Thanks to Moore’s Law, the computer will soon think faster than the human brain, argues Hans Moravec, Research Professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and author of several books on the evolution of robot intelligence. He’s calculated that the human brain’s current processing capacity of 100-trillion instructions per second is likely to be surpassed by computers by the year 2030. Increasingly, computers will take over more and more of the functions of the human brain, he says. They’ll replicate many of our brain pathways, perhaps evolving and learning themselves, maybe eventually even becoming self aware and conscious like Hal in ’2001 A Space Odyssey’ and Viki in ‘I Robot’.
They’ll soon leave Homo Optimus far behind. With advances in robot technology, they’ll be fully mobile, relatively crude at first, but quickly evolving into sophisticated androids. Like the androids in ‘I Robot’, they’ll assume more and more of our daily functions. They’ll take over production of goods and services, they’ll run our corporations in a fully automated economy. They’ll reduce the value of human brain power to zero, just as the industrial revolution reduced the value of muscle power to zero centuries earlier. We humans will be left to our own devices, creatures of leisure, with no need to work. What a terrific arrangement – as long as the machines believe it’s worthwhile keeping us on. If they don’t, there could be serious trouble. They might decide they’re better off without us. If we’re both competing for the earth’s diminishing resources, it could get ugly.
If we don’t want to cede control of the planet to them, we’ll have no choice but to team up with machines and integrate with them. Not being able to beat them, we’ll be forced to join them.
In fact we’re already going down that path, argues Pearson. We’ve made artificial limbs, eyes and ears that interface directly with our nervous systems. We’ve built computers that can detect our thoughts without any connection between brain and machine. It won’t be long before a computer and a human brain can share consciousness, he says. This new species too will have a name – Homo Cyberneticus. A union of silicon on which computing power is based, and of carbon, from which organic life forms are built.
What a glorious future. Or is it? To present day humans, it sounds not so much an advance but more like a takeover of the human race by machines. So in the beginning at least, there’ll be resistance by some homo sapiens. Some will resist on the grounds of religion and ethics. Others will fear the loss of human rituals, like the Saturday night with the mates, a few beers and a shag.
But eventually we’ll have no choice. We’ll fall so far behind, we’ll be unfit for anything but an unreliable form of domestic servant, or worse, as pets. But if we don’t go along with the machines, we’ll risk dying out, just as Neanderthals died out to make way for our human ancestors, the Cro Magnons. After a couple of centuries, we’d come to our senses, and join with the machines, making homo sapiens the first species on the planet to become voluntarily extinct.
Dr. Peter Lavell, Ockham’s Razor, Human Brain: Future Upgrades, 17th June 2007