While we have come to rely on our machines over the past 50 years, we are about to become our machines during the first part of this millennium. We need not fear our machines because ... those of us alive today, over the course of our lifetimes, will morph ourselves into machines.
The next step beyond enhancing the bodies given to us by evolution is upgrading them. It's like the difference between putting a new stereo in your car, which enhances your enjoyment in using the vehicle, and putting a new engine in the car, which upgrades its overall performance and efficiency. Of course, the final step is trading in the car on a rocket ship, which we'll get to when we discuss uploading.
Many transhumanists are eager to be upgraded with expanded memory capacity, much faster processing/thinking speed, and implanted links for direct access to the telecommunications network or the Internet. MORE
Is it really possible we will see such things within our lifetimes? Based on the current—and accelerating—pace of scientific development, the answer is an unqualified YES.
One of the first places we will encounter startling new innovations is in the world of computer and video games. A British firm, Lobal Technologies, is working with scientists to develop interactive game characters that can learn and understand human speech, and that someday may be able to think for themselves!
Any specific prediction we make about upcoming inventions is bound to be wrong ... usually completely different from anything we ever predicted. And much better, always much better.
What if you could instantly and easily remember everything you ever learned in school, anything you were ever taught by anyone else, and anything you ever read, saw on TV, or saw in a movie? Someday you may be able to do just that!
A nanostructured data storage device measuring approximately 8,000 cubic microns—a volume about the size of a single human liver cell and smaller than a typical neuron—could store an amount of information equivalent to the entire Library of Congress! If implanted somewhere in the human brain, together with the appropriate interface mechanisms, such a device could allow extremely rapid access to this information. A single nanocomputer CPU, also having the volume of just one tiny human cell, could compute at the rate of 10 teraflops (1013 floating-point operations per second), approximately equaling (by many estimates) the computational output of the entire human brain. MORE
What could you accomplish if you had access to that kind of memory? What might it mean for those working in education, health care, or scientific research?
In-body technology is already acceptable in the form of replacement surgery (artificial joints, pacemakers, etc.). Now in development is an audio tooth implant. Augmenting our body's communication skills, it enables a form of telepathy.
A micro-vibration device and a tiny receiver are implanted in a molar during routine dental surgery. The tooth communicates with an array of digital devices, such as mobile telephones, radio, or computers. Sound information is transferred from the tooth into the inner ear by bone resonance. Sound reception is totally discreet, enabling information to be received anywhere at any time.
According to the product's designer, "Technology of this kind has the potential to re-write Darwinism, as future advantageous mutations will not be random, they will be chosen by the individual." MORE
"Computers will be everywhere. We will be in constant contact with very miniature, wireless, highly mobile, powerful, and highly personalized computing with network access. Such computers may first appear on the market as watches or jewelry with the power of a computer and cellular phone. Later, we will have computers embedded in our clothing and possibly implanted under our skin."
© Battelle Memorial Institute 2002
Knowledge is power. Already we are the most knowledgeable—and therefore the most powerful—generation of people in history. Now, however, we are about to have access to more knowledge than any of us ever imagined. Ubiquitous computing, made possible by tiny, inexpensive computer chips embedded all around us (and in us), and by omnipresent local wireless networks connected to the World Wide Web, will cause fundamental cultural, economic, political and social transformations. Our world and our lives will be forever changed.
The first signs are there already. In a growing number of locations, from airports and public buildings to cafes and city parks, wireless access points are making broadband Internet access available to anybody within antenna range—often for free! It is estimated there may be as many as 10,000 such "hotspots" worldwide, with many more being added daily. Anyone with a properly equipped laptop computer or PDA can have instant access to the World Wide Web and its more than 10 million unique sites. The teaming body of knowledge on the Internet is becoming available to us beyond the confines of our homes and offices.
Soon we will be capable of knowing what is happening anywhere on Earth at any time. Each of us will possess the knowledge of kings, of wizards—dare I say of gods? What will we do with that awesome knowledge, and with its associated breathtaking power?
Best-selling author, entrepreneur, inventor and maverick futurist Ray Kurzweil recently laid a wager with skeptic Mitchell Kapor that before the year 2029 a computer will pass the Turing Test. That means a computer (or a network of computers) will by then have achieved human-level intelligence and possibly even consciousness—or at any rate will have become smart enough or clever enough to convince us that it is as intelligent as a human.
Commenting on Kapor's explanation of why he expects to win the bet, Kurzweil says:
"I think the most compelling argument that Mitchell offers is his insight that most experience is not book learning. I agree, but point out that one of the primary purposes of nonbiological intelligence is to interact with us humans. So embodied AI's will have plenty of opportunity to learn from direct interaction with their human progenitors, as well as to observe a massive quantity of other full immersion human interaction available over the web." MORE
I expect that a non-human entity will be able to pass the Turing Test well before 2029. I use the term non-human entity instead of computer because the being that passes the test will be much more than what we think of today as a computer. It will be an amalgam of artificial intelligence, robot, and distributed network.
A key factor that Kurzweil did not mention is that this embodied AI will learn not only from "direct interaction with" humans and "full immersion human interaction available over the web", but also from its own subjective experience of being in the world. It will have the ability to independently sense the difference between hot and cold, wet and dry, loud and soft, bright and dark, gentle and rough, polite and rude.
In many ways these entities will be like human children discovering the world anew and with their own unique perspective. The act of cataloging such experiences and developing patterns of recognition, reaction, and response may in fact result in a kind of emotion. I look forward to getting to know some of these new creatures and becoming friends with them.
But all this is just a prelude to the nearly incomprehensible experience of being able to directly interface with an AI—to have a mental merger with an alien intelligence. It is quite conceivable that some of us could have the opportunity before the middle of this century. Are you ready to meld your mind, even for a short time, with a new kind of sentient being?
Sometimes called "mind uploading" or "brain reconstruction", uploading is the hypothetical process of transferring a mind from a biological brain to a computer.
The idea is that after scanning the synaptic structure of a brain, we could implement the same computations on an electronic medium that would normally take place in the neural network of the brain. Disassembling the brain atom for atom by means of nanotechnology could produce a brain scan of sufficient resolution. Other approaches, such as analyzing the brain slice by slice in an electron microscope with automatic image processing have also been proposed. MORE
A distinction is sometimes made between destructive uploading, in which the original brain is destroyed in the process, and non-destructive uploading, in which the original brain is preserved intact alongside the uploaded copy.
It is a matter of debate under what conditions personal identity would be preserved in destructive uploading. Most philosophers who have analyzed the problem think that at least under some conditions, an upload of your brain would be you. The idea is that you survive as long as certain information patterns are conserved, such as your memories, values, attitudes and emotions; it matters not whether they are implemented on a computer or in that gray, cheesy lump inside your skull.
Tricky cases arise, however, if we imagine that several similar copies are made of your uploaded mind. Then which one is you? Are they all you or is none of them you? Who has the right to your property? Who is married to your spouse? Philosophical, legal and ethical challenges abound. It is easy to imagine that these will be hotly debated political issues.
Some other thoughts about uploading:
Uploading should work for cryonics patients provided their brains are preserved in a sufficiently intact state.
Uploads could live in a virtual reality environment. An option would be to have robot bodies and sensors so they can resume their lives in physical reality.
The subjective time of uploads would depend on how fast the computers are on which they run. Running on a fast computer, the upload would think much faster than in a biological implementation. For instance, on a computer a thousand times more powerful than a human brain, thinking would occur a thousand times faster—and the external world would appear as if it were slowed down by a factor of a thousand! You would thus get to experience more subjective time, live more, during any given day.
Uploads could be distributed over vast computer networks and they could make frequent backup copies of themselves. This should make it possible for uploads to have indefinite life spans.
Individual uploads could subsist on a very small amount of resources compared to a biological human, since they don’t need physical food or shelter or transportation.
Uploads could reproduce extremely quickly (simply by making copies of themselves). As a consequence, their political power could rapidly become unstoppable—and resources could become scarce—unless reproduction is somehow regulated.
note: THE FOLLOWING IS BORROWED FROM RALPH MERKLE'S WEBSITE
Being alive and healthy is fun, and definitely beats the alternative.
Today's medical technology can't always keep us alive, let alone healthy.
Future medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology should be able to preserve life and restore health in all but the most extreme circumstances.
Tissue preserved at the temperature of liquid nitrogen does not deteriorate, even after centuries of storage.
Therefore, if current medical technology can't keep us alive, we can instead choose to be preserved in liquid nitrogen with the expectation that future medical technology should be able to both reverse any cryopreservation injury and restore good health.
A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition of death is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions", the future ability to revive a patient preserved with today's technology implies the patient wasn't dead. Cryonics is actually based on the more plausible idea that present medical practice has erred in declaring a patient "dead". A second opinion from a future physician—one with access to a fundamentally better medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology—lets us avoid the unpleasant risk that we might bury someone alive.
The major reason that cryonics is not more favorably viewed in the medical community is relatively easy to explain. Medicine relies on clinical trials. Put more simply, if someone proposes a technique for saving lives, the response is "Try it and see if it works". Methods that have not been verified by clinical trials are called "experimental", while methods that have been tried and failed are rejected.
In keeping with this tradition, we would like to conduct clinical trials of the effectiveness of cryonic suspension to determine whether it does (or does not) work. The appropriate trials can be easily described. Cryonics proposes to preserve people with today's technology in the expectation that medical technology of, say, the year 2100 will be able to cure them. Thus, the appropriate clinical trials would be to:
Select N subjects.
Preserve them.
Wait 100 years.
See if the technology of 2100 can indeed revive them.
The reader might notice a problem: What do we tell the terminally ill patient prior to completion of the trials?
While this problem is not entirely unique to cryonics (the plight of a dying patient who wishes to know whether or not to take a new experimental treatment is well known), cryonics poses it in a qualitatively more severe fashion: we must wait longer to determine the outcome and we have no preliminary results to provide a clue about what that outcome might be. If a new treatment is being tested we normally have the results of animal trials and perhaps some preliminary results from human patients. Further, we expect to get reliable results within a small number of years. In the case of cryonics, we are quite literally awaiting the development of an entirely new medical technology. Preliminary results, even on experimental animals, are simply not available; and the final results won't be available for at least several decades.
Thus, while we can begin the clinical trials required to evaluate cryonics today, clinical trials cannot provide a timely answer about the effectiveness of cryonics. It is not possible (utilizing the paradigm of clinical trials) to draw conclusions today about whether physicians tomorrow will (or will not) be able to revive someone who was cryonically suspended using today's technology.
Does cryonics work?
The correct scientific answer to the question "Does cryonics work?" is: "The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we'll give you a reliable answer." The relevant question for those of us who don't expect to survive that long is: "Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?" We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials.
In order to show that cryonics will not work (or even to show that it's unlikely to work) it is necessary to show that no future technology, no matter how advanced, will ever be able to restore the suspended patient. When we consider what is routine today and how it might have been viewed in, say, the 1700's, we can begin to see how difficult it is to make a well founded argument that future medical technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur during cryonic suspension.
It is worth pointing out that a fairly wide range of simple tissue types have been successfully cryopreserved and then rewarmed, including very early human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, red and white blood cells, bone marrow, and others. The use of glycerol (anti-freeze) greatly reduces freezing damage. New cryoprotectants in combination with ice blockers are now apparently able to eliminate ice formation entirely in a process called vitrification.
note: THE PRECEDING IS BORROWED FROM RALPH MERKLE'S WEBSITE
For more about cryonics, see
the informative website of the
Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
