If you have ever seen Ghost in the Shell or have read some of the Ender’s Game Series by Orson Scott Card, you will be familiar with the notion of a network that grows so large that it gains self awareness.
Do you think that such an advent in AI is a possibility within the next 20 years? Do you think it will ever be possible to deposit your memories into the global network and thereby gain a measure of immortality?
Clarification added:
I’d like to thank everyone who has replied so far. Joost provided a very interesting site http://www.singinst.org/ that speaks about this very issue. When I asked about depositing memories and gaining immortality, I almost thought it far fetched, naively as I found out since apparently many people hold to this future vision.
The questions the really becomes not only can AI create better intelligence, but will that AI realize the huge question of what it means to be human and what will happen when it chooses to emulate the humanity and perhaps become human? I have no doubt that we will transform into androids at some point in the future: we can hardly live without our blackberries, imagine if that input could go straight to your brain…
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The biological path to awareness likely began with a single-celled creature, only aware of simple environmental changes happening microns away . . . changes that provided clues about the location of nearby nutrients.
Like the organisms themselves, awareness evolved to become what we humans experience today. But biological awareness seems to have plateaued. There is more we could discover about ourselves, using only what we were born with. However, except for a few, mostly marginal individuals, we’ve taken the “easy” route of extending consciousness through technological tools. As marvelously subtle and complex as these tools have become, human consciousness is many orders of magnitude more so.
I believe digital or network awareness will also follow an evolutionary process. The first steps are already underway. Consider the evolution of computer viruses, worms, etc.
Early biological organisms had no ability to modify their own “programming.” But they did have a strong drive to spread and reproduce, something which computer virus programmers have already given their creations. For that matter, some antivirus systems exhibit that kind of behavior, too. Self-modifying software also exists that reprograms itself in response to changes in its environment. At some point–which may already have happened–self-programming and reproductive behaviors will come together, and we’ll have the first true digital lifeforms.
As with biological evolution, not all of these will survive. Those that do will have gone beyond what their human programmers provided, and found ways to exist and reproduce that are hidden from the “antibodies” we invent to destroy them.
Human intelligence has been claimed to be holographic…existing as a whole in every part of the brain, and capable of being intact after incredible amounts of damage. Perhaps that’s how digital awareness will evolve, too — existing throughout the whole network, yet not apparent in any one node.
Once begun, evolution in the electronic domain will progress quickly, although not necessarily as quickly as some believe. A limiting factor of our own awareness is the speed at which nerve and neurons communicate. A digital consciousness whose nodes span a significant part of the globe would be limited by the speed at which its network communicates, especially the bottlenecks in that network.
Download our own memories and personality? I’d have called it impossible a few years ago. The storage technology required seemed to defy the laws of physics as we knew them. But the first RAM upgrade I did nearly 20 years ago was from 4K to 16K, requiring four fair-sized chips. Later tonight I’ll be installing a single smaller chip with more than 60,000 times the capacity. A short time ago, I saw 1.0 Terabyte storage units on the shelf at my local Best Buy.
And don’t get me started on the potentials of quantum computing . . .
The question is, when we have that capability, will there already be a conscious pervading our hardware. And will it be inclined to let us in?
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Hi Gene,
Not a cat’s chance in the next 20 years. I suspect that we will be able to map and copy some brain patterns in the next three decades. That will be like copying a few sectors off a disk. The real challenge will be cracking the operating system and I’d guess 50 years at least for that. We’ll need the work of the upcomming crop of neuroscientists plus their successors.
Regards
Brian MacLeod
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The fundamental problem in answering questions like this is that we don’t have a good definition for what intelligence or self-awareness really is. The closest we come is to identify behaviors of an intelligent, self-aware being, and attempt to duplicate those. The Turing test for artificial intelligence basically says that if a human cannot tell if he is interacting with another person or a machine, then the machine is effectively intelligent.
We already do a lot of this. Google search seems intelligent when it finds what you want from vague search terms - even correcting your spelling. But as we see what a machine can do, we start to make more refined distinctions about what a human can do that a machine cannot.
We also put a lot of our memories into the global network, via blogs, flicker, shared calendars, etc. Many people document their lives on-line, and this record is more or less permanent. I imagine, though, that this isn’t what you meant, and this point reinforces the definition problem.
What you might have meant was to ask if we can put our awareness into a machine (or network). Since we don’t really know what awareness is, it is hard to reproduce.
As an engineering problem, we are chipping away at it. As quickly as we can define the elements and behaviors, (e.g. store and retrieve images and data and relationships, recognize and correct errors), we find ways to recreate them artificially. The internet can “see”, and “remember”, and “speak”, and to a limited extent, even “reason”. Is is alive? Is it aware? Probably not, and probably will not be soon - but who knows? In the SF stories, the network builders don’t know how to create awareness either - it just arises from the chaos.
We don’t really know where our awareness comes from, so we can only guess where a new awareness might appear.
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In short: No
Longer answer:
In their book ‘On Intelligence’, Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee argue that yes, we can build intelligent machines (and I am extending their argument to systems), but they may not be what we expect, i.e. they would not behave like humans or interact with us in humanlike ways.
The authors argue that, first, as the human mind is created not only by the neocortex but also by the emotional systems of the old brain and the complexity of the human body, to be human we need all of our biological machinery, not just a cortex. Secondly, given the effort and cost necessary to build and maintain humanoid systems, this would not be practical, as even though they might be ‘intelligent’ they would not have the kind of rapport and easy understanding we have by virtue of being fellow human beings.
In view of the above I do not think that we would be able in our lifetime (whether this extends to the next 20 or 50 years) to dump our memories into a global network within the context that created them, and the most we could expect to