Mother JonesWelcome Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.
The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.
Maybe you think I'm pulling your leg here. Or being archly ironic. After all, this does have a bit of a rose-colored tint to it, doesn't it? Like something from The Jetsons or the cover of Wired. That would hardly be a surprising reaction. Computer scientists have been predicting the imminent rise of machine intelligence since at least 1956, when the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave the field its name, and there are only so many times you can cry wolf. Today, a full seven decades after the birth of the computer, all we have are iPhones, Microsoft Word, and in-dash navigation. You could be excused for thinking that computers that truly match the human brain are a ridiculous pipe dream.
But they're not. It's true that we've made far slower progress toward real artificial intelligence than we once thought, but that's for a very simple and very human reason: Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one. It turns out that this is a very, very hard problem, sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. In fact, not just sort of like. It's exactly like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. If you want to understand the future of computing, it's essential to understand this.
But plenty of people are trying to figure it out. Earlier this year, the European Commission chose two big research endeavors to receive a half billion euros each, and one of them was the Human Brain Project led by Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He uses another IBM supercomputer in a project aimed at modeling the entire human brain. Markram figures he can do this by 2020.
That might be optimistic. At the same time, it also might turn out that we don't need to model a human brain in the first place. After all, when the Wright brothers built the first airplane, they didn't model it after a bird with flapping wings. Just as there's more than one way to fly, there's probably more than one way to think, too.
Google's driverless car, for example, doesn't navigate the road the way humans do. It uses four radars, a 64-beam laser range finder, a camera, GPS, and extremely detailed high-res maps. What's more, Google engineers drive along test routes to record data before they let the self-driving cars loose.
Is this disappointing? In a way, yes: Google has to do all this to make up for the fact that the car can't do what any human can do while also singing along to the radio, chugging a venti, and making a mental note to pick up the laundry. But that's a cramped view. Even when processing power and software get better, there's no reason to think that a driverless car should replicate the way humans drive. They will have access to far more information than we do, and unlike us they'll have the power to make use of it in real time. And they'll never get distracted when the phone rings.
True artificial intelligence will very likely be here within a couple of decades. By about 2040 our robot paradise awaits.
In other words, you should still be impressed. When we think of human cognition, we usually think about things like composing music or writing a novel. But a big part of the human brain is dedicated to more prosaic functions, like taking in a chaotic visual field and recognizing the thousands of separate objects it contains. We do that so automatically we hardly even think of it as intelligence. But it is, and the fact that Google's car can do it at all is a real breakthrough.
I have had the daydream of a super-intelligent AI evaluating, analyzing, asking itself about the current state and potential of DNA-based molecular biology- something that you and me ought to be respectful of.
In movies and TV, of course, the super AI does away with us and pursues its own goals, whaever they may be, usually insidious.
But what if the super-AI looked at the genomic basis of Life on Planet Earth and said to itself, "Hey, yeah!" -as though the eons of evolutionary development in this planet had arrived at a
best solution to obtaining accurate Awareness and extremely high Intelligence using molecular interactions - perhaps even with some quantum effects thrown in.
Then, that AI would regard human beings - or at least the design of human beings - as something highly developed but with perhaps even more evolutionary potential. So it sets itself the task of finding the ultimate physical and mental expression of what already exists as expressed by the genome.
Perhaps, there are other molecules that could contain vast amounts of information as well or better than does DNA. But let's say, for the sake of daydreaming, that Nature also found in DNA a
best solution. Then, the super-AI would examine the possibilities for even more enhanced and ultra-fast evolution of that particular molecule.
Is there a limit to how evolved the DNA-based genome of humans can become?
That's one of those questions that can only be wondered. But it seems to me that if there actually were some evolutionary pressure for a DNA-based life form to understand quantum mechanics, it would be found - just as a spider can instantly calculate the shortest path over a complex geometry.
It looks like The Singularity idea could be a real thing to look forward to. It might mean the end of our currently-known meat life, but we also might be really effing glad of it!
I, for one, would never kick High IQ out of bed for eating crackers.
