognition, and electronic keyboard instruments. In 1999, he wrote a best seller, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which predicted when robots will surpa.s.s us in intelligence. In 2005, he wrote which predicted when robots will surpa.s.s us in intelligence. In 2005, he wrote The Singularity Is Near The Singularity Is Near and elaborated on those predictions. The fateful day when computers surpa.s.s human intelligence will come in stages. and elaborated on those predictions. The fateful day when computers surpa.s.s human intelligence will come in stages.

By 2019, he predicts, a $1,000 personal computer will have as much raw power as a human brain. Soon after that, computers will leave us in the dust. By 2029, a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than a human brain. By 2045, a $1,000 computer will be a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. Even small computers will surpa.s.s the ability of the entire human race.

After 2045, computers become so advanced that they make copies of themselves that are ever increasing in intelligence, creating a runaway singularity. To satisfy their never-ending, ravenous appet.i.te for computer power, they will begin to devour the earth, asteroids, planets, and stars, and even affect the cosmological history of the universe itself.

I had the chance to visit Kurzweil in his office outside Boston. Walking through the corridor, you see the awards and honors he has received, as well as some of the musical instruments he has designed, which are used by top musicians, such as Stevie Wonder. He explained to me that there was a turning point in his life. It came when he was unexpectedly diagnosed with type II diabetes when he was thirty-five. Suddenly, he was faced with the grim reality that he would not live long enough to see his predictions come true. His body, after years of neglect, had aged beyond his years. Rattled by this diagnosis, he now attacked the problem of personal health with the same enthusiasm and energy he used for the computer revolution. (Today, he consumes more than 100 pills a day and has written books on the revolution in longevity. He expects that the revolution in microscopic robots will be able to clean out and repair the human body so that it can live forever. His philosophy is that he would like to live long enough to see the medical breakthroughs that can prolong our life spans indefinitely. In other words, he wants to live long enough to live forever.) Recently, he embarked on an ambitious plan to launch the Singularity University, based in the NASA Ames laboratory in the Bay Area, which trains a cadre of scientists to prepare for the coming singularity.

There are many variations and combinations of these various themes.

Kurzweil himself believes, "It's not going to be an invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizon. We're going to merge with this technology.... We're going to put these intelligent devices in our bodies and brains to make us live longer and healthier."

Any idea as controversial as the singularity is bound to unleash a backlash. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, says that the singularity is "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people.... This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different-it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."

Douglas Hofstadter has said, "It's as if you took a lot of good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."

No one knows how this will play out. But I think the most likely scenario is the following.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO: FRIENDLY AI.

First, scientists will probably take simple measures to ensure that robots are not dangerous. At the very least, scientists can put a chip in robot brains to automatically shut them off if they have murderous thoughts. In this approach, all intelligent robots will be equipped with a fail-safe mechanism that can be switched on by a human at any time, especially when a robot exhibits errant behavior. At the slightest hint that a robot is malfunctioning, any voice command will immediately shut it down.

Or specialized hunter robots may also be created whose duty is to neutralize deviant robots. These robot hunters will be specifically designed to have superior speed, strength, and coordination in order to capture errant robots. They will be designed to understand the weak points of any robotic system and how they behave under certain conditions. Human can also be trained in this skill. In the movie Blade Runner, Blade Runner, a specially trained cadre of agents, including one played by Harrison Ford, are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot. a specially trained cadre of agents, including one played by Harrison Ford, are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot.

Since it will take many decades of hard work for robots to slowly go up the evolutionary scale, it will not be a sudden moment when humanity is caught off guard and we are all shepherded into zoos like cattle. Consciousness, as I see it, is a process that can be ranked on a scale, rather than being a sudden evolutionary event, and it will take many decades for robots to ascend up this scale of consciousness. After all, it took Mother Nature millions of years to develop human consciousness. So humans will not be caught off guard one day when the Internet unexpectedly "wakes up" or robots suddenly begin to plan for themselves.

This is the option preferred by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who envisioned each robot hardwired in the factory with three laws to prevent them from getting out of control. He devised his famous three laws of robotics to prevent robots from hurting themselves or humans. (Basically, the three laws state that robots cannot harm humans, they must obey humans, and they must protect themselves, in that order.) (Even with Asimov's three laws, there are also problems when there are contradictions among the three laws. For example, if one creates a benevolent robot, what happens if humanity makes self-destructive choices that can endanger the human race? Then a friendly robot may feel that it has to seize control of the government to prevent humanity from harming itself. This was the problem faced by Will Smith in the movie version of I, Robot, I, Robot, when the central computer decides that "some humans must be sacrificed and some freedoms must be surrendered" in order to save humanity. To prevent a robot from enslaving us in order to save us, some have advocated that we must add the zeroth law of robotics: Robots cannot harm or enslave the human race.) when the central computer decides that "some humans must be sacrificed and some freedoms must be surrendered" in order to save humanity. To prevent a robot from enslaving us in order to save us, some have advocated that we must add the zeroth law of robotics: Robots cannot harm or enslave the human race.) But many scientists are leaning toward something called "friendly AI," where we design our robots to be benign from the very beginning. Since we are the creators of these robots, we will design them, from the very start, to perform only useful and benevolent tasks.

The term "friendly AI" was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a founder of the Singularity Inst.i.tute for Artificial Intelligence. Friendly AI is a bit different from Asimov's laws, which are forced upon robots, perhaps against their will. (Asimov's laws, imposed from the outside, could actually invite the robots to devise clever ways to circ.u.mvent them.) In friendly AI, by contrast, robots are free to murder and commit mayhem. There are no rules that enforce an artificial morality. Rather, these robots are designed from the very beginning to desire to help humans rather than destroy them. They choose to be benevolent.

This has given rise to a new field called "social robotics," which is designed to give robots the qualities that will help them integrate into human society. Scientists at Hanson Robotics, for example, have stated that one mission for their research is to design robots that "will evolve into socially intelligent beings, capable of love and earning a place in the extended human family."

But one problem with all these approaches is that the military is by far the largest funder of AI systems, and these military robots are specifically designed to hunt, track, and kill humans. One can easily imagine future robotic soldiers whose missions are to identify enemy humans and eliminate them with unerring efficiency. One would then have to take extraordinary precautions to guarantee that the robots don't turn against their masters as well. Predator drone aircraft, for example, are run by remote control, so there are humans constantly directing their movements, but one day these drones may be autonomous, able to select and take out their own targets at will. A malfunction in such an autonomous plane could lead to disastrous consequences.

In the future, however, more and more funding for robots will come from the civilian commercial sector, especially from j.a.pan, where robots are designed to help rather than destroy. If this trend continues, then perhaps friendly AI could become a reality. In this scenario, it is the consumer sector and market forces that will eventually dominate robotics, so that there will be a vast commercial interest in investing in friendly AI.

MERGING WITH ROBOTS.

In addition to friendly AI, there is also another option: merging with our creations. Instead of simply waiting for robots to surpa.s.s us in intelligence and power, we should try to enhance ourselves, becoming superhuman in the process. Most likely, I believe, the future will proceed with a combination of these two goals, i.e., building friendly AI and also enhancing ourselves.

This is an option being explored by Rodney Brooks, former director of the famed MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been a maverick, overturning cherished but ossified ideas and injecting innovation into the field. When he entered the field, the top-down approach was dominant in most universities. But the field was stagnating. Brooks raised a few eyebrows when he called for creating an army of insectlike robots that learned via the bottom-up approach by b.u.mping into obstacles. He did not want to create another dumb, lumbering robot that took hours to walk across the room. Instead, he built nimble "insectoids" or "bugbots" that had almost no programming at all but would quickly learn to walk and navigate around obstacles by trial and error. He envisioned the day that his robots would explore the solar system, b.u.mping into things along the way. It was an outlandish idea, proposed in his essay "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," but his approach eventually led to an array of new avenues. One by-product of his idea is the Mars Rovers now scurrying over the surface of the Red Planet. Not surprisingly, he was also the chairman of iRobot, the company that markets buglike vacuum cleaners to households across the country.

One problem, he feels, is that workers in artificial intelligence follow fads, adopting the paradigm of the moment, rather than thinking in fresh ways. For example, he recalls, "When I was a kid, I had a book that described the brain as a telephone-switching network. Earlier books described it as a hydrodynamic system or a steam engine. Then in the 1960s, it became a digital computer. In the 1980s, it became a ma.s.sively parallel digital computer. Probably there's a kid's book out there somewhere that says the brain is just like the World Wide Web...."

For example, some historians have noted that Sigmund Freud's a.n.a.lysis of the mind was influenced by the coming of the steam engine. The spread of railroads through Europe in the mid- to late 1800s had a profound effect on the thinking of intellectuals. In Freud's picture, there were flows of energy in the mind that constantly competed with other flows, much like in the steam pipes in an engine. The continual interaction between the superego, the id, and the ego resembled the continual interaction between steam pipes in a locomotive. And the fact that repressing these flows of energy could create neuroses is a.n.a.logous to the way that steam power, if bottled up, can be explosive.

Marvin Minsky admitted to me that another paradigm misguided the field for many years. Since many AI researchers are former physicists, there is something called "physics envy," that is, the desire to find the single, unifying theme underlying all intelligence. In physics, we have the desire to follow Einstein to reduce the physical universe to a handful of unifying equations, perhaps finding an equation one inch long that can summarize the universe in a single coherent idea. Minsky believes that this envy led AI researchers to look for that single unifying theme for consciousness. Now, he believes, there is no such thing. Evolution haphazardly cobbled together a bunch of techniques we collectively call consciousness. Take apart the brain, and you find a loose collection of minibrains, each designed to perform a specific task. He calls this the "society of minds": that consciousness is actually the sum of many separate algorithms and techniques that nature stumbled upon over millions of years.

Rodney Brooks was also looking for a similar paradigm, but one that had never been fully explored before. He soon realized that Mother Nature and evolution had already solved many of these problems. For example, a mosquito, with only a few hundred thousand neurons, can outperform the greatest military robotic system. Unlike our flying drones, mosquitoes, with brains smaller than the head of a pin, can independently navigate around obstacles, find food and mates. Why not learn from nature and biology? If you follow the evolutionary scale, you learn that insects and mice did not have the rules of logic programmed into their brains. It was through trial and error that they engaged the world and mastered the art of survival.

Now he is pursuing yet another heretical idea, contained in his essay "The Merger of Flesh and Machines." He notes that the old laboratories at MIT, which used to design silicon components for industrial and military robots, are now being cleaned out, making way for a new generation of robots made of living tissue as well as silicon and steel. He foresees an entirely new generation of robots that will marry biological and electronic systems to create entirely new architectures for robots.

He writes, "My prediction is that by the year 2100 we will have very intelligent robots everywhere in our everyday lives. But we will not be apart from them-rather, we will be part robot and connected with the robots."

He sees this progressing in stages. Today, we have the ongoing revolution in prostheses, inserting electronics directly into the human body to create realistic subst.i.tutes for hearing, sight, and other functions. For example, the artificial cochlea has revolutionized the field of audiology, giving back the gift of hearing to the deaf. These artificial cochleas work by connecting electronic hardware with biological "wetware," that is, neurons. The cochlear implant has several components. A microphone is placed outside the ear. It receives sound waves, processes them, and transmits the signals by radio to the implant that is surgically placed inside the ear. The implant receives the radio messages and converts them into electrical currents that are sent down electrodes in the ear. The cochlea recognizes these electrical impulses and sends them on to the brain. These implants can use up to twenty-four electrodes and can process half a dozen frequencies, enough to recognize the human voice. Already, 150,000 people worldwide have had cochlear implants.

Several groups are exploring ways to a.s.sist the blind by creating artificial vision, connecting a camera to the human brain. One method is to directly insert the silicon chip into the retina of the person and attach the chip to the retina's neurons. Another is to connect the chip to a special cable that is connected to the back of the skull, where the brain processes vision. These groups, for the first time in history, have been able to restore a degree of sight to the blind. Patients have been able to see up to 50 pixels lighting up before them. Eventually, scientists should be able to scale this up so that they can see thousands of pixels.

The patients can see fireworks, the outlines of their hands, s.h.i.+ning objects and lights, the presence of cars and people, and the borders of objects. "At Little League games, I can see where the catcher, batter, and umpire are," says Linda Morfoot, one of the test subjects.

So far, thirty patients have had artificial retinas with up to sixty electrodes. But the Department of Energy's Artificial Retina Project, based at the University of Southern California, is already planning a new system with more than 200 electrodes. A 1,000-electrode device is also being studied (but if too many electrodes are packed onto the chip, it could cause overheating of the retina). In this system, a miniature camera mounted on a blind person's eyegla.s.ses takes pictures and sends them wirelessly to a microprocessor, worn on a belt, that relays the information to the chip placed directly on the retina. This chip sends tiny pulses directly into the retinal nerves that are still active, thereby bypa.s.sing defective retinal cells.

STAR WARS ROBOTIC HAND ROBOTIC HAND.

Using mechanical enhancements, one can also duplicate the feats of science fiction, including the robotic hand of Star Wars Star Wars and the X-ray vision of Superman. In and the X-ray vision of Superman. In The Empire Strikes Back, The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker has his hand chopped off by a lightsaber wielded by the evil Darth Vader, his father. No problem. Scientists in this faraway galaxy quickly create a new mechanical hand, complete with fingers that can touch and feel. Luke Skywalker has his hand chopped off by a lightsaber wielded by the evil Darth Vader, his father. No problem. Scientists in this faraway galaxy quickly create a new mechanical hand, complete with fingers that can touch and feel.

This may sound like science fiction, yet it is already here. A significant advance was made by scientists in Italy and Sweden, who have actually made a robotic hand that can "feel." One subject, Robin Ekenstam, a twenty-two-year-old who had his right hand amputated to remove a cancerous tumor, can now control the motion of his mechanical fingers and feel the response. Doctors connected the nerves in Ekenstam's arm to the chips contained in his mechanical hand so that he can control the finger movements with his brain. The artificial "smart hand" has four motors and forty sensors. The motion of his mechanical fingers is then relayed to his brain so he has feedback. In this way, he is able to control and also "feel" the motion of his hand. Since feedback is one of the essential features of body motion, this could revolutionize the way we treat amputees with prosthetic limbs.

Ekenstam says, "It's great. I have a feeling that I have not had for a long time. Now I am getting sensation back. If I grab something tightly, then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, since I don't have them anymore."

One of the researchers, Christian Cipriani of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, says, "First, the brain controls the mechanical hand without any muscle contractions. Second, the hand will be able to give feedback to the patient so he will be able to feel. Just like a real hand."

This development is significant because it means that one day humans may effortlessly control mechanical limbs as if they were flesh and bone. Instead of tediously learning how to move arms and legs of metal, people will treat these mechanical appendages as if they were real, feeling every nuance of the limbs' movements via electronic feedback mechanisms.

This is also evidence of a theory that says the brain is extremely plastic, not fixed, and constantly rewires itself as it learns new tasks and adjusts to new situations. Hence, the brain will be adaptable enough to accommodate any new appendage or sense organ. They may be attached to the brain at different locations, and the brain simply "learns" to control this new attachment. If so, then the brain might be viewed as a modular device, able to plug in and then control different appendages and sensors from different devices. This type of behavior might be expected if our brain is a neural network of some sort that makes new connections and neural pathways each time it learns a new task, whatever that task might be.

Rodney Brooks writes, "Over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a cultural s.h.i.+ft, in which we will adopt robotic technology, silicon, and steel into our bodies to improve what we can do and understand the world." When Brooks a.n.a.lyzes the progress made at Brown University and Duke University in hooking up the brain directly to a computer or a mechanical arm, he concludes, "We may all be able to have a wireless Internet connection installed directly into our brains."

In the next stage, he sees merging silicon and living cells not just to cure the ailments of the body but to slowly enhance our capabilities. For example, if today's cochlear and retinal implants can restore hearing and vision, tomorrow's may also give us superhuman abilities. We would be able to hear sounds that only dogs can hear, or see UV, infrared, and X-rays.

It might be possible to increase our intelligence as well. Brooks cites research in which extra layers of neurons were added to the brain of a rat at a critical time in its development. Remarkably, the cognitive abilities of these rats were increased. He envisions a time in the near future when the human brain's intelligence might also be improved by a similar process. In a later chapter, we will see that biologists have already isolated a gene in rats that the media has dubbed the "smart mouse gene." With the addition of this gene, enhanced mice have much greater memory and learning abilities.

And by midcentury, Brooks envisions a time when seemingly fanciful enhancements of the body might be possible, giving us abilities far beyond those of the ordinary human. "Fifty years from now, we can expect to see radical alterations of human bodies through genetic modification." When you also add electronic enhancements, "the human menagerie will expand in ways unimaginable to us today.... We will no longer find ourselves confined by Darwinian evolution," he says.

But anything, of course, can be taken too far. How far should we go in merging with our robot creations before some people rebel and find it repulsive?

SURROGATES AND AVATARS.

One way in which to merge with robots, but without altering the human body, is to create surrogates or avatars. In the movie Surrogates, Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, in the year 2017 scientists have discovered a way for people to control robots as if they were inside them, so that we can live our lives in perfect bodies. The robot responds to every command, and the person also sees and feels everything the robot sees and feels. While our mortal bodies decay and wither, we can control the motions of our robot surrogate, which has superhuman powers and is perfectly shaped. The movie gets complicated because people prefer to live out their lives as beautiful, handsome, and superpowerful robots, abandoning their rotting bodies, which are conveniently hidden away. The entire human race, in effect, willingly becomes robotic rather than face reality. starring Bruce Willis, in the year 2017 scientists have discovered a way for people to control robots as if they were inside them, so that we can live our lives in perfect bodies. The robot responds to every command, and the person also sees and feels everything the robot sees and feels. While our mortal bodies decay and wither, we can control the motions of our robot surrogate, which has superhuman powers and is perfectly shaped. The movie gets complicated because people prefer to live out their lives as beautiful, handsome, and superpowerful robots, abandoning their rotting bodies, which are conveniently hidden away. The entire human race, in effect, willingly becomes robotic rather than face reality.

In the movie Avatar, Avatar, this is taken one step further. Instead of living our lives as perfect robots, in the year 2154 we might be able to live as alien beings. In the movie, our bodies are placed in pods, which then allow us to control the motion of specially cloned alien bodies. In a sense, we are given entirely new bodies to live on a new planet. In this way, we can better communicate with a native alien population on other planets. The movie plot thickens when one worker decides to abandon his humanity and live out his life as an alien, protecting them from mercenaries. this is taken one step further. Instead of living our lives as perfect robots, in the year 2154 we might be able to live as alien beings. In the movie, our bodies are placed in pods, which then allow us to control the motion of specially cloned alien bodies. In a sense, we are given entirely new bodies to live on a new planet. In this way, we can better communicate with a native alien population on other planets. The movie plot thickens when one worker decides to abandon his humanity and live out his life as an alien, protecting them from mercenaries.

These surrogates and avatars are not possible today but may be possible in the future.

Recently, ASIMO has been programmed with a new idea: remote sensing. At Kyoto University, humans have been trained to control the mechanical motion of robots by using brain sensors. For example, by putting on an EEG helmet, students can move the arms and legs of ASIMO by simply thinking. So far, four distinct motions of the arms and head are possible. This may open the door to another realm of AI: robots controlled by the mind.

Although this is a crude demonstration of mind over matter, in the coming decades it should be possible to increase the set of motions we can control in a robot, and also to get feedback, so we can "feel" with our new robotic hands. Goggles or contact lenses would allow us to see what the robots see, so we might eventually have full control over the body's motions.

This may also help alleviate the immigration problem for j.a.pan. Workers may be located in different countries, yet control robots thousands of miles away by donning brain sensors. So not only can the Internet carry the thoughts of white-collar workers, it might also carry the thoughts of blue-collar workers and translate them into physical motion. This might mean that robots will become an integral part of any nation grappling with exploding health costs and a shortage of workers.

Controlling robots by remote sensing may also have applications elsewhere. In any dangerous environment (for example, underwater, near high-voltage lines, in fires), robots controlled by human thoughts may be used in rescue missions. Or undersea robots may be connected directly to humans, so that humans can control many swimming robots by thoughts alone. Since the surrogate would have superpowers, it would be able to chase criminals (unless the criminals also have superpowered surrogates). One would have all the advantages of merging with robots without changing our bodies at all.

Such an arrangement might actually prove useful for s.p.a.ce exploration, when we have to manage a permanent moon base. Our surrogates may perform all the dangerous tasks of maintaining the moon base, while the astronauts are safely back on earth. The astronauts would have the superstrength and superpowers of the robots while exploring a hazardous alien landscape. (This would not work if the astronauts are on the earth controlling surrogates on Mars, however, since radio signals take up to 40 minutes to go from the earth to Mars and back. But it would work if the astronauts were sitting safely in a permanent base on Mars while the surrogates went out and performed dangerous tasks on the Martian surface.) HOW FAR THE MERGER WITH ROBOTS?.

Robot pioneer Hans Moravec takes this several steps further and imagines an extreme version of this: we become the very robots that we have built. He explained to me how we might merge with our robot creations by undergoing a brain operation that replaces each neuron of our brain with a transistor inside a robot. The operation starts when we lie beside a robot body without a brain. A robotic surgeon takes every cl.u.s.ter of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull. As each cl.u.s.ter of neurons is duplicated in the robot, it is discarded. We are fully conscious as this delicate operation takes place. Part of our brain is inside our old body, but the other part is now made of transistors inside our new robot body. After the operation is over, our brain has been entirely transferred into the body of a robot. Not only do we have a robotic body, we have also the benefits of a robot: immortality in superhuman bodies that are perfect in appearance. This will not be possible in the twenty-first century, but becomes an option in the twenty-second.

In the ultimate scenario, we discard our clumsy bodies entirely and eventually evolve into pure software programs that encode our personalities. We "download" our entire personalities into a computer. If someone presses a b.u.t.ton with your name on it, then the computer behaves as if you are inside its memory, since it has encoded all your personality quirks inside its circuits. We become immortal, but spend our time trapped inside a computer, interacting with other "people" (that is, other software programs) in some gigantic cybers.p.a.ce/virtual reality. Our bodily existence will be discarded, replaced by the motion of electrons in this gigantic computer. In this picture, our ultimate destiny is to wind up as lines of code in this vast computer program, with all the apparent sensations of physical bodies dancing in a virtual paradise. We will share deep thoughts with other lines of computer code, living out this grand illusion. We have great, heroic exploits conquering new worlds, oblivious to the fact that we are just electrons dancing inside some computer. Until, of course, someone hits the off b.u.t.ton.

But one problem with pus.h.i.+ng these scenarios too far is the Cave Man Principle. As we mentioned earlier, the architecture of our brains is that of a primitive hunter-gatherer who emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago. Our deepest desires, our appet.i.tes, our wants were all forged in the gra.s.slands of Africa as we evaded predators, hunted for game, foraged in the forests, looked for mates, and entertained ourselves at the campfire.

One of our prime directives, buried deep in the fabric of our thoughts, is to look good, especially to the opposite s.e.x and our peers. An enormous fraction of our disposable income, after entertainment, is devoted to our appearance. That is why we have had the explosive growth in plastic surgery, Botox, grooming products, sophisticated clothing, as well as learning new dance steps, muscle building, buying the latest music, and keeping fit. If you add all this up, it becomes a huge portion of consumer spending, which in turn generates a large fraction of the U.S. economy.

This means that, even with the ability to create perfect bodies that are nearly immortal, we will probably resist the desire for robotic bodies if we look like a clumsy robot with implants dangling out of our heads. No one wants to look like a refugee from a science fiction movie. If we have enhanced bodies, they must make us attractive to the opposite s.e.x and enhance our reputation among our peers, or we will reject them. What teenager wants to be enhanced but look uncool?

Some science fiction writers have relished the idea that we will all become detached from our bodies and exist as immortal beings of pure intelligence living inside some computer, contemplating deep thoughts. But who would want to live like that? Perhaps our descendants will not want to solve differential equations describing a black hole. In the future, people may want to spend more time listening to rock music the old-fas.h.i.+oned way than calculate the motions of subatomic particles while living inside a computer.

Greg Stock of UCLA goes further and finds there are few advantages to having our brains hooked up to a supercomputer. He said, "When I try to think of what I might gain by having a working link between my brain and a supercomputer, I am stymied if I insist on two criteria: that the benefits could not be as easily achieved through some other, noninvasive procedure, and that the benefits must be worth the discomforts of brain surgery."

So although there are many possible options for the future, I personally believe that the most likely path is that we will build robots to be benevolent and friendly, enhance our own abilities to a degree, but follow the Cave Man Principle. We will embrace the idea of temporarily living the life of a superrobot via surrogates but will be resistant to the idea of permanently living out our lives inside a computer or altering our body until it becomes unrecognizable.

ROADBLOCKS TO THE SINGULARITY.

No one knows when robots may become as smart as humans. But personally, I would put the date close to the end of the century for several reasons.

First, the dazzling advances in computer technology have been due to Moore's law. These advances will begin to slow down and might even stop around 202025, so it is not clear if we can reliably calculate the speed of computers beyond that. (See Chapter 4 Chapter 4 for more on the post-silicon era.) In this book, I have a.s.sumed that computer power will continue to grow, but at a slower rate. for more on the post-silicon era.) In this book, I have a.s.sumed that computer power will continue to grow, but at a slower rate.

Second, even if a computer can calculate at fantastic speeds like 1016 calculations per second, this does not necessarily mean that it is smarter than us. For example, Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing machine, could a.n.a.lyze 200 million positions per second, beating the world champion. But Deep Blue, for all its speed and raw computing power, cannot do anything else. True intelligence, we learned, is much more than calculating chess positions. calculations per second, this does not necessarily mean that it is smarter than us. For example, Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing machine, could a.n.a.lyze 200 million positions per second, beating the world champion. But Deep Blue, for all its speed and raw computing power, cannot do anything else. True intelligence, we learned, is much more than calculating chess positions.