Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future
This Thursday, experts from all over the world will meet at a “Global Catastrophic Risk Conference” to discuss things like nuclear terrorism, the impact of a massive asteroid to the earth, and how to minimize the damages of events like these.
And is if those topics were not a tall enough order for a four-day conference…
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
That’s right, they’ll talk about the possibility of super-smart robots taking over the world.
“Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful,” said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. “If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species.”
What’s more, this sort of possibility may not be as remote as we think. Bostrom, a self-proclaimed “transhumanist” believe that the time is coming where “biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being” and that the result would be a new breed of “posthuman” life. Think super-humans, or human-like robots, I guess.
This era would be a massive and rapid transformation of a magnitude that would normally take thousands and thousands of years to occur in nature (if it could occur in nature) through natural selection and evolution.
Some say that this could occur in as little as two decades! Mama mia…
I can’t even digest the rest of this article right now. (ack!) Read on for the full details: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/14/bio.tech/
July 16, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Very cool. Very scary.
Probably since the first time primitive man strapped a pair of animal pelts on their feet and created the shoe, we’ve inevitably begun our descent (ascent?) into a near-complete merger with the technology that aids us.
As you mentioned, it’s the SPEED of all this that is astonishing. The rise of the Internet and the YouTube were rapid enough; the fact that we now may see OURSELVES gradually (or quickly) escalate into almost another form of life is something that I can’t quite conceive.
Will kids forty years from now marvel at the fact that we used to have to type comments into a machine in order to communicate with each other, rather than using the bionic chips implanted in our wrists?