Ray Kurzweil is one of our most brilliant scientists and technologists. I very much enjoyed his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. He has just published a sequel Are We Spiritual Machines? which is now available online. The following is from the first chapter.
Ray Kurzweil
An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The results will include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, downloading the brain and immortal software-based humans—the step in evolution.
An Overview of the Next Several Decades The intelligence of machines—nonbiological entities—will exceed human intelligence early in this century. By intelligence, I include all the diverse and subtle ways in which humans are intelligent—including musical and artistic aptitude, creativity, physically moving through the world, and even responding to emotion. By 2019, a $1,000 computer will match the processing power of the human brain—about 20 million billion calculations per second. This level of processing power is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving human-level intelligence in a machine. Organizing these resources—the “software” of intelligence—will take us to 2029, by which time your average personal computer will be equivalent to a thousand human brains.
Once a computer achieves a level of intelligence comparable to human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. A key advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge. If I learn French, or read War and Peace, I can’t readily download that learning to you. You have to acquire that scholarship the same painstaking way that I did. My knowledge, embedded in a vast pattern of neurotransmitter concentrations and interneuronal connections, cannot be quickly accessed or transmitted. But we won’t leave out quick downloading ports in our nonbiological equivalents of human neuron clusters. When one computer learns a skill or gains an insight, it can immediately share that wisdom with billions of other machines.
As a contemporary example, we spent years teaching one research computer how to recognize continuous human speech. We exposed it to thousands of hours of recorded speech, corrected its errors, and patiently improved its performance. Finally, it became quite adept at recognizing speech (I dictated most of my recent book to it). Now if you want your own personal computer to recognize speech, it doesn’t have to go through the same process; you can just download the fully trained program in seconds. Ultimately, billions of nonbiological entities can be the master of all human and machine acquired knowledge. Computers are also potentially millions of times faster than human neural circuits, and have far more reliable memories.
One approach to designing intelligent computers will be to copy the human brain, so these machines will seem very human. And through nanotechnology, which is the ability to create physical objects atom by atom, they will have humanlike—albeit greatly enhanced—bodies as well. Having human origins, they will claim to be human, and to have human feelings. And being immensely intelligent, they’ll be very convincing when they tell us these things. But are these feelings “real,” or just apparently real? I will discuss this subtle but vital distinction below. First it is important to understand the nature of nonbiological intelligence, and how it will emerge.
Keep in mind that this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines. It is emerging from within our human-machine civilization. There will not be a clear distinction between human and machine as we go through the twenty-first century. First of all, we will be putting computers—neural implants—directly into our brains. We’ve already started down this path. We have ventral posterior nucleus, subthalmic nucleus, and ventral lateral thalamus neural implants to counteract Parkinson’s Disease and tremors from other neurological disorders. I have a deaf friend who now can hear what I am saying because of his cochlear implant. Under development is a retina implant that will perform a similar function for blind individuals, basically replacing certain visual processing circuits of the retina and nervous system. Recently scientists from Emory University placed a chip in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim who can now begin to communicate and control his environment directly from his brain.
In the 2020s, neural implants will not be just for disabled people, and introducing these implants into the brain will not require surgery, but more about that later. There will be ubiquitous use of neural implants to improve our sensory experiences, perception, memory, and logical thinking.
These “noninvasive” implants will also plug us in directly to the World Wide Web. By 2030, “going to a web site” will mean entering a virtual reality environment. The implant will generate the streams of sensory input that would otherwise come from our real senses, thus creating an all-encompassing virtual environment that responds to the behavior of our own virtual body (and those of others) in the virtual environment. This technology will enable us to have virtual reality experiences with other people—or simulated people—without requiring any equipment not already in our heads. And virtual reality will not be the crude experience that one can experience in today’s arcade games. Virtual reality will be as realistic, detailed, and subtle as real reality. So instead of just phoning a friend, you can meet in a virtual French cafÈ in Paris, or take a walk on a virtual Mediterranean beach, and it will seem very real. People will be able to have any type of experience with anyone—business, social, romantic, sexual—regardless of physical proximity.
Read the rest of the first chapter
Read the online book: Are We Spiritual Machines?
Reposted from KurzweilAI.net