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In the testing stage, there are retina microchips to restore vision and motor implants to give quadriplegics the ability to control computers with thought. Robotic prosthetic legs, arms and hands are becoming more sophisticated. I don't think I'll live long enough to get a wireless Internet brain implant, but my kids or their kids might.
And there are other possibilities, such as using drugs or genetic and neural therapies to enhance our senses and strength. While we become more robotic, our robots will become more biological, with parts made of organic materials. In the future, we might share some parts with our robots.
We need not fear our machines because we, as human-machines, will always be a step ahead of them, the machine-machines, because we will adopt the new technologies used to build those machines right into our own heads and bodies.
We're going to build our robots incrementally, one after the other, and we're going to realise which traits we like in our robots – humility, empathy and patience; and traits we don't – megalomania, unrestrained ambition and arrogance.
By being careful about what we instil in our machines, we simply won't create the specific conditions necessary for a runaway, self-perpetuating artificial-intelligence explosion that runs beyond our control and leaves us in the dust.
When we look back at what we are calling the singularity, we will see it not as a singular event but as an extended transformation. It will be a period in which a collection of technologies will emerge, mature and enter our environments and bodies.
There will be a brave new world of augmented people, which will help us prepare for a brave new world of AGIs. We will still have our emotions, intelligence and consciousness. And the machines will have them too.
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Rodney Brooks is a professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and former director of its Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. He is a successful entrepreneur, founder of Heartland Robotics Inc. and co-founder of iRobot Corp.
First published in IEEE Spectrum.
The singularity.
While I agree with Robin Brooks starting point,that we are essentially machines we have escaped being predictable machines via the unpredictable emergent properties of our highly complex brains.
It is from this source that conscious thought and personality arise.
Thus that while the deterministic model is self evidently true, the enhancing effects of emergent properties transmutes us into an indeterminable condition of open ended possibility.
The proposition that humans are predetermined is a logical brain twister in the same class as that old chestnut
"I always tell lies"
So if we can do this with a machine then by definition the result will be unpredictable.
Question, please Sir is this a GOOD idea?
Answer, maybe not
Q When?
A Not soon
Q will it like us/ be like us?
A which do you prefer?
Q are you?
A guess
Ron Horgan.
Be careful what we instill
Rodneys comments on what we instil into AI raise the key issue on AI - you instill what you are. That is the problem. we will instill human nature its strengths and frailties. Someone, somewhere will instill the capacity for war in their intention to protect themselves from other humans. Then we let the "children" protect us. Well we know how that goes down.
ok
It all sounds very nice, creating ourselves in our own image stepping back and patting each other on the shoulders. Just like the boys down at the Manhattan project did 50 years ago. But let me get this straight mankind currently is drowning in our own apathy, watching species after species disappear, "talking" about global warming and twiddling our thumbs, not really giving a shit about the world now nor since the dawn of the first singularity, when we started clubbing animals with bones. And you expect AI to clean up our mistakes live in some sort of quasi-utopia with Nano bots that clean up our toxic waste, plug ourselves into the matrix, blah blah blah. Get over this ridicules god complex that all these futurists cling too. It’s now, not maybe, grow up and take stock of the current world and its problems not some AI 40 years from now. i mean Jesus thinking and talking about this stuff is cool, but actually giving funding to these pipe dreams only divides the reasonable from the absurd. The best part of life is that we die, who wants to be uploaded into a computer, life isn’t a cyberpunk game there are certain responsibilities humans have, and one of them is to die, not continually consume for eternity. Get a grip.
Super-human intelligence
I believe there is a fundamental blocking to what we can know about
a super-human intelligence. Simply, we can't know what such an entity will
think or do, because per definition we can't think like superhumans.
So no matter what precautions we take, we can't predict the actions of these creatures. We can't even say "low probability of killing us" or something like that.
Exceeding our design
It is easy to believe that the creation of AGI will happen soon, or happen at all for that matter. From reading countless science fiction books, it would be a fantastic concept to visualise, humans and robots co-existing peacefully.
I would like to point out however, that it is a rather selfish act to design AGI in our own image. Given that we would be recreating our own mistakes, in efforts to conceal or solve our current problems. We would be re-developing the laws that govern us, and programming these traits according to our functions and needs. There will still remain many characteristics and faults at large which we wouldn't be able to predict.
I'm offering that human control does not offer greater possibilities.
I gather that this production would be a slow process to the 'ideal' final design. But what this fantasy result (of an AGI) consists of exceeds our human abilities to fathom. So it is only realistic to be able to replicate ourselves in the form of synthetic matter, if we ever do get there. However unrealistic to think mankind (primitive as it still is in its development) can create something beyond comprehension, and beyond the human "ideal".
In light of this discussion I would love the idea of a self emergent AGI from the depths of a network such as the world wide web.
( This reminds me of the same idea sparked in a novel by Orson Scott Card, called "speaker for the dead". Embedded in this text, an immaterial super intelligence emerges as a "network of ansibles" capable of awareness, sentience and a million performances at light speed.)
-19, female, aus
Would this cause the intelligent design camp to win?
By recursive logic?