Horizon - Human v2.0

[The White Knight]

Horizon, a science-program on BBC2, brought a documentary about neurology and artificial intelligence yesterday, which seemed interesting enough to post about here.

Human v2.0

Should we be worried about what future technology might bring us? Reading minds isn't something that is impossible to be accomplished within the next 10-20 years if we may believe this documentary.

There are two important figures on both sides in this ethical debate: Raymond Kurzweil on one side and Hugo de Garis on the other.

When computers become our equals ...

Raymond Kurzweil, a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments is a member of the The Singularity Institute for Articial Intelligence (SIAI). The SIAI is a non-profit organization with the goal of developing a theory of Friendly artificial intelligence and implementing that theory as a software system. This goal is implied by a belief that a technological singularity is likely to occur and that the outcome of such an event is heavily dependent on the structure of the first AI to exceed human-level intelligence. The organisation was founded in 2000 and has the secondary goal of facilitating a broader discussion and understanding of Moral, Strong Artificial Intelligence.

The SIAI considers that reliably altruistic AI ultimately offers better prospects for addressing major challenges facing humanity (eg. disease, illness, poverty and hunger), than any other project seeking to advance the common good. (wiki)

... or our worst enemies.

De Garis predicts that one day intelligent machines (or 'artilects', as he calls them, after 'artificial intellects' to distinguish them from current forms of AI) will be far more intelligent than humans and threaten to dominate the world, resulting in a conflict between 'cosmists', or supporters of the artilects, and 'terrans', those who oppose the artilects (both of these are terms of his invention). He describes this conflict as the 'gigadeath war'. This scenario is very similar to common science fiction themes, such as found in the hit 1984 movie "Terminator". He has recently authored a book describing his views on this topic titled The Artilect War.

Cosmism, according to de Garis, is a moral philosophy that favors building or growing artificial intelligence and ultimately leaving the planet Earth to the Terrans, e.g. Kevin Warwick and Bill Joy, who oppose this path for humanity. In his essay "The Artilect War", De Garis predicts that the factions will war to the death as the Terrans, terrified of becoming extinct, or simply of being left behind as relics of the past, will attempt to violently re-assert domination, which the Cosmists will rabidly oppose on the grounds that it is nothing more than chattel slavery, motivated purely out of ignorance or malice. (continue the story)

The program also told more about the "unabomber " an anarcho-primitivist who terrorised universities and airports in the 70's and 80's with a motive "to destroy technology". Was he right?



What is your stance on the subject? And why so?


Ps: Mods, feel free to move this to the science forum. I think it fits here because it wants to discuss the moral aspect rather than the scientific one.
Pps: There is lots of additional info to be found on the subject in the "external links" sections of wikipedia.

[Pnutmaster]

The stuff of science fiction, and consequentially, the stuff of an eventual future.

Artificial Intelligence is not a question of if, but when...
Genetic engineering is not a question of if, but when...
Neither was the submarine or a lunar landing...

Do I honestly believe HAL could be realized within this century, as the BBC program suggests? No.

The construction of a fully functional, adaptive, responsive artificial mind is a massive undertaking. We cannot even entertain the thought of achieving this feat until we fully understand how our own brains work.

Humanity has a habit of overestimating (2001: Space Odyssey) and underestimating (Kitty Hawk to Apollo) its scientific progress, but I will throw my own estimate out there and say we can expect Terminator/Matrix AI by the 22nd to the 23rd century.

"Gattaca", however, is around the corner. It's only a matter of decades and bold, illegal actions.

[the Eternal Cocoon]

we wont become 'relics of the past'. By the time we get to the ability to create robots equaling our intelligence ( which will probably not happen this century) we will probably already have developed nano chipping technologies and bio engineering capabilities with which we could enhance our own intelligence.