LAWS@IU.AI.SRI.COM (Ken Laws) (07/09/87)
[Forwarded with permission of Hans.Moravec@ROVER.RI.CMU.EDU.]
From AP Newsfeatures, June 14, 1987
By MICHAEL HIRSH
Associated Press Writer
PITTSBURGH (AP) - If you can survive beyond the next 50 years or so,
you may not have to die at all - at least, not entirely. [...]
Hans Moravec, director of Mobile Robot Laboratory of the Robotics
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, believes that computer
technology is advancing so swiftly there is little we can do to avoid
a future world run by superintelligent robots.
Unless, he says, we become them ourselves.
In an astonishingly short amount of time, scientists will be able to
transfer the contents of a person's mind into a powerful computer,
and in the process, make him - or at least his living essence -
virtually immortal, Moravec claims.
''The things we are building are our children, the next
generations,'' the burly, 39-year-old scientist says. ''They're
carrying on all our abilities, only they're doing it better. If you
look at it that way, it's not so devastating.'' [...]
''I have found in traveling throughout all of the major robotics and
artificial intelligence centers in the U.S. and Japan that the ideas
of Hans Moravec are taken seriously,'' says Grant Fjermedal, author
of ''The Tomorrow Makers,'' a recent book about the future of
computers and robotics. [He] Devotes the first five chapters of
his book to the work of Moravec and his proteges at CMU.
MIT's Gerald J. Sussman, who wrote the authoritative textbook on
artificial intelligence, agreed that computerized immortality for
people ''isn't very long from now.''
''A machine can last forever, and even if it doesn't you can always
make backups,'' Sussman told Fjermedal. ''I'm afraid, unfortunately,
that I'm the last generation to die. Some of my students may manage
to survive a little longer.'' [...]
CMU's Alan Newell, one of the so-called founding fathers of
artificial intelligence, cautions that while little stands in the way
of intelligent machines, the transfer of a human mind into one is
''going down a whole other path.''
''The ability to create intelligent systems is not at all the same
as saying I can take an existing mind and capture what's in that
mind. You might be able to create intelligence but not (capture) the
set of biological circumstances that went into making a particular
mind,'' he says.
In Moravec's forthcoming book, ''Mind Children,'' he argues that
economic competition for faster and better information-processing
systems is forcing the human race to engineer its own technological
Armageddon, one that a nuclear catastrophe can only delay.
Natural evolution is finished, he says. The human race is no longer
procreating, but designing, its successors.
''We owe our existence to organic evolution. But we owe it little
loyalty,'' Moravec writes. ''We are on a threshold of a change in the
universe comparable to the transition from non-life to life.''
Moravec's projections are based on his research showing that, on the
average, the cost of computation has halved every two years from the
time of the primitive adding machines of the late 19th century to the
supercomputers of the 1980s. [...]
Moreover, the rate is speeding up, and the technological pipeline is
full of new developments, like molecule-sized computer circuits and
recent advances in superconductors, that can ''sustain the pace for
the foreseeable future,'' he says.
The implications of a continued steady decrease in computing costs
are even more mind-boggling.
It is no surprise that studies in artificial intelligence have shown
sparse results in the last 20 years, Moravec says. Scientists are
severely limited by the calculating speed and capacity of laboratory
computers. Today's supercomputers, running at full tilt, can match in
power only the 1-gram brain of a mouse, he says.
But by the year 2010, assuming the growth rate of the last 80 years
continues, the best machines will be a thousand times faster than
they are today and equivalent in speed and capacity to the human
mind, Moravec argues. [...]
''All of our culture can be taken over by robots. It'll be boring to
be human. If you can get human equivalence by 2030, what will you
have by 2040?'' Moravec asks, laughing.
''Suppose you're sitting next to your best friend and you're 10
times smarter than he is. Are you going to ask his advice? In an
economic competition, if you make worse decisions, you don't do as
well,'' he says.
''We can't beat the computers. So that opens up another possibility.
We can survive by moving over into their form.''
There are a number of different scenarios of ''digitizing'' the
contents of the human mind into a computer, all of which will be made
plausible in the next 50 to 100 years by the pace of current
technology, Moravec says.
One is to hook up a superpowerful computer to the corpus callosum,
the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the
brain. The computer can be programmed to monitor the traffic between
the two and, eventually, to teach itself to think like the brain.
After a while, the machine begins to insert its own messages into
the thought stream. ''The computer's coming up with brilliant
solutions and they're just popping into your head,'' Moravec says [...]
As you lose your natural brain capacity through aging, the computer
takes over function by function. And with advances in brain scanning,
you might not need any ''messy surgery,'' Moravec says. ''Perhaps you
just wear some kind of helmet or headband.'' At the same time, the
person's aging, decrepit body is replaced with robot parts.
''In the long run, there won't be anything left of the original. The
person never noticed - his train of thought was never interrupted,''
he says.
This scenario is probably more than 50 years away, Moravec says, but
because breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology are likely to
extend people's life spans, ''anybody now living has a ticket.''
Like many leading artificial intelligence researchers, Moravec
discounts the mind-body problem that has dogged philosophers for
centuries: whether a person's identity - in religious terms, his soul
- can exist independently of the physical brain.
''If you can make a machine that contains the contents of your mind,
then that machine is you,'' says MIT's Sussman.
Moravec believes a machine-run world is inevitable ''because we
exist in a competing economy, because each increment in technology
provides an advantage for the possessor . . . Even if you can keep
them (the machines) slaves for a long time, more and more
decision-making will be passed over to them because of the
competitiveness.
''We may be still be left around, like the birds. It may well be
that we can arrange things so the machines leave us alone. But sooner
or later they'll accidently step on us. They'll need the material of
the earth.''
Such talk is dismissed as sheer speculation by Moravec's detractors,
among them his former teacher, Stanford's John McCarthy, who is also
one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence research.
McCarthy says that while he respects Moravec's pioneering work on
robots, his former Ph.D student is considered a ''radical.''
''I'm more uncertain as to how long it (human equivalence) will
take. Maybe it's five years. Maybe it's 500. He has a slight tendency
to believe it will happen as soon as computers are powerful enough.
They may be powerful enough already. Maybe we're not smart enough to
program them.''
Even with superintelligent machines, McCarthy says, it's hardly
inevitable that computers will take over the world.
''I think we ought to work it out to suit ourselves. In particular
it is not going to be to our advantage to give things with
human-level intelligence human-like emotions (like ambition). You
might want something to sit there and maybe read an encyclopedia
until you're ready to use it again,'' he says.
George Williams, an emeritus professor of divinity at Harvard
University, called Moravec's scenario ''entirely repugnant.'' [...]
McCarthy, however, insists there's no need to panic.
''Because the nature of the path that artificial intelligence will
take is so unknown, it's silly to attempt to plan any kind of social
policy at this early time,'' he says.