  |
Smart medicine, for example, is just a microchip away, courtesy of a tiny, wireless electronic device developed by Thomas Ferrell at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that can be attached like a Band-Aid or embedded in a fingertip or earlobe. |
click here to see the photos and
captions for this article
| Making our lives ever more comfortable, convenient, and complete,
technology has served us well this century. But come the new millennium, will the tables be turned? by Douglas Page When IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov last year, the world's greatest chess player thought he'd met God. "I met something I couldn't explain," he said after the historic match. "People turn to religion to explain things like that." Some think Kasparov was being a little hyperbolic, for the truth of the matter is no mystery. He was up against a 3,000-pound bundle of 512 computers bear-hugging 200 million moves a second to beat him. Kasparov, evaluating a measly two or three moves a second, still managed to win one game and tie three more in the six-game contest. The next match, however, will surely be the coup de grâce. According to Moore's Law, stated in 1965 by Intel Corporation founder and CEO Gordon Moore, computer performance doubles every 18 months, which means that today's notebooks are exponentially more expeditious than the granddaddy of all electronic digital processors, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Built during World War II in a basement lab at Iowa State University by math and physics professor John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a graduate student, the automobile-size machine had a storage capacity of 375 characters and could perform one operation every 15 seconds. Some 50 years later, experimental machines exist in Japan and the United States capable of "teraflops" performance--1 trillion floating-point operations per second. Such speedy processors have already rendered Moore's Law obsolete. Machines 1,000 times faster are pushing against the fence: petaflops are anticipated within five years, based on smaller semiconductor technology now considered feasible. Have computers hijacked our destiny? Yes, some ardently declare. We're just a few years, if not a few minutes, from what visionaries and fringe thinkers alike are calling the end of the human era, the point at which a runaway, fugitive technology commandeers the future--a future in which humans will be unfamiliar, unnecessary, and probably unwelcome. Restive technology has always been a force in human history, but today it's about to stampede. Innovations in agriculture, medicine, electronics, and genetics have permitted population growth; a larger population means a larger brain pool, and a larger brain pool means newer and better technologies sooner. As anyone who bought a 166 MHz personal computer last summer knows, it was obsolete before you could build a bookmark file. In Silicon Valley, smaller equals faster, and nanotechnology--engineering on the molecular level--is stirring restlessly in the stockade. In Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor Books, 1986), K. Eric Drexler explains how by using molecular "assembler" machines we will eventually be able to create almost any arrangement of atoms. This technology will at first yield materials stronger and lighter than anything known. A new Illinois company, Nanophase Technologies, is currently fabricating iron, aluminum, and titanium oxides into nano-scale powders, which are molded into ceramic components used to make giant Caterpillar and Lockheed engines. Its other nano-scale powders are key ingredients in a new generation of high-tech sunscreen and cosmetics (no caking or streaking!). The sunscreen powder particles (each about 12 atoms in size) are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, effectively yielding 100 percent protection against dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Nanotechnology will further reduce the size (and increase the speed) of computers. Drexler predicts it will eventually allow nano-supercomputers smaller than grains of sand. Here, the corral fences collapse: the stampede begins when nanotechnology bolts toward human physical immortality. Swarms of nano-scale cell-repair cruisers will ripple through the body, locating faulty cells and repairing abnormal (aging?) DNA. If you like, or maybe even if you don't, you can live as long as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. This will be attractive to us Chicago Cubs fans, who may have to wait at least that long for our team to make it to the World Series. You'll need something to do while you wait. That will require the "Santa Claus machine" capable of recycling the molecules of matter in our junk drawers into just about anything we want--like maybe a Bruce Willis--type android to confront the guy with the Harley next door, or a gadget to render all dogs and everyone named Jesse Helms silent. Already our consumer products are getting brainier: today's industrial designers have dreamed up everything from fuzzy logic washing machines that can determine how much water to let in based on how dirty your clothes are, to "shape memory" eyeglass frames that return to their original forms when run under hot water. In the Nineties, though, it still takes a human mind to conceptualize these clever applications for such innovative materials and technologies. However, most futurists predict that sometime between tomorrow and the year 2035 a computer at MIT or Los Alamos or the University of Tokyo or somewhere will be nudged into consciousness and suddenly "wake up" to find itself "human," insofar as it is capable of performing the processes of the human brain. That computer will do a great deal more than crunch numbers. It will have found computing's Holy Grail--self-awareness, a condition we call "intelligence." From here, things quickly get interesting. "Smart" machines will reproduce, creating smarter machines, which in turn will build still smarter ones. Technological progress, at this point approaching omniscience, will explode, swelling superexponentially almost overnight to the utter limits of knowledge, to what the seers call the "Singularity." The term comes from mathematics--it's the point at which a function goes infinite--and is popularized in the science fiction novels of Vernor Vinge, who teaches math at San Diego State University. Vinge thinks of it this way: If we can make machines that are as smart as humans, then it's not hard to imagine that we could soon thereafter make, or cause to be made, machines that are smarter than us, and then it's Goodnight Irene--we'll plunge headfirst into an incomprehensible era of "posthumanity." If any of the doomsday prophecies are correct, then there is nothing to be done. If the Singularity can happen, it will happen. Hold on to your hard drive. There's no way to stop a silicon stampede. There's just this one detail: The human brain has an ineffable inner quality that no machine can replicate. No object is "awake" in the sense that it is aware of its experience, and some experts doubt computers will ever--no matter how small they become, how fast they operate, or how well they mimic neuronal activity--be more than catatonic couriers, note-passers with little if any ability to understand content. (Take heart, Garry!) While proliferating "smart" technologies stand to make life cushier (see "Things That Are Smart," below) by being programmed to sense and react to a range of variables, consciousness is a far more multifaceted riddle than most people think. As philosopher David Chalmers of the University of California, Santa Cruz, says, "The more we think about computers, the more we realize how elusive consciousness is." The dash toward the Singularity depends on the creation of super-human artificial intelligence, and AI has a limited future if the human mind can't be downloaded and algorithms written to imitate it. At this point, there's no agreement on what the human mind even is, and no one seems to know how it works. We don't even know if these things can ever be determined. There's a magical connection concealed in the mind, a poetic symbiosis sealed in mystery. Maybe the human mind is a personal Ark of the Covenant, to be approached and admired but never entered or tampered with. Some suspect when the day comes that machines are like men it will be more because men have lost their humanity than because machines have found it. Personally, I'm not inclined to worry much until I see a computer catch a fly ball or gather a grandchild on its lap. There are people who aren't worried about the concept of the Singularity because "techno-prophecy" is almost always wrong. Edward Tenner, in his book Why Things Bite Back (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), complains that almost nothing about technology has been predicted with any accuracy. Every innovation that solves one problem, he says, winds up creating another. The marvels of modern technology, for instance, include the development of the soda can, which, when discarded, lasts forever. Improvements in football padding were meant to prevent injuries; instead they encouraged more aggressive play, causing injuries to increase. One can only imagine what they were thinking when they invented the leaf-blower. The template of inexpediency: Operation Cat Drop, the guiding parable of the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder, "hypercar" guru Amory Lovins. Forty years ago malaria was the scourge of the Dayak people of Borneo. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) sprayed DDT to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The mosquitoes died, but so too did parasitic wasps that had controlled thatch-eating caterpillars; roofs collapsed. Other DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. When the cats died, the rats flourished, and the Dayak people were suddenly faced with outbreaks of typhus and plague. In response, WHO parachuted 14,000 cats into Borneo. "This true story illustrates that if you don't know how things are interconnected, then frequently the cause of problems are their solutions," Lovins says. What does it all mean? We don't know. We don't know whether technology will eventually convey us to the Singularity or safely house us in the sanitary suburbs; we don't know whether to regard it as invective or invitation, whether it's inherently benign, treacherous, or transparent. Of course, the entire issue pales when you realize the fact that 90 percent of the people in the world have no telephone. Exactly which side of the technological fence is actually "backward" remains to be seen. Douglas Page is a recovering aerospace computer systems analyst now writing about science and technology from Redondo Beach, California. |
Keywords:
intelligence, machine, robot, computer