Android apocalypse - will the computer become the superior being?
June 30th 2008 21:49
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From: the SMH link above
Computers are becoming more powerful at an exponential rate. Decades ago they were warehouse-sized machines that played noughts and crosses with scientists. Now IBM's two-metre-tall Deep Blue has beaten world champion Garry Kasparov at chess.
With Moore's law - the doubling of the number of transistors in computers every two years, with consequent growth in processing powers - in full effect, computers are closing the IQ gap to the human brain at an alarming rate. Scientists speculate that in the next two to three decades, computers will eclipse our brain's ability to process 100 trillion instructions a second.
And with the advent of what artificial-intelligence expert Professor Hugo de Garis calls artilects - massively intelligent artificial intellects - there is the risk that not only will we have created our successors but also that such machines may wipe humans out by accident or design.
De Garis thinks "species dominance" will be one - if not the - main political issue this century.
"If these artilects come into being, they may become so superior to us they might, to use an analogy, treat us like ants," he says. "They may do something and, as a side effect, we get wiped out. Or they may choose to wipe us out.
"They would think a trillion times faster, they would have unlimited memory, they could change their shape, they would be immortal. They would be godlike. Imagine what they could be thinking."
De Garis is the director of the China Brain Project, trying to build China's - and possibly the world's - first artificial brain. As with Bill Gates, he can foresee a time when robotics will be a huge industry. (So can the US military, which is already talking about phasing out human soldiers by the 2030s and putting robot troops on the front line.)
"If we can build an artificial brain, that would hopefully be the beginnings of increasingly intelligent robots and that could become a huge industry," de Garis says. "They could babysit the kids, take your dog for a walk. A robot is just a piece of steel but it's the control that makes it useful. That's where the artificial brain comes in."
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