Goodbye biology, hello software - conscious machines

UNESCO Courier, July, 2001 by Ivan Briscoe

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 nanotechnology [1], 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.

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.