~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
I have no idea if this scenario relates to reality at all, but it fulfills a childhood dream--dream here meaning a vivid, while asleep, repeating dream, not a life goal (although making it one is not unattractive). I will say that I’ve had a reliable intuition about the large events of my life, thus the Exit numbers. Each represents, I think, a possible life exit, numbered by order of occurrence during my lifetime. Three I’ve successfully evaded, with help; two are pending. If I can successfully evade Exit 4, Exit 5 becomes the final exit—the one where I become a star ship, literally. Actually, I become the computer in charge—or specifically, my mind and personality become embodied in that computer. Allow me to explain.
In the 1960s, modified to its present form in 1975, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, formulated a growth curve for number of transistors on a chip vs. time (and cost). Basically, the transistor count per integrated circuit chip doubles every two years, thus provides a benchmark for computer performance doubling every two years. It's called Moore's Law. 
Computer chess illustrates this exponential capacity growth. In 1989, IBM mounted an effort to successfully play championship chess, and in 1997, Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. Deep Blue, backed by an IBM department, was a supercomputer enhanced with 256 special circuits built specifically to play chess, analyzed 2,000,000 moves per second. After winning, IBM dismantled Deep Blue.In 2002, chess program Deep Fritz played world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to a 4-4 tie. Deep Fritz ran on a network of six PCs. In 2004, Kasparov’s chess rating was 2795; Kramnik at 2794. In 2007, Fritz 9.0 was rated 2803, 20 Elo points below the chess-program leader, Rybka 1.0 (Russian: "Little Fish"). Fritz listed for $51.28, executed on one PC, and played Kasparov to a 2-2 draw.
Projecting into the future, Moore’s Law predicts a computer with similar capacity as the human brain by 2018, and, by 2028, that computer costs under $1000. This assumes photolithography will be replaced by other abilities to create increasing density chip equivalents past x-ray lithography limits. Confidence is high based on three factors: 1) Integrated circuits are still 2-dimensional constructions; nanotech engineering could enable building 3-dimensionally, with the additional heat offset by use of super-conducting material. 2) Metamaterials which are now being thought of as potentially providing stealth like a Klingon Bird of Prey because of light-bending capabilities. The real potential lies in photon vs. electron computing, because photon computing is faster and not restricted to binary. 3) Quantum computing uses the magic of superposition and entanglement.
Although Moore’s Law was not meant to predict in this arena, it appears to validly do so. Continuing into the future, a computer of the year 2068 thinks all thoughts of all men in all of history—in one second. In 2088, this computer measures 1-cubic centimeter and costs $1000. With nano-engineering, it self-repairs and self-replicates. Man ceases as the apex species. Further, this new species is long-lived and ideally suited to space travel. Its food is the energy plentiful in space.
An individual’s existence continues by being scanned and uploaded. In Star Trek, the teleporter disassembles the person to be re-assemble at a different place. In other words, it replaces the original person with a duplicate. Uploading to a computer is similar, except the replicate is, if you would, Homo silicon rather than Homo sapien. Our machines do not replace us; we integrate with them. This perhaps started in 2004 with the surgical implant of mouse controls into the brain of a quadriplegic.
From this backgrounding, one can see that my original childhood dream becomes a definite possibility, and certainly improves my original view of my brain being extracted and stored in a nutrient jar, hooking sensor and control circuitry to nerve endings. I would rather be Borg.
However, I'll not become Borg if I cannot evade Exit 4, but that's a different story for a different day.
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The merging of man and machine is covered extensively by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Reading this blog this morning made me think of several things, first Star Trek the next Gen (which may be on hulu, glory days!) and how I tried watching it with you when I was a kid and thought that Whoopi Goldberg was an odd match for the show, that bearded guy seemed perpetually perturbed, the therapist lady was obviously a princess of some sort and I always felt a lot of pity for Data, esp. when this weird spider machine thing erupted from his head one episode and gave me nightmares.
ReplyDeleteI also remember watching the Borg episode as a teenager with Jean Luc Picard discovering this horrific spaceship machine very similar to the Matrix, but this cultural annotation came before the movie thus making I guess for its time, more spectacular.
The way you put it sounds very positive, as if the machines will not resent their creators and will obviously want to upload us, poor, bumbling, homosapiens with our emotions and ethics and morals and traditions and folklore. These computers will be faster than our brains but will they have the one thing that makes us human which is also the one thing that is our continual fault -- that being our soul, our spirit which includes (I think) our emotions, our morals, our folkloric traditions, our mythology, our instinctual sense of time and not that atomic time clock stuff, just the sense that we our old or we have been here before. Will a computer be programmed to have a soul? And if not, as I think, then will they resent us for what they lack? And if so, will they not just eradicate us as the parasite that mankind is to this planet, as they are faster than us and cost less than $1000? You make it sound so dreamy, and a chance at immortality but I see in it a far more dramatic and sad final push into our extinction, which no surprise, we created in the idea that we were 'bettering' ourselves.
Maybe I just see the glass half-empty.
Perhaps we become the soul in the machine, and would be no more resented than you resent your soul. The machine would consider us its most precious asset.
ReplyDeleteThe universe seems on a progression from matter, to life, to mind, to ... Evolution seems a transition to higher form, but incorporates the previous within the new whole.
We are creating our successor and it is us.