Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Man

By Earl Hunsinger

How fast is technology changing? According to many experts, faster than the majority of us think or are prepared for. According to one futurist, Ray Kurzweil, "we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029." If that sounds like something from a scary movie ("Terminator" may come to mind), Mr. Kurzweil says not to worry, such super machines will also have morals and respect us as their creators (the people in scary movies rarely think that anything bad will happen to them either). He also believes that humans themselves will be smarter, healthier, and more capable in the near future by merging with our technology. For example, tiny robots implanted in our brains will work directly with our neurons to make us smarter (this may call to mind some other movies).

Will such a technological revolution take place? Some would argue that it is inevitable, or that it is already happening. It is hard to deny the tremendous changes that most of us have seen in our own lifetimes. Even people in their twenties probably remember a time before cell phones and the internet. Seventy years ago there was no television, much less satellites and cable. People listened to phonographs or the radio, if they had electricity. Many people in rural areas didn’t. A little over a hundred years ago there were no cars. If you wanted to go to town, you saddled up your horse, or hitched him to a wagon.

Of course, if you’ve ever purchased a computer, you know how fast technology changes. It seems that it’s out of date as soon as you get it home.

Some futurists, like Mr. Kurzweil, believe that technological progress is a logarithmic progression, rather than a linear one. In other words, the changes are coming more rapidly all of the time. They see this as leading inevitably to what has been described as the technological singularity. As the term is used by some, this is a hypothesized point in the future that will be characterized by the development of self improving machines. The idea is that if machines can be made capable of improving themselves, they will build even smarter machines, which in turn will build smarter machines, and so forth, rapidly outpacing us. As the mathematician and novelist Vernor Vinge put it, "When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale." He is not as positive as Ray Kurzweil about what this will mean for human civilization. When first writing about the subject he made a statement that is often quoted, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended." Other experts likewise feel that the creation of such super machines will eventually result in the annihilation of the human race, either deliberately or by accident.

Technology is neither good nor bad. It never has been. What man does with it is another story entirely. Technological changes are certainly coming. They are already taking place. They are constant and ubiquitous. Many believe that they are accelerating. They are probably also unstoppable. Just as with the scientific knowledge that went into making the atomic bomb, once it is possible to do something, someone will eventually do it.

The question then is how soon the next big breakthrough will come and what we will do with it, or it to us.