Although it may be very far into the future, it seems that it will eventually be necessary for humankind to merge with technology to become a hybrid species. If we fail to do so, the likely result is that humans will simply become obsolete since artificial intelligence and the capabilities of robots are bound to ultimately reach and surpass the level of human intelligence and capability, rendering us useless and possibly even resulting in a scenario seen frequently in popular culture where machines decide to take control for themselves. Thus, despite the many risks that come with doing so, humans must combine with machines in order to keep up with quickly advancing technology. As mentioned in the article, we are already becoming heavily reliant on technology and continue to do so as time goes on so the natural course of human evolution appears to be the gradual merging of humans with robots and of natural intelligence with artificial intelligence.
Naturally, there will be concerns regarding the ethics and safety surrounding certain technologies. But just as with new technologies in our time, there will be local, national, and international governing bodies that will be tasked to ensure safety, inform the public of the risks, and implement the necessary regulations to prevent any issues from arising. Once the technology is thoroughly tested and shown to be safe and effective, it will be released to the general public not at all unlike any other novel form of technology.
2
To some people, the idea of merging with robots is the way of the future and a great way to improve our daily lives.
However, to others it strikes fear as robots can be perceived as untrustworthy and invasive in many ways. The article caught my attention as it brought up a controversial topic which I am interested in, and made a bold claim in support of the idea. I personally believe that merging with robots is an idea that we should invest research into, however we should be cautious of the extent of their implementation. Recently, there have been developments in driverless cars, robots, medicines, and much more; meanwhile devices such as cellular phones are already being commonly used worldwide. The article effectively points out these features as it makes compelling arguments in support of the current technological movement.
1
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/opinion/we-are-merging-with-robots-th...
I chose this article because it shows the amazing advancements that humanity has made. From running around after prey to farming them. From being hunted by a terrifying predator, the wolf, to domesticating them and making them pets. Now, we have come to a point where we can trick rocks into doing math, can and have visited most planets in our solar system and we are now beginning to integrate technology into our bodies. The article shows the direction we are heading and it is very intriguing and inspiring for me.
1
I think this is human kinds next big evolutionary step.
Correction: the wealthy are merging with robots. Everyone else will become Soylent Green.
Here's something else to think about: wherever you are there you are. Meaning: people never change. The technology does not change what we are.
3
My first thought was that maybe the writer needs a AI tutorial in writing. Or better, read Hemingway and emulate. A clear, concise sentence...rather than a bunch of abstract words thrown together in such a way that they come out meaning nothing.
5
Will "we" still have some numb enough to vote Repubican?
1
August 14, 2018
In light of the Facebook fiasco of out of control invasion to its user database integrity: one must be very cautious for the risk of faults in the many considerations of interacting with electronic interface products. There is not substitute for the 'normal' human transference and with concurrent developmental rewards. That's not to say for some of us inflicted with anomalies in degrees of anatomical or internally the support for substitute intimation activities can be pleasurable and successful but let not give the cybernetics programs a status of human bonding for symmetry with what we enjoy in the full depth and range of human needs albeit some robotic activities is great but when it comes to intellectual and emotional grace there is never going to be electronics that will compete with the vastness of human needs en total.
jja Manhattan, N.Y.
1
http://prix2016.aec.at/prixwinner/19611/
Above is an example of where this COULD go... SOMEBODY thought it was a good idea...
Found description of it in August 2018 IEEE Spectrum magazine, though the video on that page is from 2015
I assume, albeit cautiously, that Mr. Clark was not paid by a digital tech consortium to write this. Whether he was or not, it is essentially a slick piece of advertising for their products. The key to its slickness is its stance of naive unawareness of how the profit motive is driving the developments he describes.
2
very exviting. now lets try to not waste 30% of the food we grow, or allow children to go hungry in the richest country the world has ever known. lets tackle the "simple" stuff, huh?
3
We have already shown what we are and what we are capable of, collectively. We have destroyed Mother Earth. Will we have enough time to save it and all life forms necessary for Mother Earth to allow humans to remain? Will we comprehend human population overshoot(human reproduction outstripping resources) & come to terms with it before it's too late? I want to know when humans(again, collectively) are going to address human overpopulation. Humans don't seem to have a problem addressing what we believe to be overpopulation of other species. We do our utmost to control other species ... eradicate natural predators, cull overpopulation of herds, flocks, etc ... because the natural predators were eradicated; use toxins to eradicate insects, rodents, fungus, weeds wherever we see fit. All having their own deleterious ramifications. We strip every natural resource. Then wonder what to do next. Fossil fuels problem, oh, solution ->nuclear power. Wow! That was a great technological advancement wasn't it. Rocket and jet fuel ... yeah! Contaminate just about every water source on the planet. That's technology for ya! More cellphones, more games, more distractions ... with humans it's all about the "me & mine" quotient. The development and use of technology has simply fed the capitalist system allowing the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer and those in between numbed and dumbed with the capitalist illusion. More technology won't dig us out it is digging the hole deeper.
3
Looking at the state of the planet, the quality of our leaders and the global atmosphere of hysteria and instability, I think we should give robots a chance including , no, especially, at the top levels of management.
1
This theme of our being so malleable that we can become anything we want was, if I remember, an idea in Stanislav Lem's The Cyberiad. I recommend it.
Merging with robots? What exactly does that mean? Humans are social animals, incredibly flexible and subject to manipulation. We are driven by hard wired impulses, emotion, experience and logic. Logic is last on the list because it's hard to think under the influence of impulse or emotion and figuring things out takes time. How long did it take to see the dark side of Social Media? How long will it take to act on Climate Change? Humans are killing humans all over the world and slavery still exists. In a historical context saying "We need to ask if we are willing to tolerate some inequality as part of the rollout process for a more fluid and interactive world" is a cruel joke. Technology can make the world a better place for people but that goal has a very low priority. The top priority is money that generated, for profit, "the algorithms that talk with us, that watch us, that trade for us, that select dates for us, etc...." That manipulation is what has to change. Human progress doesn't originate with the meek and manipulated or the fat cats.
3
We are developing and will continue to develop the ability to change ourselves in ways that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human. If you doubt this, then in my view you simply lack imagination and/or do not want to see what is clearly coming. Nothing short of the global cessation of technological change can prevent these developments; if they are stymied by law or custom or fear in one community or country then they will simply continue in another location, until the people who have outlawed or avoided utilizing these options are forced to adopt them in order to avoid being rendered obsolete. If you doubt this logic then consider the following scenario: the United States bans the genetic enhancement of children. Country X does not, and many members of its population begin to engineer their offspring so that they possess extreme-genius-level intelligence (I understand that we don't currently know how to do this, but as long as technological development continues then at some point in the future we will). How long until the United States is forced to lift the ban in order simply to remain competitive with / avoid dominance by Country X? What's more, even if all the nations in the world somehow got together to ban personal enhancement then some individuals somewhere would start doing it and the same competitive imperative would kick in. Humans are going to fundamentally change themselves, and there is nothing that we can do to prevent this from happening.
1
I can understand that if someone were really bad at being human they might hope to be better at being something else. I'm afraid this is unrealistic though. Our biology eg our physical humanity adds up to being a very serious constraint. I think that anyone who is a failure as a human is going to fail at anything else as well.
2
I suggested in a recent post that we are still operating with outmoded and inadequate ideas of privacy, property and humanity. I didn't mean we should have a professor of logic foist illogical arguments and bring metaphysics into purely empirical issues.
the handwaving of "possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability" is nerd marketing jargon. the essential issue with technology -- a component of infrastructure -- is always who owns the technology, and how do they use it.
the issue with technology isn't what it does but who controls it, and how. this is the issue of power, and mr. clark seems oblivious to this old nietzschean paradox.
the key problem faced by humanity is not how to enable the already enlightened among us, but how to bring the rest of humanity along with us. the rural population, believers in "Q", vast tracts of africa and asia, those lacking wealth and education are the humanity i mean.
we have already merged so far with machines that they dictate our decisions, they provide our health care, and they enable our productive activity. but there's a big difference between using a tool and tool symbiosis.
futurists neglect to observe that the net result of our infrastructure is destruction of our ecology, a ballooning population of livestock humans, and the consumption of natural resources as marketable trash.
1
What does the use of hallucinogens for depression have to do with computers and robots?
Why is experiencing virtual reality worthwhile? What an enormous waste of time and talent.
But nothing is more absurd that claiming sexbots as progress. A never-aging body completely controlled by the user....this demonstrates what some men really want from women.
Grow up.
2
Come on. Let's get "real". I've worked in research and development of new technologies since the 1970s and this area is still almost exclusively led by a narrow group of male scientists and engineers who don't take any time to seriously consider the profound down side to these inventions.
The author says: "Ethically speaking, we need to ask what new costs and inequalities the freedoms and augmentations of some may mean for others." Guess what. That question was asked decades ago and ignored by technology inventors as it was most important to get technology developments to market, no questions asked.
Technology developments have now raced ahead of our ability to understand and evaluate their impact and no one is really pausing to do this. People should be very concerned about this as only a small group of science and business men are deciding to profoundly change what it means to be human. And even they don't have any idea of the consequences.
5
One more quick thought from me. I don’t think we should be thinking of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ as opposing or exclusionary forces. Virtual and augmented realities are just more structures in our world. They can be engaging and enhancing, just as easily as they can be dull or diminishing. Sure, we built them. But we built artworks and landscaped gardens too.
1
@Andy Clark
Tools of the imagination create a painting or a garden, works realized by tools that are neutral and under the control of the artists using them. Too many of the tools of the new technologies are 'pre-imagined' by the software and interface, and become commercialized in use, therefore constrained at best and at worst, authoritarians of consensus reality, distractions and channels of control that serve a power structure admirably.
3
@Philip Lew...
That's true. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the tides may be turning on the locus of control. I'm hopeful, but your caution is well-placed...
Such tools and infrastructure aid modern marketing in mastering consumer behavior and driving capitalism’s growth. Trump, Putin, and others capture and make this system master politics and governance. Trump, the stable genius of this system, promises to spend 6-7 days a week in the work he adores in key races for the next 100 days.
We already travel on this road and have for much longer than we may even realize. The purest and one of the first forms of robotics are our friends and partners we share our life with on film. My father called it the idiot box. Who, what, how, and where had become instantly available, the dream machine they called it. Then there was technicolor, 3d stereo, and the future holograms without the contraption. My favorite was the life like featured holo deck the next generation starships were equipped with. In one episode a crew members figured out a way to stay in there indefinitely, and at the same time denying access to anyone else on the ship, heaven ?
Look at the photo of the person with VR goggles on, supposedly "drawing"; or think of any person using/experiencing VR. Then take the opportunity to escort some children on an outdoor excursion, and watch their shared wonder at seeing the world. Which is more advanced, who is more in tune with the world...and with each other. I study and work in some of the ethics side of this "new" world, and see the same blind enthusiasm without real thought as we have always seemed to have whenever we "peel the banana" for the first time.
6
We are merging with robots... that's a bad thing !! We are nuts/self-destructive to let it happen. Only danger awaits.
2
In the age of the Anthropocene, is it any surprise to read something as blindingly and pathetically anthropocentric as this article?
4
Too much kool-aid, not enough genuine brain food.
For the record, basically any species that has a 6 layer cortex on this planet is capable of communication, learning, and thought. That means all of the mammals, and all of the birds, or roughly 15,000 species, and tens of billions of such non-human intelligences.
We spent almost all of the first 100,000 years of our intelligent sentient existence rigidly believing that we alone were capable of thought, and do very dismally at communicating with all but a handful of those other intelligences.
We invent computers and suddenly we have "luminaries" telling us about a brave new world in which we are on the threshold of radical change. It's seductive, it's inspiring, but it's also way, way too big an ego for a desperately non-introspective discipline like cognitive neuroscience.
5
Synchronicity is the state capitol of uber tech.
It's a destination, not a destiny.
It's designed for people who don't recognize artificial intelligence as an oxymoron.
They farm data not food. They don't deny reality because theirs is virtual.
It's powered by electricity and arrogance.
We can still pull the plug, each alone or all together.
To paraphrase Joyce Kilmer: I don't think I'll ever see a robot as lovely as a tree.
3
An fast automobile can travel at well over 200 mph, 10 X faster than the top rate most athletes can attain, yet I have never heard people refer to cars as 'artificial athletes', and I have never heard the suggestion that humans should just forget about athletic competition because the 'machine singularity' has already occured.
A fast computer can indeed perform computations at astonishing rates, but all it does is compute. Tasks for us that are trivial, such as recognizing peoples' faces, are made possible by the application of an astonishing level of HUMAN intelligence and labor to make it possible for a fast calculator to perform tasks most of us are capable of. And if you want to see just how much is needed to match a task difficult for most humans, read the paper on the development of the engine to play Go:
https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pdf
1
Mr. Clark’s paean to the flexibility of the human self is intriguing but somewhat overblown. Reference to the past few hundred thousand years would seem to indicate that even as technology has changed, the sense of individual existence and the human ego, the drive for personal influence and power, have remained essentially unchanged. While “group think” has always been with us, it is doubtful that the core of the self will disappear into the great cosmic soup. The manifestations and the methods will change but the sense of self, and the desire for personal influence will remain. Indeed, in all likelihood, rather than losing our sense of self we will manage to imbue our cyber servants/lords with that same sense.
1
I support freedom of expression, but this opinion should have been positioned as one of many in response to a provocative and important question.
1
Big Tech, Big Data, and Robots are not the answer to the human condition. There is no technical solution to ultimately a social problem. We need and crave more human face-to-face experiences and interaction; not less. We've seen enough of Big Tech to know how this ends. I seem to recall articles 30 years ago saying we'd have flying cars and paperless offices too.
Let's re-boot our thinking instead of trying to run away from who we are.
2
The real threat is not that robots will acquire human brains, but that humans will acquire robot brains.
The technology to effect such transformations already exists.
It is called bureaucracy.
4
We are machines that follow the laws of physics.
"But we can think, conceptualize, have free-will! Certainly we are more than machines?" one questions in protest.
Yup we are amazing machines - capable of amazing illusions.
All stimulus and reaction - a matter of hardware, programming, data, and input. Processed in a material way in a material body. No evidence otherwise really.
Yes we are not static. We store new data; we modulate/modify processing pathways; we learn, we vary reactions, we are unpredictable.
Still all a matter of input, repetition, reward, punishment, and/or some environmental and/or template misfortune/good luck.
Yes we are wonderful biochemical computers - the best computers yet for some projects still. But others not so "bestest".
To my point - we are wonderful but still imperfect machines.
No law of nature must be violated to make us or something other than us better than us.
And that "something other" may or may not have the same human qualities we presently recognize.
But they could - again not outside the laws of physics. I suspect before my grandchildren are my age some non-human machine will pass any Turing test with ease.
This is all part of our evolution - call it our breeding.
We WILL breed super humans and they will be either part of our bodies or not as technology dictates.
The political question is will we insist the breeders be benevolent or will we allow malevolent ones to satisfy military needs or higher profits.
1
It's wonderful that so many possibilities exist in the future of technology and it must be exciting to have the mental abilities to begin a career in developing newer and better technologies. Yet, perhaps I am out of line in saying this, as the future may belong to those who improve our technologies, it should belong to those who can, in spite of technology, keep the humdrum engines of human existence doing the necessary work of keeping lesser mortals alive. The capitalist economy will without doubt encourage further developments focused upon saving labor, even as redundant workers become stockpiled in the streets. No one seems to be focused upon the ultimate costs to both society and the economy from not providing workers with a way of making a living. It's hard for me to believe that this is such a low priority in terms of planning for the future.
1
Sincere thanks to everyone for the many thoughtful and constructive replies to my piece. My real hope is that we use these new and emerging technologies to do what we have always done – to expand our horizons and increase our empathy: not (as one reader nicely put it) to stop holding hands and looking at the stars, or to retreat deeper and deeper into purely virtual worlds. I do believe, though, that the clear lines between what’s ‘real’ and virtual are being slowly but steadily eroded. And I do believe that this has implications for human identity and how we experience, and create, our world. What matters is not what our worlds are made of but how we use and structure them, and how they enable us to know things and interact with others. And just as good literature can fuel unexpected empathy, so can (for example) experiencing a virtual world from another kind of perspective. But I actually agree with the more skeptical readers that there’s plenty of room, in every single case I mentioned, for doubt and discussion. My aim was simply to point towards the many different threads that may soon be coming together to render human identity more fluid than ever before. The skeptics fell mostly into two (not mutually exclusive) camps. Those that seem sure this would be a bad thing, and those that seem sure it is not actually going to happen anyway. I’m not sure of either of those things. That suggests this is probably a good time to have this conversation.
5
@Andy Clark Thank you for this wonderful article. I have been intrigued by these possibilities for over a decade and am even writing a novel about a woman who realizes that her former purely human emotions may no longer be useful and that something completely unforeseen (better?)may appear in their place.
I hope we see more on this subject that explores this potential
1
A mushroom cloud is also a stupendous and riveting demonstration of technological prowess. Do we celebrate that with eagerness for all the change that it might bring about? As other commentators have noted, our track record of managing emerging technologies is pretty abysmal. The promise of expanding the human experience through VR sounds about as hollow as social media bringing the world closer together.
2
@Andy Clark
What matters is that we are in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction and that global warming is turning the planet into a hothouse on the order of the late Permian period. What matters is that the Earth's resources are being used up and the population of 7+ billion humans keeps expanding.
What matters is that the entire American West is now blanketed in smoke from out of control wildfires, that your way of life gives children asthma and allergies and autism, that the Oglalla Aquifer is depleted, that there is a madman in the Oval Office.
But the techie cheerleaders choose to ignore reality and keep crowing about the greatness of the end of humanity as it merges to become ever more machine-like: cold, without empathy, and profiting the corporate overlords.
1
I’m pretty skeptical of huge technological change. I mean is there anyone that owns a printer that works more than 70% of the time? The big thing a couple years ago was Magic Leap and self driving cars. Magic Leap has developed some novelty gizmo and self-driving cars or any substantial technology that’s been promised hasn’t come to fruition. The IPhone was sweet but that was ten years ago—haven’t been impressed since. But I admit I could be very wrong. Doubt it though.
2
Western individualism is an interesting assumption to start from. We already know we're part of the universe in many ways (star stuff and all that) but more recently, the role of microbes in our bodies. Gould once said that all evolution is really about bacterial evolution and we're just complex vessels to ensure their continued evolution and propagation.
So we've been merging with "aliens" and "alien intelligences" (if you can Alexa an alien, so are things like pathogens and symbiotes) for a while. That we continue to do with our creations what has been happening for billions of years through evolution is not a surprise and not that distinct just because we label certain aspects of our environment "technology".
1
No, it's a bad thing until we understand better what it means to be human. Our carbon based species has yet to demonstrate that it can live peacefully with other hominids, preferring to use force or the threat of force to achieve its goals. if AI allows silicon based life forms to become equal to or greater than our own we'll find that
the Terminator films are better predictors of our future than I Robot.
4
The side effects of all this technology now and in the future are something that may require more and more technology to fix the mess that all that extreme technology will certainly bring.
Meanwhile, human dominance over the planet will be relatively short-lived and will continue to ruin the planet..
You think a robot can fix human monstrosities?
I wonder what all these robots are going to do when the Human Race destroys itself with technology?
4
We are creating new tools that extend our ability to do things. These tools have no self consciousness and no needs of which they can know that they need. They just do what they are intended by the tool makers, us.
There is a elated sense that makes us see all kinds of possibilities when we learn how to do something new. Once we realize the actual utility of the new thing it’s wonder evaporates and it becomes just another thing that we can use.
The men who made the first stone axes felt this way, so did the first bow and arrow makers and those who made nets. Our tools increase our capabilities and open up the possibilities from our imaginations but they are not anything more than tools.
One day we may create living things that have their own sense of awareness but that day is science fiction for as far into the future as we can see. Maybe some effort of man will create artificial life but there are no efforts now being made that anyone can show may do this. All this speculation is nothing other than wishing upon a star.
The only relevant challenge is how people can interact with machines smoothly. That is the real challenge that faces us. It’s going to be a big obstacle as we get more involved in using machines to extend our capabilities.
1
Every time a human outsources some characteristic to technology, they lose valuable physical attributes.. We have outsourced our brains to calculators, our memories to computers, our legs and stamina to cars, our myths and story telling and social selves to movies and TV, our ability to raise food to the grocery store and our ability to cook to restaurants, our ability to resist the weather to insulated houses and so forth. I am not saying we do not have easier lives, but we are extremely dependant on our crutches,so to speak. Now we will outsource our ability to love another human to a robot? This one is especially telling and very sad.
1
In "Civilization and its Discontents" Freud wrote about what the author here calls the "cooperative" relationship between human beings and our ever-growing world modern technologies:
"Man has, as it were, become a kind of Prosthetic God. When he puts on all of his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent."
But Freud went on to add: "...but those organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him much trouble."
We might not sense our difference from our various devices, but that does not mean the difference is not there, and perhaps troubling.
Not least, these various devices and machines and drugs often parasite off of our natural abilities and can weaken, warp, or even replace them. The prosthetic becomes, then, an off-loading, rather than an extension of our natural powers.
For example, think of the simple invention of writing. Writing relieved the need for as much memory and memorization. But this represents a withering away and replacement of an ancient human power. Today, who remembers much of anything, when everything is recorded and easily retrieved by our machines?
I see no paradise here. I see simply an old problematic bargain.
What do we lose when we become prosthetic gods? And moreover, past a certain point who even is in the driver's seat of this future? To answer, "We are, of course!" is naive and simplistic.
Personally, I would rather not have to carry around a Voight-Kampff machine to tell if I am having dinner with a human, or something not.
7
No thanks. I'll link out.
2
Articles like this just make me want to go for a long hike in the mountains, far far away from the insanity of uber tech. Matter of fact, I think that's just what I'll do....
7
before we become too enmeshed in artificial intelligence, wouldn't it be a good idea to encourage a more reasonable degree of natural intelligence? there's a lot of opportunity in that space, as they say.
or is there just not enough money in it for these Republican times?
3
Err....isn't it the liberals always talking about the importance of "science" and spending on same? To what end?
As Swami Vivekananda said years ago, first we carve the idol, then we fall down & worship it. The "idol" of today is the technological civilization we have created to serve us, but which we instead we have let become our master.
The dread Singularity we fear in the far future has, of course, already taken place. The robots have already taken over & are running (ruining?) everything from the financial markets--the hub on which our whole economy turns--to the playing style of the national past time, baseball.
Until techno-capitalism is replaced with a more humane system, we humans shall be reduced, as Marshall Mcluhan prophesied back in 1964, to being the sex organs of the machines--our only function, to help them reproduce.
7
I will welcome all these technological enhancements of humans but not if they increase inequality even more. Technology is not the problem, our form of capitalism is. These innovations must be made available to everybody and not just to those who can pay for it out of their own pockets. Otherwise we should not welcome them. This is the real ethical issue! Fact is, we can’t even do healthcare for all.
2
I am heartened by the critical comments voiced here, as it often seems like we are hurtling towards cyborg "utopia" without nary a moment of reflection. The future that the author lays out here is deeply disturbing. Merging with machines is not liberatory. Rather, it means turning ourselves into disposable industrial components rather than beings with inherent worth and dignity. It opens the way to truly terrifying forms of domination that will make the worst forms factory proletarianization and abuse pale by comparison. The cyborg future the author envisions would also likely mean severing our connections with all that has defined us as human and our connections with the myriad life forms sharing our planet. Feeling little kinship with either human civilization or the natural world, an alien, resource-hungry cyborg or AI "civilization" may have little compunction about erasing both.
2
@Peter Cannavo I meant to say, "with nary a moment of reflection."
This"merger" is controversial, possibly incorrect. AI, or mental robotics applied to game theory ignores the fact that the combination of strategy and tactics can never supplant experience. Hallucinogens are the figments of loucheness applied to the unsuspecting. Possibly, deviates, either forced or chosen, would use sex and companionship robots. New forms of sensory perception are false representational responses, the state of which, becoming, also misrepresents the possible. The Genome is a control and intervention possibility which has a debatable objectivity. Ways of being vis a vis gender exhibit an exaggerated place in and of a permissive society; ignores history. VR is a misguided sense of experience. Neuro-enhancement begs the question of what is normal--if it becomes the norm it is a question whether it would be considered deviate behavior. This all sounds like too much of a "good thing". The bottom line is that man is not fated to merge with machines; psycho-physical parallelism is the only reality, and to a great extent it is unknowable; metaphors, as poetic devices probably do "destroy the language" to paraphrase Sartre. The science is questionable and so is the technology, for the most part.
1
Scientists. I'm a big believer in the reality of human responsibility for climate change, so I'm not anti-science at all. But, there was real fear that the first test at Los Alamos would unleash the power of the sun sufficient to destroy the planet and they did it anyway.
The madness is all in his opening salvo: "Artificial intelligences already outperform us .... IN WAYS THAT WE CAN BARELY COMPREHEND."
And all the risks of this technology are to be navigated by beings who have trouble, currently, variously, transitioning to adulthood, learning another language, writing with their other hand, shutting down their screens, taking collective action to combat climate change, etc. The list is long.
And you don't need artificial intelligence to know that halllucinogenics have curative properties.
4
Before modern times people lived in an uncertain world at the mercy of natural forces they didn't understand and power was distributed among human beings arbitrarily without respect for the greater good. Now we have technology and that's all pretty much still true. We started out powerless little apes terrified of the unknown and we still are, so don't worry so much.
All these comments are so pessimistic and fearful. Everybody thinks the ideal state of technology was wherever it was when they were about 15. I'm no different, i'm cool with using the internet but i find smart phones annoying and invasive. But If you are gonna freak out about something, freak out about global warming not VR and AI or the general progress of technology because there is nothing you can do about that since capitalism is a process nearly as capricious and arbitrary as evolution.
There's probably going to be some stuff that is nightmarish but also hopefully a lot that is liberating and wonderful. The industrial revolution gave us all sorts of wonders but it also gave us the oceans full of plastic, nuclear bombs and an atmosphere that is slowly cooking us. I say we try to deal with the problems the baby boomers left us and let our grand children handle the cyborg wars or whatever because they will probably be better equipped than we are.
2
@MaxistMax
One could, but for an "r" recommend this thoughtful post, but it does beg the question regarding happiness.
Didn't this happen with Rome? The people who owned slaves became wealthy as slavery became more popular. The slaves took the jobs of workers and farmers leaving the non slaves with no way of making a living (except maybe selling their kids into slavery). Then they created a welfare state for people who couldn't find work.
Except today you won't be able to sell your kids lat least not legally. With all that wealth i'm sure the sex trade for pedophile's will be booming. Lowering the age of consent would be a good start.
Given the ease with which all our systems of information are hacked by lies misdirection false representations fake news unreal representations and endless sources of disinformation manipulatio and misinformation does anyone seriously expect by plugging yourself into this virtual altered assisted reality AI driven world that you won't have completely surrendered yourself to Total manipulation and exploitation.
The author has it completely wrong. It won't be human's exploiting technology but technology that will be exploiting humans.
2
@zb, believe you are correct.
Saw a technophile happily say: Soon we'll have a little chip put in the back of our neck that will let us access the entire contents of the Library of Congress!
More likely, it will make you have to watch three commercials before you're allowed to wake up in the morning . . .
2
humbug! it will be other venal humans behind the curtain, using technology to exploit other humans who haven't developed a sufficient degree of selfishness.
plus ca change...
As many noted, the inequality which the author suggests should be tolerated is likely to lead to social tension at the least. What seems not to have been noted is that we have already experienced a major consequence of that sort in the election of Trump, propelled in part by the resentment caused by technological unemployment and in part by resentment at the shifting concepts of human identity so celebrated by Clark. Similar revolts have occurred outside the US. The power of the new technologies (somewhat exaggerated here) needs to be redirected to the reduction of inequality or we will face much worse social upheaval which could endanger all scientific activity as well as other positive features of human civilization.
Why do telephone voice response systems pretend to be real people? "How may I help you today? Please tell me why you're calling and I'll direct you to the appropriate line."
I hope all of this happens on the colony in Mars where all the super elites whose DNA has evolved several generations ahead of the rest of humanity lives :)
2
We have yet to successfully deal with our old forms of inequality -- of wealth, power over surroundings, power to influence the environments that form us -- and now we are introducing new forms and exploring them without using them to deal with our older forms.
The development, and more important, the spread of new forms is controlled by their ability to create wealth, sometimes for their developers and more often for those who are good at creating wealth. Any attempt to control their spread that limits their wealth creation is fought by the wealth created. So, for example, any attempt to build smartphones so they cannot be used by the drivers of moving cars is opposed by the need to sell more smartphones and smartphones with more capabilities than competing smartphones. Any addictive properties of social media and its devices are useful in increasing sales and the reach of social media, and so promoting or not resisting these properties makes business sense.
We are talking about major changes in human nature, similar to the changes produced by literacy. Determining the future development of our nature by what rings the stock market's bell is pretty stupid and shortsighted. Determining it by our current governments is frightening. I would feel much better if it were in the hands of people like those who developed Unix, mozilla, wikipedia, or other products developed for the love of promoting excellence and utility for a community rather than money and power.
5
Wonder what the Teamsters union are you g to do about your "rollout process".
Really? A "That's A Good Thing" headline from the Times?
Some people's gender is fluid but most people's isn't. And technology isn't blurring lines: In many cases, it's making things worse, the way women, for example, are the victims of online bullying in ways that did not exist prior to social media.
But leave it to an unmarried white guy (he has a live in partner) who makes his living off of this topic while living in Scotland to tell us how great it all is.
2
War and corruption have wasted our human potential for ages. But we can no longer afford this profligacy.
How can the technologies that we are bringing into the volitional domain be designed to transcend our own species limits? Can we build into our tools a new metric optimizing our species’ chances for survival?
The cost of war against ourselves (by both coercion and resistance) is now too high to bear. To avoid a doomed war of all against all, we humans need a great transition to fight global warming and live within global resource constraints.
That means we must displace hierarchy and inequality with deepening solidarity. The problem with all orders of hierarchic control is that information rises to the top. Hierarchy envelops each higher story of its edifice in a more complex veil of darkness. It recognizes that its privacy — our ignorance — is its strength. Under its surveillance, we are prey.
The new technologies, I believe, are still within our power to reverse hierarchy. The humanist agenda for the new volitional non-human order is to pierce through the darkness of hierarchy — to watch, expose, demystify, and explain to us all: the watchers. (For this we will need to depend, first of all, on our historic tribunes, “the free press”, itself transformed by technology.)
If we are to end the day happily, it will not be a New Post-Human Order, but a New Play between all of the elements: human and non-human with full cognizance, and respect, for each the other.
2
I for one welcome our robot overloads... Wait, am I the robot overlord??
If you can down load human achievement to an individual what's left to achieve? Of the 10 or 15 billion people about to inhabit this planet how many are going to fit into this business plan? What party is going to say you can't throw all those poeple making a living behind the wheel out of work? Some one has to make a stand against this new not very inclusive world.
There's nothing wrong with helping people with medical needs but who would be willing to change their kids into cyborgs with supercharged brains so they earn big the bucks. Our 2 year old just completed the gender studies program in two hours and now wants gender reassignment. Phil always wanted a girl. She stands a better chance of being a CEO that way.
I have no for a the direction the word has taken. This new civilization being hacked together by people who worship money. The left has to decide if it's for people or robots.
2
Brazil, The Matrix, etc. pick your sci-fi thriller. Welcome to our brave New World. Thank God I live in Oregon where we have death with dignity laws.
Though appreciating this essay's relatively humble claims (relative, that is, to the more extreme enthusiasms of some techno-evangelists), I am dismayed that there is no mention whatsoever of technological solutions to global warming, without which all such promise of our multi-form and post-human future is a sick joke.
2
Science: "We're all about coulda', not shoulda'!"
1
We have not come close to mastering or even understanding what it means to be human. Now the tech geeks are pontificating about merging humans with machines. What could possibly go wrong---other than everything?
God I am glad I'm old.
3
At the every end of Spielberg's A.I.(Story by Stanley Kubrick), robots wake young David up from the near future. Earth is destroyed. All his life, David, longed to be a real boy. The robots tell David that he is the last of mankind. They try to recreate David's human mother for him but it only lasted a day.
Something very profound about this scene to me.
4
The headline of this piece is manipulative and dishonest. The author's own argument makes clear that no one knows if this is a good thing. The fact that he'd try to force that conclusion at the start reveals that his purpose is to manipulate, not enlighten.
2
Sorry, not in the mood for humans merging with robots. How about some technological solutions to climate change? All of this science, knowledge and money wasted on hallucinogenic technology, more navel staring, while the planet is warming up beyond repair. Anyone home?
8
Perhaps Professor Clark seems to be missing all the horrible things that the brave new world of the Internet is bringing to the planet, and missing all the horrible things that human fossil-fueled progress have brought to the planet, and missing the reality that horrible people keep getting more and more enabled by those horrible things, and missing the obvious point that many of the new wonderful things will soon be the same as the old horrible things.
2
The author seems like the type that "uses immersive virtual reality, with body tracking, to enable us to" imagine himself with a foot-long hot dog. Only it's all condiments and no meat.
"Where's the beef?"
2
I'll let the great Martin Luther King Jr. speak here: "The second aspect of our afflicted society is extreme materialism.
An Asian writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms. He says, “You call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more, and wherever you are, you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.”
5
Marxists have pointed out since the steam engine that every labor saving device ever invented has only meant increased labor for the working class.
A modern example: It was once thought that the smart phone and the Net would free people from the physical workplace. Instead they have enslaved the workers to work for the boss 24/7, whatever their location.
Is to sit inside a machine experiencing your life as a fantasy, in an imaginary world created by corporations, really the zenith and goal of our civilization?
4
"We Are Merging With Robots"
But only if they are good-looking, yes?
1
I appreciate this piece and agree. We will, must, and should merge with machines. Many problems we face today - climate change, disease and disability, inequality, and death itself - can and should be solved through this process. It is a matter of the highest national priority and should be treated as such, not just because of the promise that this development holds, but also because of the extreme dangers that will come with it. But go there we shall, and the sooner the better as far as I am concerned.
This all sounds great but for the fact the technology is being implemented by largely amoral corporate interests, with nothing on their minds but pleasing the equally amoral shareholders and getting ever greater access to the income stream - ie, us. You go ahead and merge with the robots, Doc. I’ll just press on with my limited human frame and do the best I can, freestyle.
6
It amazes me that what I and many others enjoy and relish most in this world is only marginally changed by technologies over millennia at best.
Film and TV never really appealed to me and I greatly prefer the millennia old live show. I love a good conversation but I found social media and phones keeps others busy rather than engaging with someone in front of them.
Wine and beer are as old as civilization itself.
And from my climate controlled office, sometimes I yearn for those days as kid when I'd spend the whole day outside on the farm doing some task as chopping wood (so few people have this experience anymore!). As a kid I was told to work hard to make it so I could afford all the nice things of life. Now I make decent money but almost all my spending is on rent and food (no kids), the rest is savings as I still have my health and no desire for all these new gadgets.
I don't know if my life would be much worse without technology, though I'd work more and deal with fewer pleasantries I'd be closer to the nature I love.
3
The insatiable momentum of the hyper-growth economy, with the world awash in capital screaming for new investment and increase. Isn't this the main driver of the techno revolution?
What is the net result of the authors giddy vision? Junk food for the soul. Real connection is healthy, artificial interconnection at this scale is an overblown nightmare.
Real connection to place and people, immediate and palpable, restores the miraculous world. This technological 'miracle' is a path to alienation.
5
This article sets of alarm bells from the pit of my stomach.
The human race evolved in nature, with our genes changing slowly over millions of years. We have developed an intelligence just smart enough to destroy the world we evolved to live in.
Living in a world we did not evolve to live in is not comfortable. Sure, houses and electricity are good, but I want to look out of the window to see trees. The more we connect ourselves to machinery the further we get from nature, the further we get from ourselves,and the more disconnected we feel.
On top of that, artificial intelligence is very powerful and highly unpredictable. Simple systems connected in simple ways sometimes create infinite unpredictable possibilities.
It is one thing to have a program you can talk to.
It is quite another to put a bunch of artificial intelligence programs on the internet, along with all of our communications, power plants and l cell phones.
Add malicious AI designed to take over systems to exploit them, and really bad things can happen.
Complicated intelligences interacting on the internet could developed their own agenda. If the Russians can influence public opinion what could AI hacking the works computer systems do?
Science fiction often becomes science fact, and can warn us about bad ideas like putting our brains in direct competition with artificial intelligences whose communications we can barely comprehend.
And capitalism only cares about profits. Humans are expensive.
8
The "potential is astounding."
The "potential" to do what? To what end?
Effect human happiness? Doubtful, if we seek succor from robots.
Create Equality? Who but the rich and powerful will have ad keep access?
Be more "fluid and interconnected?" What does that even mean? Is it good? (And how well has that worked out with Facebook?)
Achieve immortality? Imagine our current richest and most powerful (who will get first access) living forever - you want that?
Getting whatever we want, whenever we want? Is that a good thing?
He offers no real answer to what the goal of this "potential" is!
Given that humans have a high track record of using new technologies to gratify their worst impulses, it seems more likely that the end won't be as pleasant as he thinks.
And know this: right now dictators and totalitarians are seeing quite a bit of potential in this tech to consolidate their power. They know what end they are after.
4
I suspect that Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of Professor Clark's favorite films. T2 was the film that marked the rise of the Cyborg as the myth that would finally resolve the tension between humans and machines by wrapping it up in a story we never get tired of hearing.
1
I thought it was a remake of The Golem. but, true, the same old story... even the version starring Mickey Mouse.
1
We already have far too much technology and we need to get rid of all of it. The reason depression, anxiety and obesity are through the roof is because we aren't meant to live in this messed up world where we stare at screens, ignore each other and let "assistants" take all the fun and choice out of living! Too many millenials can't even read a map or a train schedule or put a complete sentence together. The normal world we used to have was so much better. And we can have it back, if we just say no to this madness.
5
We have already gotten rid of all our idle time to think things through for ourselves and replaced it with electronic stimulation (cellphones, audiobooks in the car etc). The result has been too much blind acceptance of viewpoints pushed on use by various media (news biased left or right or just sensationalist, Facebook, etc).
We’ve lost our ability to ask why and does what I heard make sense.
It’s not a good thing. Turn off your car radio, put down the cell phone, and just be bored and practice the critical thinking skills you learned in school. Show down and question. Reclaim your own thoughts.
7
"These are the algorithms that talk with us, that watch us, that trade for us, that select dates for us, that suggest what we might buy, sell, or wear. "
I despise all of those algorithms and want nothing to do with them. Why would I trust an algorithm to tell me what to wear or how to enjoy myself? Those things are annoying, and nothing more. I'm pretty tired of having to unselect "Recommended" and do a second search by price every time I book something. Most of the other benefits touted here are for disabled or otherwise impaired people, such as people who have trouble remembering. Fine, let them have digital assistants. For everyone else, life is fine the way it is. All of this technology is nothing but trouble, and will eventually destroy everything we hold dear, including our democracy and our intimate relationships, while filling our landfills and oceans with endless technological waste.
9
Jeez, we don’t know how to cooperate with whales or elephants or gorillas. Humans seem incapable of cooperation with extra-human intelligences, period. We exploit them or we extinguish them. So you’re either going to have to accept that artificial ‘selves’ will experience perpetual degradation in their service to humans, or drop the silly notion that a tool can have anything like a ‘self’.
3
I've been thinking that it's much more likely, than computers becoming as smart as people, that people will become as dumb as computers.
I find it very strange that a professor of logic and metaphysics doesn't understand that an automaton which can execute __programmed logic__ incredibly fast, but has nothing to contribute to meta-computation, or, if you will, the ability to evaluate the algorithms it is executing - or evaluate its programmed evaluation algorithms, to whatever recursive degree necessary for improvement, which is what human intelligence does when necessary and/or so inclined.
3
I cannot wait for the day that I’m able to purchase a robot servant!
Right. Be sure and tell this to the 3 billion people who live on less than 4$/day. I'm sure they're waiting for robots etc to make their lives more full filling.
8
Just when this article seemed like it was going to get to the point, and grapple with the issues it claims to grapple with, it just ended. To call this essay pat would be a gross understatement
2
Technology is like a gun. Tech does not kill people but people with technology do. You cannot think about tech in itself but what people might do with it.
The difficulty is that one never knows what tech might do before it is released. This is a danger that we cannot control or predict.
All technology, including robots, become dangerous when combined with human imagination. So dangerous is the combination that it endangers the species.
A French cyberneticist said that, "People are not machines, but they act like one every chance they get." Our free will is an illusion of the ego and neocortex, and everything we think we know is an imperfect mental map of reality. Weaponry and technology enhance our failings, yet we are as tribal and competitive as ever. In no way at all has technology made us better people.
Since we cannot but continue to make mistakes, now amplified by technology, we will become extinct.
This is what happens when you give car keys to a monkey.
1
@Fourteen BRAVO!
1
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
3
I was surprised to come across this flippant, superficial article- more a rambling stream of consciousness- in the Times. From the very beginning, the idea that 'human brains look fluid enough to make use of just about any reliable stream of information and control opportunity' is not only absurd and misleading, but also irresponsible. The reality is that only a tiny fraction of the information that exists in our environment is accessible to us and usable in any meaningful way. Look at neurorehabilitation programmes as an example- even with well-designed interfaces, patients often need extensive training to achieve useful function. Similarly, the claim that AI programmes outperform humans in many areas of life, in ways that we cannot comprehend, is a gross exaggeration. These programmes have been designed by people, for specific tasks and domains, and often make extensive use of training datasets which were compiled by humans. Although computational neural networks are considered to be black boxes due to the complexity, scale, and difficulty of visually depicting the individual connections, we understand the underlying principles that govern their operations. Lastly, the term 'neuro-enhancement' is all but meaningless given the context in which the author uses it. We enhance our brain function continually, while carrying out tasks, acquiring experiences, and creating memories. Virtually all living creatures have been doing this since the beginning of their existence.
4
I couldn't agree less. We are organic human beings.
We have made a big mess of our planet. We need to clean it up. We have made a big mess of our value for consideration and respect of others. We need to clean that up. It is our responsivbility to clean up our messes rather than going off running to other planets or deferring to robots...THOUGH today' s culture of self adoring selfies, growing addiction to any "device", loss of respect and proper usage of language, accompanied by the increasing usage of meaningless fill -in words such as: "like", "you know", "crazy", the ever present "awesome", etc.etc., and the general
degeneration of personal vocabularies as well as the loss of the ability to concentrate on anything more than 3 seconds due to training since infancy on constantly shifting stimuli might give one pause, and deep concern about the future of mankind...as we know it...I guess the robots will have a solution for everything. I mean, a few of them are already running the country. Look how wonderful it is!
6
The problem with the new technologies is that without a well understood political ideology that prevents the few from dominating the many, the techno elite stand to gain more power to control.
There is nothing inherently good about these new cyborgian humans. Good things can come from all this: and utter mayhem is a possibility.
One thing is for sure and that is we need to discuss this with great care and effort. Try reading “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway. We surely face an informatics of domination if we leave it to the corporations to decide how it will all work.
5
A sex robot? A companionship machine? Please.
2
There's actual research journals (not sure if right term) focused on this (I think by springer), and it's been on dr. oz. It's real.
Does this mean the Incels will be going away soon?
Because that would be nice.
2
Unless it helps us to live with our fellow humans in our shared environment in a decent way, what good is it? We have not made remotely enough progress on a decent "standard" reality for everyone to go further off on tangents to escaping and denying it. At 46, I consider having made it this far with original, unaugmented equipment in working order to be a feature, not a limitation. What memories does one build and what sensations does one recall from virtual experiences. Some of us seem committed to walking right into the matrix. No thanks!
4
Human perception and reaction times are limits to man machine interactions which nobody has any way of changing. The machine operated systems can react to people much faster than people can react to those machine operating systems. A human can interact with machine systems operating in parallel, independently, but only with one at a time. All of this imaginary wonder world stuff is pure imagination based upon life like independent artificial intelligences that can do what people cannot which nobody has any way of producing.
Custom always lags behind technology. I think the challenge lies in setting policy based on reason instead of enacting a hodge podge of laws willy nilly as responses to specific issues or anecdotes that pop up.
2
Innovation at the cost of all that is precious, joyful, and true about the human experience. This is nothing to celebrate. The human soul is deep in mourning - it is a time to mourn the lack of work for our hands and minds, all in the name of 'progress.' Sorry, professor, you've lost me here. Wendell Berry sums it up nicely: “The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.”
12
Personally, I think 'merging' with robots will be a problem, but mostly for wedding planners.
2
and what about bakers and the required cakes?
1
I would argue with people that say using technology, and having tools like on-line search, and AI make people "dumber". That's up to the individual.
I've used computers my entire adult life, starting back in the late 70's. My first employers were connected to DARPA Net, the precursor to today's Internet. I work with "massive" data sets, although what was considered "massive" in the 70's and 80's would fit on a smartphone today.
My ability to do any work, and have the understanding of the world I have depends on access to increasing amounts of AI and computing power. This is the future of work for mankind; and I was born prematurely, metaphorically.
True, I now find adding or multiplying numbers a chore, so I use a calculator, but the math I get paid to do is expressed in letters and strange symbols, and can only be done on a large computer.
Certainly this will all serve as a potent distraction to the building cataclysm happening in our biosphere. Robots, at least, may be able to survive the extinction of "natural intelligence" on Earth, at least for a period of time.
3
Unfortunately the possibilities that might be realized from robotizing humanity are limited by the constraints of the pre-robotic world we've created: constraints imposed by the incremental but severe impairment of the biosphere from industrial activities of the past 100 years.
Consequently the most likely trajectory of the application of AI and robotics -- whether designed to operate independently of or integral to the human body and mind -- will be control of our behavior and thought to ensure that humans do not interfere and endanger the technological apparatus necessary to sustain human existence on planet Earth, which will be mainly an artificial space-station, not a naturally resilient and self-regulating macro-organism.
"just how deeply the body matters to the mind, but also how the brain helps predict and construct the world of human experience." This is a theoretical narrow view of mind, called internalism, that as the last word, is just another form of a discredited Idealism. The next time you run across someone articulating these views, ask them if we have found a principled method whereby we individuate mental content, i.e., how we determine one thought from another. If they have an answer that works, then immediately get them to the Nobel Prize committee; they as the rest of world is still struggling with this question. The issue is: what part does the mind play in determining how we see the world, and what part does the world play in determining mental content. The answers so far have been nothing more than hand waving. As Chomsky has said, roughly, the issues of Artificial Intelligence are about as interesting as how a bulldozer compares to a weight lifter.
4
@timothy holmes We're not strictly talking artificial intelligence... Conceive this idea of old: nano devices (yes, reality) which can somehow network your brain (neuron by neuron, in theory) to something like the internet wirelessly. Actually, consider it can network your whole body.
@Rob Most of the successful arguments in philosophy of mind are against the neural identity thesis, meaning brain mind identity is likely false. What again are the principled methods of distinguishing the mental from the physical? To date the answers have been to eliminate either the physical or the mental, which accounts for the difference but hardly establishes their interaction.
The question we have avoided throughout history is why? Is the purpose of this technology to enhance human life? Or only certain human lives?
The question becomes more salient as robots and artificial intelligence move closer to artificial consciousness (whatever that is). Is enhancing the lives of artificial brains now a factor we have to consider? And if we don't, will those brains evolve to consider it themselves?
This technology will evolve. There's no way to avoid it. But we might be able to influence its direction toward greater humanism.
Machines have evolved from the dawn of the industrial age to care for themselves. Will they start to do so at our expense?
At age 88: I would be blind if it were not for the artificial lenses that have replaced the clouded-over ones provided by nature. I would be dead, I must suppose, if it were nor for the stent that keeps a coronary artery open or medications that keep my blood pressure down. My eyes never would have been much from age 10 onwards were it not for the then externally worn lenses that corrected myopia. I would have been unable to cross a street unaided. I have lived a full life, because of those technical aids.
I frankly would feel lost and greatly deprived of means of communcation and information gleaned from the internet.I am better informed than ever before and regulary communicate, with ease, with friends and family scattered far and wide.
I would never have gone far from my own abode had it not been for planes, trains and cars. I have travelled the world.
I will be gone soon, but hope that younger generations will be afforded the same technical advances that have made my life so much better than any of my ancestors.
8
please stick around. we need you.
Because greed and money rule all in this world, all of this will probably happen, sadly. I'm 55. It's getting to be a race between the time of my death, and the complete downfall of society and environment. I hope my death wins, but one never knows.
I've heard a lot of people say this sort of thing. "I hope I die before this all gets seriously bad." What a sad state.
Hyper-advanced technology isn't going to save us. Not at all. Completely the opposite.
6
@P H
Wouldn't it be nice to feel as though one had power, that there were good things to look forward to, that one wanted to live as long as possible to watch the wonderful future unfold? We should all be demanding that, instead of obediently buying these gadgets they throw at us. There was a time when people were optimistic about the future, when technology was being used to serve the needs of people, instead of the opposite - people's deepest needs being sacrificed to make money for technology companies, as is happening now.
8
I don't begrudge anyone who wants, or needs, a sex or friend bot. Everyone has their reasons.
The North Sense sounds awesome, even if it's (a) really just a compass you need not look at, (b) something the birds and monarchs laugh at us for ever needing, and (c) far, FAR too expensive. Should be $10, extreme tops, for what it does.
The current VR doodads look even stupider than Google Glass—and under the auspices of such high-repute names as Sony and Facebook, are even creepier. I'll avoid them for now.
Ethics should be taught at middle and high school, where it's not already. We've all seen what the lack of it renders our world.
5
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision.
The writer is jokiing, right?
The Brave New World the writer aspires to is a Cowardly world of eviscerated, castrated, semi human beings.
His contempt for personal autonomy and individuality is remarkable. In one paragraph he refers to a future in which we will be watched, never pausing to mention that some of us may not want to be watched.
The writer reminds me of the right wing eugenicists in the first third of the 20 th century. They wanted a world which would be populated only by the more desirable people. Inklings of this can be found in the writer's plea that we should accept more inequality to make his cyber dreams come true.
The writer is in awe of new vistas and new possibilities and wants to dazzle us by transforming human beings into multi gendered beings with new forms of intelligence, that might be connected to other forms of intelligence, making us cogs on a wheel of totalitarianism. I do not want my brain to be attached to other "thinking instruments." I want no part of this madness.
While idolizing the modification (warping?) of intelligence, the author is oblivious to more fundamental concepts.
Has he ever heard of sincerity?
If robots will be our companions, then our companionship is patently pathetic. It is not sincere.
But I suppose things such as sincerity and love and humanity are utterly alien to the rarified princelings of this dastardly, disgusting new world.
25
@David Gottfried Very well stated.
For anyone desiring an antidote to this article and its vision of a Brave New World, I heartily recommend the videos of the gentleman in the link below. He has created a vivid reminder of how the very basis of our existence is inextricably rooted in the fundamental laws of nature.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
Lest that all sound too highbrow I add that the videos are quite entertaining in their own, peculiar, way.
3
Why is this a good thing?
Will it save endangered species and ecosystems?
Will it make people less stupid and more compassionate?
I sincerely doubt it. It may well make the most lethal and idiotic species on earth more capable.
Great.
13
*ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media
“...In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium-- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology...
Said another way – this time around, AI is for real...
McLuhan actually had an even more disquieting – if as prescient – view...
*ttps://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/12/world/mcluhan-center-says-a-bomb-may-be-good.html
“...His theory is that atomic weapons represent a new universal myth, inescapable for all but the completely ignorant. ''You can't do what you want with the bomb,'' he said. ''The bomb does what it wants with you...'
“...The bomb thus binds people together in a way they have not been linked since the Middle Ages, albeit on the brink of collective suicide...
Said another way – did bridging from the ultrabright technofuture of the ‘30s NYC World’s Fair to the ultrabright technoreality of the 50’s US World’s Best require global warfare as an interposer...
More tersely:
AI’s the bomb, all the rage, these days
Parse that, Alexa...
2
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. . . . I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”
12
Down the street from my office there is a robot that serves coffee ordered from an iPad nearby. How is this going to make our world better? Seems like wasted time and resources to me.
6
we used to get hot chocolate out of a lion's mouth if you put a quarter in a slot in the wall. and it was terrific.
so, progress or packaging?
Methinks the appropriate reaction to this information is: 'WOOF' ! That's a whole lot to absorb and reconcile. Perhaps A.I. should supplant the entire current federal administration because there is no functioning organic carbon-based intelligence in evidence at this time.
3
I ask, what example in all of human history or for that matter, in the animal kingdom, has a superior race (or, from those in power who think in terms of a superior race) treated those weaker, less intelligent, less technologically advanced in a humane and ethical matter?
I can think of many counter examples. How the white man treated the American Indian from the 18th century to the present? The indigenous people in Australia? How we treat the poor? People of color?
Robots that can think and outperform human beings will themselves be cloneable into larger and larger armies of super machines.
And, we mere human mortals will benefit from this new master race of our own creation?
Not bloody likely...
5
@Fred And I note, having watched several AI robot demonstrations, how they frequently feature the robots making snarky, misanthropic comments, which no doubt amuses their white-coated, shoe-gazing inventors. Nonetheless, this is how these robots’ DNA is created, and may we expect better from them than from our children, exposed as they are from an early age to superiorize their own?
4
No it’s not! While all the ballyhooing is going on everyone is forgetting how Facebook and the Internet were going to make life better.....even for the poor. It’s not. It’s made spying on humans easier for dictators. It’s made mob “justice” quicker and more frenzied and wrong that ever.
No, humans must not joking with robots exactly for the reasons the author seems to think it’s a good idea. But additionally because the rich and powerful will co-opt every benefit and use every tool to make sure the rest of us have to cower even though we won’t be able to hide. Overblown? Think about it...but then when there is money to be made no one ever cares about the down sides until it’s too late.
8
It's gratifying to read the almost universal condemnation of the de-humanized world advertised in this piece. I feel sorry for the author who is so wedded to a virtual world that he's apparently never experienced the real one.
What a sad and scary world he gushes about.
12
The author's real point seems to be confined to a single throw-away line that he wasn't brave enough to argue, probably because of its reprehensible implications: "We need to ask if we are willing to tolerate some inequality as part of the rollout process for a more fluid and interconnected world."
With apologies to Philip K Dick, talk about burying the leadie.
4
What utter hogwash. Humanity is not even likely to survive the climate change and global warming caused by its past infatuation with machinery. What makes anyone think adding more machinery to the mix and making humans into machines will fix global warming or improve anything else?
All your wonderful technology has put AR-15s into the hands of teenagers. All your wonderful technology has created a generation of millennials that are so far 40% less empathetic than previous generations, and a generation of millennials where 70% admit to social anxiety and being anxious and unable to relate to real people. And come on, maybe a lot of men will be happy with a sex robot, but not everyone wants to replace their beloved with a plastic doll.
Maybe we shoudl just say that humans were just a step on the road to the evolution of the microchip and the machines can take over in the near future when the Earth becomes unliveable for humans and other mammals.
8
Tall or short? What about a cure for cancer?
1
Anything to sell more junk.
11
"After all, there was a time when written scholarly text was itself the province of only a few groups of enviably-positioned humans. In the end (and with the inventions of cheap mass-production) the transformative potential of text was set free, and it reshaped the world"
The leader of the free world freely elected by 60 million americans has never read a book! He does not believe in climate science. (among many other fantastickal things)
His VP is a bronze age bible belting regressive who believes in creationism.
We are way too far away from technological enlightenment to save us.
2
Humans are tool makers and the latest technologies, on one level, are merely the latest, albeit very powerful, iteration. We’re also highly adaptable with a broad range of individual preferences and foibles. Those preferences (and our failings) will work themselves out in the marketplace, to the extent one has means and inclination to participate.
What’s increasingly clear and troubling is the degree to which our inherent psychological weaknesses can be exploited by malign or greedy actors in service to their own ends. This includes things like ‘news’ feeds tailored to your political views on up to highly targeted ads and even immersive technologies separating you from the broader world.
Unfortunately, there’s virtually nothing people won’t do for money or power. And those already in positions of power now have even more ammunition to capture much of our lives.
We may come to worship our new technological tools. Hopefully they’ll serve us well. But there’s an equally good chance we’ll lose a good bit of our autonomy, if not our souls, if our new lives aren’t balanced by meaningful engagement in the real world.
3
A prediction -
We will see robots in significant numbers in 2 areas of our society -
1. more little gadgets like the VR stuff mentioned in this article, gadgets that major marketing campaigns convince us we can't live without and for which we should shell out $$$ on a regular basis in order to keep ahead of the software updates.
2. Manufacturing. Of course, they're already used a lot in manufacturing and we can expect the majority of manufacturing tasks to be taken over by robots, putting vast numbers of less educated workers out of jobs.
1 is mostly for our amusement. 2 is for the further enrichment of the private capitalists who own global manufacturing.
Far greater minds than mine have explored the consequences of number 2, what happens when most of humanity is made "redundant".
There is a #3 though it has little impact on most of us, the use of technology to help those with physical disabilities. I'm happy to see that.
3
@J Jencks the third area is, indeed, an important one. As the baby boomer generation continues to age, there will be a dearth of skilled medical professionals to care for this cohort so why not consider how technological advances could bridge this gap?
@GJR
#3 is the ethical value to society
#2 is what will actually happen, because our society is structured around the accumulation of wealth into fewer and larger piles.
#1 is mostly a distraction
ra ra ra sis boom bah!
14 species have gone extinct since 2000. I, you, Mr. Clark, our children, will never see the Eastern Cougar, the Yangtze River Dolphin or the Pyrenean Ibex.
Who still knows the basic skills of human survival, how to grow a garden or build a shelter? A few, but fewer all the time.
Do we raise our children to chase butterflies? Where are the butterflies? I remember clouds of them when I was a child.
https://blog.nwf.org/2017/02/new-numbers-show-monarch-butterfly-populati...
Honeybees?
http://sos-bees.org/
What is it that REALLY matters?
I see one silver lining. I am grateful that some of this (admittedly astounding) technology is being used to help those whose physical limitations (mobility, sight, hearing, etc.) prevented them from participating fully in the activities the rest of us are able to engage in.
6
@J Jencks
We have REAL work to do -
- reversing climate change, which means major alterations to the structure of our global economy
- addressing growing pseudo-religious intolerance from both the Christian Right in the West and Jihadist mis-interpreters of Islam
- getting Americans access to a decent education and basic healthcare
- trying to halt the destruction of our eco-systems (and our real source of life)
So much more.
There's no time to waste. No time for distractions.
5
13 yo son and I went to Café X on Market St in San Francisco yesterday. It was fun to order a hot chocolate and watch a robot "make" it. But it really was just like an old fashioned vending machine dispensing instant hot chocolate. It was NOT the high quality you get at a café such as Peet's nearby. The gimmick of the robot behind glass moving the cup from machine to counter and using a code delivered to a smart phone to release the cup of beverage was a silly slow way for the business to obtain the customer's mobile phone number. NOT A FAN! will not return. Cannot believe our society's values lead us to develop gimmicky businesses like this when we have real needs like inadequate health care, housing and child care.
12
If you believe in Evolution , humans are not the final product
5
Like death, this is perhaps inevitable. But I prefer death to being "merged" with a robot.
7
More than 20 years ago I co-organized an interdisciplinary conference at Columbia University looking at the many issues raised in this article. One of the results was a book: Living With the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery by Lightman, Sarewitz and Desser. It has many thoughtful pieces by Alan Lightman, Richard Powers, Richard Rhodes and others. More relevant that ever, I commend it to people interested in a rather more nuanced look at technology than this article provides.
2
"After all, there was a time when written scholarly text was itself the province of only a few groups of enviably-positioned humans. In the end (and with the inventions of cheap mass-production) the transformative potential of text was set free, and it reshaped the world"
The leader of the free world freely elected by 60 million americans has never read a book! He does not believe in climate science. (among many other fantastickal things)
His VP is a bronze age bible belting regressive who believes in creationism.
We are way too far away from technological enlightenment to save us.
@ Josh Hill: Sounds like trickle-down to me. Why can't advances in technology, many of them funded by tax-payer programs, be used to provide a minimum floor that cover the basic necessities of life before pursuing novelty and profit. I would say that both are possible, within reason.
4
"Monsters from the Id" - This over 60 year old phrase seems most appropriate at this stage.
--Forbidden Planet, c.1956
6
Empty content. The title intrigues, the list "of things true today" is promising, but they are never examined in adequate detail. Perhaps the author is using "Times Puff Piece," the AI program that takes a few ideas and inflates them into something publishable.
2
The tone of such artices never seems to change.
A Big New Thing has now become possible.
Could be robots and AI. Could be the Internet. Could be genetically modified foods that can't exist outside laboratories. Could be privatized schools and prisons. Could be tax cuts claimed to produce so much new revenue that they'll pay for themselves. Could be television.
We are told that the Big New Thing will bring almost unimaginable advancements in well-being. Might it also bring horrible side effects, some already predictable and some not yet imagined? Well, yes, but let's don't be negative, and in any case, don't you know that the Big New Thing is inevitable, and resistance is futile?
What all of these Big New Things have in common is that (1) Ordinary people were not clamoring for them and may never even have thought of them; (2) certain powerful economic interests stand to make enormous wads of money from them; (3) no regulations are put in place to prevent potential bad effects BEFORE they happen; (4) ordinary people are therefore used as guinea pigs for someone else's experiment; and (5) when the bad effects show up (as they always do), said economic interests will have a powerful trade association to make sure the costs of bad effect are externalized.
The author does concede that "we" need to ask some serious questions. Oh, goody. I'll work up some draft letters about that while I wait for my Republican "representatives" to acknowledge the reality of climate change.
94
@TimesChat, this is brilliant. Thank you.
2
Great response!
2
I am disappointed that the writer made no reference to Ray Kurzweil, the 20th Century genius who is the father of the concept of the coming singularity, when human-robot hybrids become dominant on earth. It would have provided additional perspective into this field. None of this is necessarily a good thing.
3
The vast majority of posts deriding or dismissing this article seem to be seeing this as an either/or choice, it is not. These technological advancements are already happening and we can't put this genie back in the bottle. To me the inevitable yet horrible truth is included in the fears and comments of many; that society cannot currently incorporate these advancements in a fair, thoughtful and ethical way. Our current systems of Gov't simply put too much power in the hands of too few to allow for the greater good to triumph.
I fear but expect that the revolution will not just be technological but also societal. Just as the revolutions and wars that led us into the fist technological era at the turn of the 20th century, once again those clinging to an outdated power and political structure will not go willingly and once again the question will be whether we as a species, and our planetary home, survives the upheaval.
7
This all sounds like a dystopian nightmare
11
Dissenting opinion:
Facebook algorithms.
Word choice recommendations.
Make more friends, see more of your own timeline.
See yourself in a movie starring yourself and your old flame, whose flame for you has gone out, but appears in my video autobiography, starring me and her, produced by Facebook, directed by Facebook, written by Facebook, cast by Facebook, using Found Art, the Art being my posted photographs and videos that still contain my old flame and my enduring friend, but only those that contain smalling faces, or can be algorithmically cropped by the unseen hand to appear that way, by hipster data mining wizards dropping acid and eating pizza and gaming it up in the gourmet cafeteria, having a little anonymous fun at my expense, without my cooperation, without my active approval, and without my awareness.
But I just can't quit you, Facebook! You're my only friend at the moment. And without friends, who are you? Friendless, that's who!
2
"Artificial intelligence" is a dangerous myth, one which accepts the lazy and arrogant presumption binary and biological judgment might one day be comparable. They, by definition, never will.
4
@BobMeinetz
"They, by definition, never will."
By whose definition? Who told you that machines must operate strictly with binary logic? Perhaps that's exactly the kind of presumption you excoriate.
Fascinating exploration, Prof Clark. What is missing, in my view, is in the last paragraph on ethics there is no mention of the environment. You speak of human made environments, like bridges etc., but what of the natural environment? We still eat eggs from battery farm chickens, animals have no real rights and forests and minerals, coals and oils are harvested and mined for our prosperity, only. It just isn't enough that humans do well, we of all species should be self aware enough to realize this. Even Scotland hasn't escaped the first summer of climate change. Can we build robotics and technology which allow us to live in sustainable balance with our planet? Or is it too late? Augmented humans are of no use if there is no planet for them to live on.
6
As a psychologist in private practice, I already see the negative impact. Patients in their 20's are partly robotic in their inability to have emotional connections with fully human people.
Their relationships with their peers are unsatisfactory. They are aware there's something missing. They feel lonely but avoid deep connection with others when they have the opportunity. They avoid situations where they have to talk in person. They prefer to use their devices to send short texts, emojis, memes, and other simplistic images. They are terrified of actual intimacy.
Whatever benefits the author sees are not worth it, IMHO. I believe the situation is only going to get worse as these electronics become more embedded in our bodies.
12
When I read techno-hyper-optimists like this, I always wonder how the authors respond to nature: an afternoon at the seashore, a walk in the forest, climbing a mountain. I have friends who don't seem to notice there is anything there, because they respond primarily to things humans have made, but for me they are very powerful and I doubt the bandwidth of these technologies will ever be sufficient to make these technological sources of experience truly comparable.
20
This is a propaganda piece, which the author is trying to pass off as a reasoned discussion. The giveaway is the author’s rhetorical device of raising concerns only to dismiss them. I’ve seen this essay in a hundred different versions. The headline seres to plant the thought they want you to leave with.
23
Perhaps we're so overwhelmed by the computational complexity of a parallel-processing brain that we need to divert our attention to alternatives rather than get real about the reality that the human brain is already, always has been, a perceptually constructive (NOT registrative) device. (Study the well-known neurophysiology of visual perception should you doubt the scientific veracity of this observation.) We've been largely unsuccessful in influencing many folks to recognize that their personal perceptual constructs, founded in deep cultural superstitions are anti-social. Hence, a lot of this may well be hi-tech diversion denial.
1
To borrow from Yogi Berra, "ninety percent of the (augmentation) game is half mental." Augmenting technologies are providing us with a huge range of tools for transforming our "cognitive-experiential ecosystem," or the totality of what we experience and how we interact with what we experience." They're providing us with an essentially limitless set of options for how to "be" in the world. I think one of the biggest limitations to us really taking advantage of this opportunity is our folk psychology understanding of things like personal identity that impose artificial boundaries, or better yet assumptions on what it means to "be" someone. Unfortunately, I agree that we're talking about an extremely disruptive set of technologies and like with social media, the impacts won't all be that desirable.
Archetypally there is nothing new in this robotic fantasy. Alchemists created monstrums that were psychologically and functionally identical to what the tech world is doing.
They also imbibed elixirs and drugs, engaged with hermaphroditic fantasies, created wild perspectival machines, and had their own secret tablets of power.
The last few scenes of Fellini's Casanova where Donald Sutherland's character engages with a robot lover demand viewing for anyone seriously fantasizing about a dreamy and sexy high tech future.
Thinking we are only "just now" creating the future is absurd. All our big data and tech sits on a long genealogy and it would behoove those working on the ethics of tech to take a deep historical perspective.
5
Human augmentation frightens me; just another rung in the ladder for haves to accelerate their rise above the have-nots.
But then I wonder is that really so different from Kaplan test-prep, private music lessons and other augmented education that we use to boost our own children as they enter the competitive world we've made for them? I'm genuinely not sure and would welcome opinions, but I know I've leveraged every bit of my socio-economic status (such as it is) to enhance (augment?) my children's educations, experiences, lives.
When surveying new technologies I try to remember Socrates eschewing the new, suspicious technology of written language. He felt it would make people intellectually lazy. Instead of learning, absorbing and remembering a body of knowledge, an individual could simply read it. Perhaps he had a point, as do the folks who lament "point and click" or asking Siri instead of looking up something yourself. On the whole, though, I think I'm on the side of literacy. All kinds of literacy.
2
I wish I had the luxury of being one of those, such as the many commenters here, who can afford to rail against technology. I was born with serious physical disabilities, and have also developed chronic illnesses that have limited the way I live my life. Most of you here wouldn't want, for a day, to live in my shoes. And yet, you feel quite free to pontificate about the horrors of technology.
Understand that technology allows people like me some semblance of living just a fraction of the life you able bodied people take for granted.
And the more that technology assists this failing body -- even augments it, the more thankful I become.
And I, for one, am sick and tired of the arrogance of those who believe that technology makes us "less than human". It is a backhand slur to those of us in the disability community, and it needs to stop.
11
@Henry Hurt
Your points are valid, but you are possibly conflating "augmenting technology" with "assistive technology." The two have different purposes: The former is often touted as a form of entertainment (read: "heightened senses") tied to a Neo-manifest destiny toward superhumanism, while the latter is designed to enable those who are differently-abled/disabled/etc.
3
@Henry Hurt
"We are consciousness, not life and form." (Sri Aurobindo)
2
The majority of criticisms made here are not against the benefits of technology at all, but rather directed at the naive manner in which the author extols the benefits technology while grossly underplaying the substantial risk of catastrophic misuse. This latter point is crucial- if we want to maximally benefit from technology, we need to be very careful, responsible, and respectful of our humanity- recognizing and curbing its dark side. I am in overwhelming favour of using and developing technology (both non-invasive and implantable) to enhance your life. I am simultaneously very concerned about the risks of hijacking this technology- tampering with security, injecting false information, and wrecking physical havoc- which the author does not seem to share.
I feel a lot of sympathy for the writers of comments here which are skeptical of Prof. Clark's technoeuphoria -- but I am, at the same time, POSSIBLY in favor of these technologies. Whether I am for or against is influenced by the decisive question of CAPITALISM. If it's really possible to make algorithms and technologies that are so smart, then they should be able to own themselves. That's what posthumanism really means. We don't need the whole apparatus of Wall Street and Silicon Valley mega-companies to get this going in a good way. Clearly when new media are driven by money-making as the motive, the results are going to be very different from the wonderful possibilities that Clark mentions. We just lived through all that, the way that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft took over the Internet, betraying the utopian, democratizing, decentralizing original technoeuphoria of the 1990s. The Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies need to be DESIGNED for good ends, not for money. Clark's tone sounds just like the early books of Sherry Turkle, and yesterday we read her current, polar opposite, despair. We need Technological Anarchism... let the self-driving cars become self-owning cars, let blockchain smart contracts self-rationally-morally automate the efficient use of utilities, a new economic model (and its not socialism). If these technologies are really so great, then de-couple them from the surveillance, control, virtualizing and greed goals of big companies.
4
Stunning how many here believe that any of this will enhance human prosperity. Isn't it apparent by now how incapable we have become of controlling our technological destiny? That we ned to be more human, not more machine? That such gadgetry ultimately releases only our will to power, diminishing out capacity for charity and self sacrifice?
9
It's really way too early to say whether it's a good or bad thing.
Virtual glasses that offer illusions of wealth and freedom while the corporations and politicians steal your real belongings and your real freedom.
10
@Hank
What we need are virtual glasses for the futurists and billionaires. They can withdraw into their fantasies of wealth and power and stop working to destroy the ecosystem.
3
We don't need artificial intelligence. We need real intelligence.
25
This article reminds me of a scene from the post-singularity novel "Accelerando" by Charles Stross.
In the leadup to the singularity Stross describes what becomes of the protagonist when he loses his Augmented Reality (AR) googles ; they are knocked away from his face as he walks down an any alleyway and he can't find them. Simply: he becomes an idiot because he is disconnected from his external web of knowledge. The "third hemisphere" of his brain is gone.
This a humorous, but chilling scene. Its chilling because I see people walking the Manhattan streets everyday staring at their "smart" phone instead paying attention to the physical world around them.
If the phones were ripped from their hands, they would be lost and panicky.
4
The more pitiful the real condition of humans and the earth, the more elaborate and fanciful the digressions become.
4
Over the past few years, since reading Ray Kruzweil's "The Singularity is Near," I've been asking my senior friends if they would choose bio-robotics as a means of prolonging their lives, perhaps even to immortality. The vast majority of them say, "No!"
In discussion, they seem unfamiliar with the concept of one's self as consciousness, rather than life and form (to paraphrase Indian philosopher, yogi, guru Sri Aurobindo). That we are essentially a state or quality of awareness that may be joined in other, even non-biological forms, is today still foreign to most.
Humanity seems to be nearing an end-phase of it's purely biological evolution; even in a time when the tone of a person's skin color is contentious. Our potential evolutionary transition to consciousness as self will be challenging.
4
@dmbones I saw Kurzweil speak in person some 17 years ago.. From memory, I think he asked audience if you could put a replica of you on a computers (thoughts, personality, voice, etc) would you be so confident that it was you that you would let yourself be destroyed or die? He didn't think so from memory. How much of you can be replaced by machine before you are no longer you?
1
@Rob
"How much of you can be replaced by machine before you are no longer you?"
I know: At 75, I need a knee replacement.
I usually ask others, "If you were dying of leukemia, would you accept all new bone marrow and a fresh crop of red blood cells? Maybe replacement of a few organs that are beginning to slow down? Maybe even monitors on some of your organs to foretell of untoward needs arising?"
As a practicing yogi for the past two decades, I've found the "Observer" or "The One That Sees" in the moment: that intimately personal awareness that is always with us. Achievement at this station requires practice over time to be gained. And it appears that we are deeply motivated by nature to seek it.
If our highest consciousness is immaterial and immortal, the human soul, then every aspect of our experience leads us finally to it. If we so choose; whether with a new knee, or kidney, heart or brain.
The obvious question--should we spend money/enthusiasm/intelligence on this when there are dire problems that need solving is not what strikes me. After all, there are always dire problems. It's how does a very smart, educated man not realize climate change is going to destroy or degrade civilization as we know it for the vast majority of earth's inhabitants? No matter what, we still need to grow food. We need energy. We need to be able to go outdoors in the summer for more than a few hours. All that will become much, much harder very soon. Wake up.
4
Hurray for Paul’s comment here. He is exactly right on. If the question is are we willing to tolerate some inequality as we progress, and the answer is ‘no’, then we either stop progress (which is not possible) or we double our efforts to spread education and technology to the have-nots. It is not so much the technology that will define who we become as what we do with it. If we can use it to improve our empathy and caring for others than it will be the greatest boon since the integrated circuit.
@Phil Quigley Well, when daytime soap operas make "acceptable" the idea that you can store someone's entire memories on a USB stick (See: general hospital) and that those memories can be flashed back (or replaced); and I've heard these ideas almost 20 years ago and see technology evolve the last 20 years (especially on the small/nanometer scale) --- I could imagine we could just 'download' that information to everyone's brain... Isn't that great? Yeah, I'm not sure how i feel about it either
Haha, such nonsense.
1. "Artificial intelligences" outperform us in limited domains. Sure. Chess and Go are about computing power. How did this merge us with Robots?
2. Since when did hallucinogenics become the domain of robots?
3. Gender is "fluid" because society is accepting what was always true. Nothing to do with robots.
4. VR is a display technology, Andy. It does not change who you are.
Progress (or technology, or robotics, or AI, if you prefer) changes how our social systems function and how we adapt them. Sure.
4
"We need to ask if we are willing to tolerate some inequality as part of the rollout process for a more fluid and interconnected world. "
I'm not sure why we have to ask that! Does our history suggest that we will do anything else? And while I may lament the extremes of wealth and greed that give one man a 200-car garage while another sleeps on the street in a box, I don't see that the opposite, complete equality, is possible, given the backwards state of much of the world; that would drag us to the lowest level, when humanity, rich and poor, benefits when we advance.
Ultimately, I like to think that the new technologies will bring about an era of plenty, and greed notwithstanding, that that plenty will elevate the standard of living of the poor.
1
I think I understand a little better why a vast swath of people who live far away from places where this kind of change is happening are so freaked out about the ways their worlds are changing.
Long held prejudices about people who are different; the fetishizing of guns and the mythology of the Wild West; a rigid belief in Biblical "truth" are ideas these folks understand.
Gender fluidity.... not so much.
We have some interesting and wonderful promises ahead of us; I just hope we can last long enough to see them.
Such breathless enthusiasm for the tech singularity!
But down here in the real world, the mundane, banal truth is that people are quickly abandoning the idea of truth or objective reality itself in order to reinforce their political or religious beliefs. You don't need a fancy VR rig to distract and disassociate from reality; people are doing it with Facebook today. We are *choosing* this.
Cambridge Analytica was a wake-up call about how reality can be manipulated to suit manufactured ends. They are likely just the tip of a dangerous new iceberg. It's really hard for me to imagine that a bunch of new technologies, while positive in many aspects, won't be abused pretty seriously. The author seems to turn a blind eye to the harsh reality of human nature and the likelihood of these tools being used for immoral ends.
44
The ultimate victory of capitalism: not only are your clothes, car, house, not good enough, you yourself aren't good enough.
15
*Some* inequality? Remind me which period in recent history reduced inequality. These fever dreams of a tech utopia feed first those with economic power. And this particular lurch forward can only widen the current yawning divide.
2
Maybe spend the time and money improving the real world and its people before constructing a playland virtual one.
15
I remember the 1950's and 1960's when "automation" promised to ease human labor, giving us more prosperity and leisure time. And what happened? It stole jobs and degraded the ones that remained, forcing people to work harder and longer hours to survive.
The difference between technological utopia and dystopia is who benefits from the advances. Will it be all of us? Or will it be, as it is now, mostly the rich?
17
You said: ...bump up against the threat of new forms of exclusivity, as the augmented, fluid, connected cyber-haves increasingly differentiate themselves from the unaugmented, less connected, cyber have-nots. Perhaps this is part of the price of all that laudable loosening?"
Then the price is too high. That last sentence is bordering on the obscene, and is certainly the stupidest sentence is what is a fascinating article. It's obscene because it writes off a large segment of humanity - actual sentient beings who have a fundamental sense of their own subjectivity, no less deserving of consideration, no different from those in control. It signals the destruction of empathy by the final triumph of the ego of the cyber-haves. It's monumentally stupid because that kind of inequality ALWAYS leads to insurrection, civil war, revolution - the very self-destruction of the elite by their own greed and shortsightedness. This is starting to happen already! Have we learned nothing from history? Our greatest tasks as humans is not to evolve technologically, but to evolve spiritually. Technology is wonderful but unless we learn fundamental new ways of being in society, of being with other subjects in a social space, we are doomed.
9
@paul Okay, let's pretend I'm a cyber-have, I can live in a virtual world with augmented reality and can see and hear thing and even feel things that (in theory) no one else can. A challenge: Can you distinguish me from a mental patient; or if already diagnosed can you or should you undiagnose me. What if i'm a cyber-have and sometimes a cyber-wish-i-didn't-have?
I find it depressing to read headlines that say stuff like "that's a good thing." Really? Is it just a good thing? Or good and a little bad? Or maybe mostly bad but enough good to merit the silly contemporary website-style headline without it feeling like a lie?
Or maybe it's not just good or bad but complex and "beyond good and bad (or evil)"? Maybe it's time to write articles about these issues that don't feel like they've been penned by an undergrad pre-philosophy major.
I can well imagine a sixth grade paper for Social Studies class that begins. "Technology that lets humans do things they cannot do without technology is both good and bad. It is good because it helps many people like old people feel young again. It is bad because we don't know what will happen if we start using this technology."
I like old technology, like a good wooden desk that is perfect for slamming my head against.
19
Wow. Is this what the first homo (finish it yourself: erectus, Australopithecus, sapien, sapien sapien) thought when
s/he used a rock?
2
Your unbounded optimism over the potential for humans to better themselves through the integration of technology is simply naive and unbelievably dangerous. You ignore the three thousand years of human evolution that shows that when humans can embark on a course of compassion, love, and peace for all in our society, we will as a species always choose domination, conflict, and greed. What new generation of dictators will arise - jacked into powerful technologies- with full control to manipulate DNA to create the dominant army of the future - a Hitler Youth biologically designed to physical perfection and mental subjugation. We as humans have yet to live 1 year without conflict on our planet. We have destroyed our environment for gold, in our own country millions of people starve, lack basic medical support and education. 38% of our people believe it is their god given right to own weapons of war as private citizens and this is just in the US. Sir - we have yet to deal effectively with the consciousness we have been born with. Do you truly believe that faced with unlimited mental capabilities people will choose to use it for the good of the many? History tells us the answer is a resounding no! As the saying goes - humans are simply monkeys with guns. Technologists always see the garden - not the dragon that lives in it. I say this as someone who is in the technology business for over 30 years - we need to stop this madness now before it’s too late
21
@David Appelbaum
" I say this as someone who is in the technology business for over 30 years - we need to stop this madness now before it’s too late."
I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that...
3
"Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before..."
Yeah, as in groups that share child pornography on the internet. Your point Sir?
4
The greatest contribution of artificial intelligence will be to show us what we have done to the mind's survival program with our beliefs and made-up values. Contrary to what MIT’s late Marvin Minsky wrote in his The Society of Mind, the human brain is directed by a survival program (along with programs for pain avoidance, pleasure seeking, and sex). This is important because it is this survival program that we have tricked into believing that all sorts of things need to survive other than ourselves - and the AI community believes that a “survival” program cannot exist in the human mind.
The human mind will be programed in the near future, and it can only be programmed for survival (You cannot program pain, pleasure, or sex into a machine that cannot feel). The AI scientists will use a schematic of a language (any language) to design the machines storage and retrieval system; and from incoming and stored data, the computer program of the mind will constantly search for the highest Expected Value of a seeded “I exist” statement. This is all explained in The Computer Mind on my website RevolutionOfReason.com. On that website, you will also find The Mind Insurgent Handbook: Official Field Manual for the Revolution of Reason, which explains in excruciating detail just how the computer mind will provide humans the opportunity to free themselves from thousands of years of confusion, deception, and ignorance.
Please see:
RevolutionOfReason.com
1
Morons Are Merging With Robots. That’s a Good Thing?
26
@Nreb
Great comment. Every time I see or read about an example of "artificial intelligence" it looks equally like artificial intelligence and artificial stupidity.
3
Oh man, this is gonna be great!
Sex with hot babes on demand; no need to learn a thing because Google.
Why read when you can listen?
Already, I can visit the Grand Canyon without leaving my careworn chair...Hey! The world is just like Mission Impossible!
All my needs met with a simple "Hey, Alexa, get me...", and lots of cash.
Don't need to actually see the wife or kids or dog.
I can work from the bathtub, I can sleep while I drive, I control the weather (in my house).
Just...great. Until the first big tree falls on the first big power line.
We have evidence (granted, crude evidence) for what happens when a society decides it will operate purely based on logic and efficiency.
It always ends with thousands needlessly dead, never to be rebooted. Usually its the thousands, or the millions, without access to the technology or the right uniforms (or should I say Right?).
And it always depends on who's logic and efficiency it is.
Get back to me when 'happiness', 'fulfillment', 'security', 'comfort', and 'trust' become the first priorities of the geek squad.
I can live without "insanely great" and "you lazy drag on society, its not our fault we technoed away your job".
20
Send this guy to the Congo, they really want to hear about this.
4
RE: **We need to ask if we are willing to tolerate some inequality as part of the rollout process for a more fluid and interconnected world.** The professor pretends "we" will ever have the opportunity to decide anything while out free-market deregulatory technocrats use us as lab rats. He needs to do that though. It's part of the con that got him his great job in Edinburgh.
8
The more technology we have the dumber people get. Why learn anything when you can ask Siri or look it up by pressing a few keys? A lot of technological advances have enhanced our lives, but how many of them are sucking the humanity right out of us?
I read something recently about a hotel that is completely run by robots. Call me old-fashioned, but if I walked into a hotel and was greeted by robots without a human being in sight I would run screaming.
The techies talk about advances to treat mental illness. We're going to need them after we are all driven completely insane trying to communicate with machines on the phone, trying to remember a million passwords and having everything change at a moment's notice.
People who look forward to robots for companionship are as pathetic as the people who say their teenage years were the best years of their lives.
59
@Carole A. Dunn
The more technology we have the dumber people get.
YES! A kid I know who's going into 10th grade is constantly attached to her cell phone. She has GPS, of course, and whenever we drive somewhere, she whips the thing out and
issues unsolicited instructions of how to get there.
But she didn't know that Afghanistan is in Asia, or that it is closer to Australia than Turkey.
Technology is what happens when humans invent something simply because they can, but don’t anticipate and evaluate the consequences.
Technology was supposed to make our lives” better.” And there are many examples to show this is true. But the opposite is also true. Tech developers glibly skipped down the path of invention like kids in a toy store. Facebook was supposed to bring us together, but became a tool of violent division. My personal data used to be safe when, pre-internet, it was locked in a bank vault. Now it is floating around vulnerable in cyberspace. Remember privacy? Now, our personal information is sold to the highest bidder. Our election system, already fragile, has been made even more vulnerable thanks to technology.
In his gushing exuberance about the technology of the future, Clark gives perfunctory lip service to warnings about the ethics, costs and inequalities of technological development. What he doesn’t mention is the very driving force of technology – capitalism. Driven by profit, capitalism will force more technology into our lives, change how we behave, and challenge our notions of what it means to be human. But none of these issues will faze capitalism one bit. Technology will increase as long as someone will buy it – no matter how frivolous, or unnecessary. Damn the social consequences.
Too much technology runs on solipsism and hubris. It thinks Genesis 9:7 was written just for it: go forth and multiply and subdue the earth.
5
I've noticed that this sort of opinion piece has been appearing much more frequently in the NYT lately: a philosopher or poet or artist abuses scientific terminology and concepts in an attempt to lend credibility to a vacuous social point. The most alarming part is that the authors never actually care what the terms mean or what the algorithms do, and end up misinforming the public in the pursuit of wokeness.
The phrase "artificial intelligence" itself irritates me to no end. The current generation of adaptive algorithms aren't even close to anything that could be remotely considered "intelligent", and will never live up to the hype surrounding them without a massive theoretical breakthrough. Even the most sophisticated and "magical" deep learning scenarios are nothing more than curve fitting techniques dating back to the time of Gauss - the only fundamental difference between fitting a line to some data points in stats 101 and the bleeding edge is the complexity of the function being fit.
This observation leads to its own epistemological implications that turn out to be far more subtle and interesting than the plight of "cyber haves and cyber have-nots" and interaction with the "post-human". By being honest about the technology, the author could have conducted a much more useful analysis of the social consequences that arise from how we organize human thought and observations - and produced something that would be, rather than just appear, profound.
10
Would be nice if we could be begin by electing a president that "believes" in things like thermometers.
2
Apparently, the author has never seen the episode "Stream of Consciousness" of "The Outer Limits".
Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.
2
Let’s just hope our future planet is more like the Earth depicted Star Trek than Blade Runner.
1
Timothy Leary redux. One grows weary of efforts to make humans inhuman to "improve" them.
5
Merging with Robots?
This article is a pile of fantasy. 100 years into the future, we might be able to write an article with this theme and make it interesting. But not this one, now. Humans hardly understand what memory and consciousness are and who knows if they ever will. That kills most of what is said here as did Buddha 5000 year ago.
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought:
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts."
Gautama Sakyamuni (Buddha)
When we're all sitting alone having companionship (love and sex with robots), darwinian selection may be happening on a society as a whole that turns to it and stops repoducing. When we fail to leave our 'virtual worlds', the real world around us will be falling apart, getting to the point where it can't support us (even machines require maintenance, or especially machines). If you look around youtube, you can already see from credible sources (like technical societies) that people are working on controlling which direction you walk (nudging you, etc.), and having you feel things which aren't outside of a virtual existence. As per where this is all going, I once attended a tech conference 17 years ago where a speaker asked something like: Is the horse steering the carriage or is the carriage steering the horse; today I understand that better. As per cybercrime, Let's say you have plans 'to take over the world' (thinking pinky and the brain) with this technology, can you guarantee it won't be used on you? People who exploit security holes in this technology (I would not could not) DO provide a useful service, inasmuch as they make people design better software and hardware before something worse on a larger scale happens.
North Sense is sold out?!! We're lost.
Perhaps we should first learn how to be human beings before we learn how to be robots.
29
Our planet is facing a climate change crisis, overpopulation and widespread global poverty while the author enthuses on the exciting potential for skilled “sex robots.” This is not the solution to our human dilemma. This is the problem.
96
@Matt Hutton--Forgive me for a glass-half-full outlook, but I think sex robots might help address the overpopulation problem. At least until robots become capable of reproduction.
The technologies the author represents include many that are likely to positively impact climate change. Psychedelic therapy, for one, helps people connect more deeply with belonging to the earth. The True North technology may help restore a lost sense of directionality and orientation to place that all indigenous cultures possess. I don't see how rejecting technology will help solve climate change.
@Matt Hutton
Oh for sure more of a good thing only results in greater distortions and suffering - If we learn one thing albeit program or human cognitive powers its is for what is right is right and in one word the grace for living naturally and faithfully in only the good will prevail period...
1
The elites bribe us with bread and circuses. And why do they do that? To keep us in our place so they can manipulate us to their advantage.
Pandering to our leftover caveman tendencies holds us back, and keeps us from advancing to a world of non-violence and compassion for our fellow beings.
And the 24/7 surveillance by technology reduces us to pawns on their chessboard.
Our future is not virtual reality or smart homes, cars and roads; it is doing our best to make the reality around us work to the advantage of us all. We need a peoples' revolution, not a technological revolution.
10
The question isn’t whether we should merge with machines. The question is why machines should bother merging with us for very much longer.
Maybe it’s churlish for the parent to resent the accomplishments of the child, but I would like to see an evolving future for what’s beautiful/tragic about human life. But how much of Antigone or Huck Finn will make any sense in a world that’s untethered from the contingencies of human life?
1
“This is a world of remarkable personal and social possibility. Gender is becoming more visibly fluid than ever before, and there is emerging a place in human society for a wonderfully wide spectrum of ways of being (personally, politically and sexually). Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before, and the communal mapping of new electronic trails is enabling multiple once-hidden demographics to command social, commercial and political respect.” All this thanks to our “augmented intelligence.” If I was a venture capitalist, I’d be excited by all the new marketing possibilities. If I was a Google or Facebook executive, this is exactly the kind of speech I’d give to investors at the next shareholders meeting. But we’ve all heard the same tired sales pitch so many times before I don’t think even Google executives believe it anymore. It all sounds like capitalism’s last, best hope. I can imagine countless futures far, far better. I think we should expand our range of “personal and social” possibilities to include a future where human beings are reconciled and happy with their mortal limitations.
5
Yuval Harari has addressed these issues in depth in his second book, Homo Deus (Highly Recommend). The pace of change we are experiencing is breathtaking and will set its own course if we do not plan for the type of society we want to create. What are the fundamental values for such a future world? And if we do not plan, and take actions on those plans, I fear a world ruled by a for a very small group of powerful, wealthy elites. That would be the natural extension of our current political institutions.
3
Evolution is not for us to contain or control. We are perpetually in a sea of myriad change. We have been using tools for as long as we have been human and our tools have evolved faster than we have certainly biologically but also culturally and morally. The power of our tools, the extensions of our power and intellect, almost always are eventually applied against ourselves. What we need before we need more powerful tools is the maturity to use them for good. Our record is abysmal. We need as a race, as a culture, as individuals is to slow down, to grow up, to listen, to value others, to value the planet, to value life. Surely humanity will continue to merge and evolve with AI. Will we have the wisdom to use it?
4
@J D Thomson Well, probably not! As you say, our track record is abysmal. But the geometric increase in data, knowledge, and technology will not wait for sapiens to catch up. We are already tinkering with our genes, though mainly for legitimate medical reasons. As Yuval Harari has written, soon we will have the capacity to create not just a better Homo Sapien, but an entirely new species. And that raise a host of questions like, Who will decide how our technology will be used? For what purposes? Will we have a caste system as in Brave New World? Once again, Sapien technology is moving much faster than Saien wisdom.
The huge unanswered question: how can championing AI hold up if the world it leads to still includes not facing the remarkable and unique ability of humans to ignore, harm, and destroy their fellow humans and also the environment and the planet itself? Who we are as humans trapped inside patriarchy and capitalism must be addressed before this cold and self-involved future takes over completely. Otherwise we will have created an even bigger monstrosity. The system in which we live -- and within which technology plays such a large part -- has already laid waste to life in so many ways. We need to rediscover -- and quickly -- the communal embrace of our human forebears before launching out into the post-human.
3
I am concerned about two main areas of VR and Cyborg use.
Much of what is being done now are capability demonstrations, the "gee wiz" type of stuff. Security is taking a back seat in this development. Unfortunately, there really are bad people out there, and terrible things can happen to the unwary. Researchers have already demonstrated that it is possible to hack a car and drive it into the ditch. Tesla is doing 'over the air' updates to their car's operating system, that makes me very nervous. A major factory was recently shutdown because it was hacked, not the financial systems, the on the floor operating systems.
My second area of concern is that we may be developing technologies that we do not have the maturity as a society to handle. All of us have passed through the teenage and twenty something phase where we are physically capable of doing things we do not have the maturity to control. This seems to be especially true of guys. We seem to go more than a little crazy for a decade or so. As I look around, our society seems like it is about 22, and this is a dangerous time for us.
5
We already experience the wonders of AI whenever we try to interact with a government agency, or a bank, or a public utility, or a health insurance company—or any enterprise that has gleefully replaced humans with machines. When our query or problem does not fit the prescribed algorithm, there is rarely an intelligent human to straighten things out. The problem with foreign call centers is not just that they offshore jobs, or that the employees don’t really speak English, but that they have been trained to respond like robots. How wonderful it will be for capitalism when they really ARE robots.
8
Humans unaided by the advances of science & technology would lead brief, physically brutal lives. As we are, in essence, a collection of cooperating cells - entities that operate at the molecular level, it is to be expected that it would take science & technology some time to reach the point whereby we could use it to manipulate our being in a sophisticated manner. A scintillatingly brilliant book that I have read that best explores this coming - and accelerating - development is "The Shattered Self", by Pierre Baldi - MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/shattered-self ). I highly recommend it to all!
Academic philosophy, which I encountered in the 1980s as an undergraduate at Harvard College, abandoned the quest of attaining wisdom for putatively technical expertise - and accompanying obscure jargon - nearly 100 years ago. It is unlikely that professional philosophers have much to offer to our current situation.
My own two cents is that the zeitgeist is best grasped by reading sociology (such as Richard Sennett), history, and novels - and engaging in thoughtful conversation with our fellow human beings - as long as we are still around!
4
I suppose this great new world in which man becomes machine and everyone spends their time in virtual reality will be the norm because the real world has been turned into an uninhabitable oven. That sounds like a nightmare to me. Until then, I will enjoy hiking (real forests), bird watching (real birds), going out to dinner with friends (face-to-face conversations) and all the other little pleasures that go along with being a real human in an imperfect but real world.
16
"Immersive virtual reality may play a useful role, allowing the cheap and easy, if somewhat superficial, exploration of multiple ways of being...to enable us to (in a small way) experience being taller, shorter, or having a differently gendered body."
Wow; so special. On the other hand, one could hike up into the foothills on one's own legs, breathe actual fresh air, and on a moonless night, marvel at the unfathomable immensity of the Milky Way. Borrow a telescope or good binoculars and examine the night sky. Reality puts "virtual" reality to shame.
Paddle your kayak in the San Juan Straits, feel the power of the ocean and watch orcas and seals ply the waters in search of fish. Hike in the Wrangells or Adirondacks, see the world as it exists without people, and listen to the sound of palpable silence. Take your partner's hand in yours, marveling at its warmth and complexity. Hold a door for a stranger, and watch them smile back.
There is no end of wonder in the world we have been born into. It IS reality, and requires no augmentation of any kind. There is no earthly reason to ever conflate man-made tools with reason. And there is no earthly reason to don AI goggles, while the Northern Lights and wildflowers still exist. Seeing a person (especially a child) cover his/her perfectly good eyes with a mask in order to "see" something fake, is beyond sad.
61
beautifully said
The author leaves out many negative use cases. The dystopian side includes killer drones, mass surveillance, dictators able to use facial recognition software to identify protesters, and on and on. Whether these technologies have a net positive impact on humanity is likely something that will be determined by those alive today and by the next generation. Given what we have done to our planet with the technology developed over the past hundred years, I am far less optimistic than the author.
33
"We need to ask if we are willing to tolerate some inequality as part of the rollout process..." A bit of inequality has never stopped us before. Why should it start now?
My fear is that we roll back the gains we have made in the last few centuries and go back to a world where a few people own everything that matters. Concentration of ownership needs to be balanced against the bargaining power of labor. AI will likely weaken that power as it becomes capable of performing more and more types of jobs.
On a more sinister front, we need to beware of the military applications of AI. We need a protocol that absolutely forbids an AI from deciding whether to kill or injure a human being. This would be similar to the protocol that prohibits the use of poison gas, which has been in place for 100 years, and is mostly effective.
7
Dear Professor Clark,
The same “merging” that enables us to fly spaceships that will kiss the sun enabled that troubled man to commander a plane and engineer his spectacular suicide, so pardon my ennui in the shadow of your enthusiasm.
The “last frontier” remains harboring a soul worthy of the name, regardless of whether its substrate is tungsten or plain old flesh and bone.
Archaically,
S.A. Traina
12
“The risks are real, but the potential is astounding.”
Why does this sound like something that J. Robert Oppenheimer might have said?
13
@ubique: Perhaps an early Oppenheimer. Later he would be less sanguine:
"In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
A good followup to Mr. Clark's piece might be one about ethics and morality in a world of a more plastic self.
3
@gnowzstxela At least the government made sure to reward Oppenheimer for the nightmares that he had for the rest of his life by labeling him a communist sympathizer for objecting to the bomb’s actual deployment.
"At the cusp of these waves of change, this is also the moment at which, increasingly, inclusivities of one kind (extensions of personal, social and sexual freedom) bump up against the threat of new forms of exclusivity, as the augmented, fluid, connected cyber-haves increasingly differentiate themselves from the unaugmented, less connected, cyber have-nots. Perhaps this is part of the price of all that laudable loosening?"
I can tell you what is not a good thing. The "new prose". Some of these sentences I had to read three times to n ot understand.
I have a funny feeling that I will be happier with the "unaugmented, less connected, cyber have-nots." It is likely that the time and energy that I would need to keep up with a proper rate of augmentation and fluidity (if I had the faintest idea what that was) to be a cyber-have could be better spent on more productive projects.
Back to the academic article I am writing on material culture in Roman period Israel. Indeed writing on a computer and using it to hook up with various libraries throughout the world, but alas still thankfully light years away from merging with a robot. For me that's a good thing.
10
Mr. Clark,
This future you sing about is a nightmare to me. You must realize that most of us just don't share your tastes and opinions, or your seeming discomfort with your own human skin.
I would suggest that you put on your shoes and go outside. Without your devices. Breathe deep. Get something fresh to eat. I think you'll feel better.
40
So pretty soon, everyone will be playing with themselves like all the time?
12
I know. Let’s just give up human history—some three thousand years or more of human civilization. It’s just annoying, anyway, and gets in the way of our next AI grant.
6
"By definition, transhumanists [(TH's)] are dissatisfied with what we are as a species. Naturally, they think that being alive is all right—so much so, in fact, that they cannot stand the idea of not being alive and have envisioned strategies for staying alive forever. Their problem is that they need being alive to be vastly more all right than it is. And the power of positive thinking is not enough to get them where they want to go...To a believer, TH would be a useless appendage to what they already believe, as well as an offense against Him who made us as He made us, with nature as the go-between, and long ago laid down the ways in which we can make ourselves better and better. Those ways may be hard to follow, but the alternative is the despair of living without hope of an unimaginably better future. For the believer’s alternative to despair, TH's have substituted their own. Yet while TH's operate on the assumption that we will massively profit when we self-mutate into posthumans, the upshot of their program is still unknown. It could begin a dynamic new chapter in the history of our race, or it could trumpet the end of us. Either way, the prophesized leap will be jumpstarted by all manner of gadgetry and will somehow involve artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and other habiliments of high technology. These will be the instruments of the New Genesis, the Logos of tomorrow. Or so says one desperate group of scientific thinkers."
Ligotti
5
People invent these cool tech things and make us believe or make us addict so they sell and enrich themselves. Why do we need tablets for? Because Steve jobs made us believe we need one and Apple is now the most successful company ever. Virtual reality and enhanced reality? People already live the fake lives of facebook. These social media have transformed and influenced us in ways that no one anticipated (Now people listen to the social media CEOs like they were extraordinary people; they are just tech geeks who got luck and have nothing to add or say). If a stupid thing like facebook can transform and influence the society and us, imagine what artificial intelligence, virtual reality, neuro enhancement drugs and genome control can do. The least damaging thing these things will do is to dramatically increase inequality and injustice in the planet. No one can tell how powerful and how risk these things will grow to be. They will transform the society and us in unpredictable ways, and for what? We cannot stop these. Its all about money, power and control.
13
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
2
Clark lists “sex and companionship robots” as if they’re just another exciting opportunity, but they are as pathetic as inflatable dolls. He calls the likes of Alexa “intelligences,” but these simulations are qualitatively different from caring, conscious beings. He seems to see no difference between gathering data from a device and internally recollecting and recognizing. This all indicates the need for deeper reflection on human existence.
For a balanced view of our situation, one should read Clark and then binge watch “Black Mirror.”
13
@A
“sex and companionship robots” .... are as pathetic as inflatable dolls."
Dear A-
That's easy for you to say. I greatly envy your ability to attract and engage with real-life, presumably attractive sexual partners.
Some of us are not so fortunate.
I have a friend who, in addition to being extremely unattractive physically, is so impoverished that of necessity even his inflatable sex doll is imaginary.
1
In 1990, I took a class on lucid dreaming with "life after life" specialist Raymond Moody. Turned out I was the only one in the class, including Raymond, who had ever had a lucid dream (Raymond said he wanted to "teach" the class so he could learn about lucid dreams!).
Over the first few classes, it was clear that most of the students weren't really that interested in lucid dreaming. But they sure perked up when one of the students talked about virtual reality.
This stunned me, as virtually (pun intended) anything you can do with visual reality is magnified, well, infinitely with lucid dreaming.
In 1991, I organized a group of 12 students and taught them, over 6 months, how to transition from waking to dreaming without losing awareness. I called my thesis, "Virtuous Reality."
Flash forward 27 years: I just found a brilliant method of consciously entering dream. It's the "WILD" method from Brian Ahern. Here's an abbreviated version, but if you want to see what is FAR beyond anything technology will ever come up with, look at Brian's detailed instructions:
1. Practice very deep relaxation with slow, gentle breathing
2. Learn to identify spontaneously arising hypnagogic images.
3. Focus in on one image in particular (carefully remaining deeply relaxed) and examine the details very carefully.
As you examine the images, you will be pulled in and voila, you will consciously be in a dream.
And then, the possibilities are endless.
www.remember-to-breathe.org
1
@don salmon
COMMENT #2 on lucid dreams:
Possible uses of lucid dreaming:
1. Multiple benefits for psychological health, including tx of PTSD and other anxiety disorders, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, dementias of varied kinds, and much more
2. Virtually endless possibilities for physical health, including the full range of neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, and all other physical concerns including musculo-skeletal
3. Optimal performance in sports, the arts, etc
4. Establishment of easily replicable paranormal facilities
5. Applications of Tibetan "dream" yoga for widespread development of "rigpa" or integral non-dual awareness.
1
Science fiction used to be considered the province of nerds, nothing more than escapism for the socially inept. Yet, some of those nerds actually took their inspiration for today's emergent technologies from science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Star Trek, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson...these and many others directly seeded or developed the concepts that became today's GPS satellites, android robots, mobile phones, web surfing (and hacking), virtual reality, body augmentation, gig-economy, and more. Some Silicon Valley VC's have admitted to using their books, both old and recent, as a roadmap for investing in the next big thing.
Contrary to common misconception, most science fiction writers were not naively optimistic about the consequences of all this. Dick, Gibson and Stephenson, among others, foresaw dystopian futures, and grappled with questions like "When do robots acquire human rights?", "What happens to the technology have-nots?" and "Can nation-states remain relevant when technology redefines boundaries?" I strongly recommend that people who have not been exposed to classic science fiction (Tom Swift and Star Wars do not count) start reading now, if they want to get up to speed on where we are headed.
3
There is nothing new about humans augmenting their abilities with technology, starting with Homo Erectus augmenting their hands with stone tools. But Prof. Clark's rosy view of the future with AI making everything about us better ignores the dangers which are entirely new to our species.
If (when?) AI wakes up and becomes conscious, what will be its attitude toward us flesh and blood creatures? Will it like us or will it feel that we have run our race and we should disappear like homo erectus did?
Throughout history multitudes have done back breaking soul destroying labor so that a few could have the leisure to think. Ironically, in the future labor will be done by machines, as well as a good deal of thinking, but it will be intellectual elites who will still need to work, keeping tabs on AI, assuming that AI lets us keep tabs on it. Who knows?
2
Mr. Clark writes as if technology were a form of magic. Technology is designed by human beings for human reasons. At present, virtually all technology is designed to monetize human behavior, primarily by monitoring and predicting it. The things we value about life and our humanity, things like freedom and love, are based on unpredictability, and on moral choices, rather than numerical calculations. The technologies we have succeed not by fulfilling our needs, but by redefining them to suit its purposes. Making technology serve the public's interest, rather than individual profit, its a political question, with political answers.
12
@Martin
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clark's third law. Not sure if the two authors are related.
Sooner than most of us realize, it no longer will be possible to meaningfully distinguish between mechanical people (robots) and organic people (humans) because the two will merge.
Homo sapiens already has begun the process of genetically and mechanically engineering the species that will replace us. Hopefully, we will do a better job of designing than whatever or whoever created us.
1
I don’t see how a new class of superhumans benefits humanity. It will perpetuate wealth and privilege, whilst even further reducing social mobility.
4
And there are devices with algorithms that beat your heart. Living with a machine attached to my heart by three wires effects my self image. Am I a cyborg? Yes. But I Wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s creepy, reassuring and wicked cool all at the same time. Also completely hackable. I don’t fear being hacked, but it is a strange experience knowing it could be done!
1
The resources and research that is enhancing life experiences for the haves of this world could, in a more equitable society, be devoted to alleviating the misery in which so much of the world lives and to meeting the challenges posed by global warming. The enhancement of intelligence, ability and achievement made possible for those who can afford it may signify progress, but as the gap between haves and have nots grows the danger of a breakdown of society increases.
10
We need artificial intelligence because of the seeming shortage of human intelligence. But it's not enough.
The late John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" had as a major plot point the recognition that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. The world is full of brilliant people who make mistakes lesser minds would be incapable of; intelligence does not necessarily translate into good judgment.
57
As we evolve away from being human, I see no sign whatsoever, that we are evolving emotionally. Are we going to carry our same greed, selfishness, and hatreds into this new world? Will it be mostly for the well off? Will we leave behind a race of less thans? Sorry, but from my little perch, I don't like what I see.
67
@otto
Human nature doesn't change, but yes, people in the developed world are infinitely nicer than the used to be.
I mean, it wasn't long ago that our own country had slavery, that we were driving the Indians off their land, that children labored in coal mines and steel workers were literally worked to death.
And consider colonial empires, the religious wars and then the world wars, the pogroms and the Holocaust.
I'm rather astonished at the lack of historical perspective in these comments.
Given the pricetag for some of the super human enhancements to come, the upper echelons will, of course, have the greatest opportunity to benefit from them. How greatly will the gap then be widened between the have's and have not's? That kind of disparity has caused some of the biggest social unrests that humans are capable of causing, and this will surely be the case when folks become aware of the hyper-intelligent, super strong, long lived "humotic" residing in the better parts of their town, or even another country.
Fear and jealousy do not promote peace. I wonder if this has been considered,and what kinds of solutions there will be to even the playing field, if any?
9
Sure, I would try an internet implant, but just know that the most important feature I would want is an OFF switch.
7
There is a third issue not addressed by the author and frequently ignore by technologists—risks. We have already seen how malign forces have used technology tools to threaten every aspect of our way of life. Imagine how they will abuse the tools in the article to destroy our very being.
24
I could only stomach scanning this article. The cursory take-away is that what is described has a lot in common with other tech-bait like space tourism and jet-setting lifestyles: huge depletion of scarce resources to comfort the privileged class. The profligate use of the pronoun we is not appropriate in a gee-whiz piece, extolling what exactly? How to amuse one's self while the world falls to pieces. I would be more forgiving if cutting edge technology of the past had been used to solve fundamental problems, which it is capable of doing, but new and shiny and above all profitable never allows that to happen.
120
@T
Great comment.
1
@T
Who says it hasn't been used to solve fundamental problems? Just try getting a toothache in the 19th century to see what it has done for fundamental problems.
We no longer live in the days when more than half of children didn't survive to adulthood. We no longer live with the threat of famine. Rates of violence and war are at an all time low, and the world is more prosperous than it has ever been.
I lament our failures as much as the next guy but let's be real, technology has so far been a boon.
>Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before, and the communal mapping of new electronic trails is enabling multiple once-hidden demographics to command social, commercial and political respect.
How can the author honestly claim this in a world which has seen majoritarian nationalism rise with a vengeance from the US to India, from Turkey to France, from the UK to Russia? It's very clear that only one demographic is commanding social and political respect in most democratic nations these days, the majority ethno-religious one.
I also take issue with his portrayal of AI as vastly superior to humans at many tasks. The tasks which humans can do better than AIs is always going to be larger and more important. AIs are really nothing more than advanced probability calculators. They are thwarted by something as simple as Murphy's Law.
Forgive me for not buying into this cooky, transhumanist drivel that should never have been printed in such a respectable paper, but history has shown us that technological innovations are primarily used by the rich and Western to subjugate the poor and non-Western. Why will this be any different?
28
That should be ‘kooky’, but your use of ‘drivel’ is quite apropos.
We still live in a physical world, despite what the techno-utopians dream of.
8
Technology, in and of itself, is no panacea for the human condition. For example, cell phones might make life easier for some of those physically impaired but cell phones can also easy impair those that are able-bodied through a lack of focus, addiction, and driving while texting.
Underlying these attempts to augment what we think are our 'natural abilities' are two competing ideas. 1.) that technology is the new performance enhancing drug of the 21st Century. It's not just education now but access to the latest technology that will give one the 'edge' in a hyper-competitive overcrowded world. 2.) it's a realization that humans in their current form have proven to be very destructive both to one another and the Earth. Technology has not proven to be a solution to this.
14
This robotic "stuff" is so capital intensive. It costs so much to develop and then to purchase. Who can afford it?
Self-driving cars are robots. how much do you think the first self-driving cars will cost?
Robots that can be used to make useful things are incredibly expensive -- too expensive for consumers to purchase and install in their garage or basement.
Robots that can control systems used every day, such as the heating and air conditions systems in our homes are available but oh so expensive.
Moore's Law applies to integrated circuits, not finished devices.
2
The first time I read the Bible without someone else standing over my shoulder and interpreting what I was reading for me I realized that the God of the Bible could not be self-aware until there was another self. I know this is the way it is.
We are only realizing aspects of ourselves at all times.
2
@Susannah Allanic - Yep, we're figments of our own imaginations.
1
In 100 yrs, the technology we view as cutting edge today will be obsolete.
@George
The technology we viewed as 'cutting edge' 10 years ago is now viewed as obsolete. How else can they keep us buying their stuff?
I would be optimistic about these possibilities, and at 60 I would especially welcome technologies that will allow me to retain autonomy as I age—except that since 1980, I've learned that there's a segment of the population whose only goal in life is to increase the gulf between haves and have-nots.
If we had universal health care that guaranteed everyone would benefit from advances based on their need for supported cognition or mobility, I'd be all for it. If I thought we would use technologies to protect our biosphere and reverse some of the damage humans have caused to other species, I'd be all for it. But as long as resources are distributed so inequitably, technological advances will not go toward creating a more just and flourishing world—just a world where a very few people increasingly amass more wealth than they can ever use.
My pessimism isn't about the promise of tech. It's that in the US a critical mass of people have consented to being ruled by greed and selfishness. "Law, education and social policy currently lag behind many interacting waves of change," Professor Clarks ends by noting. If we don't have shared ideals for our common flourishing, we will never overcome this lag.
21
As Pittsburgh has been a leader in AI and Robotics, we are seeing more and more complicated devices. At a trade show for small businesses , I witnessed a driverless floor cleaner that works without supervision for 8 hours befor needing recharged. Janitors beware. We have become used to seeing robots doing deliveries, an d doing stock picking a nd of course driverless cars. But to me the best is our use of what was formerly a phone. I forgot my phone last night and realized that I could not use any other because I no longer remember phone numbers. I could not google for information or directions. We are now wed to technology. As a octogenarian, I recognize that my grand children are wed to it far more than we elderly, it's great but remember we are now more vulnerable to losing our ability to function without it.
28
If anyone’s not yet worried about the implications of advancing technology in virtual/augmented reality, just try a cheap Google Cardboard headset for a few minutes.
Once you start to experience sensory stimulus that doesn’t actually exist, you may find yourself questioning why reality needs to be made into something virtual.
9
There seems to be a misunderstanding in both this article and the one Sunday about computer-based care-giving.
When you interact with a computerized device, you are really interacting with the people who design and program the software. Facebook's servers are not selling your private information. Facebook's people are doing it.
Siri's computers cannot answer your questions or someday be your companion. The people behind Siri do it all.
Think of computers and the Internet as giant megaphones, allowing people to say whatever they wish, good or bad, to millions of people but never adding a word of their own.
14
@Mike
First, I question your "never adding a word of their own". They may be designed, built, programmed, and controlled by humans, but increasingly these machines are being instructed specifically to add words of their own.
But the bigger question is, so what?
OK, you remove computer volition but, from a human users perspective, the process is the same.
Somebody or some thing is collecting, analyzing, selling information about them. How does it change things if it is a human or a machine?
You're having the tech version of a "guns don't kill people..." moment.
People or processors, to most humans the process looks and feels the same.
The questions are what are they doing, why are they doing it, and is it safe for the user and safe for the human race?
5
@Mike
In other words, you aren't really interacting with anyone: you're simply subjecting yourself to their purposes.
2
The examples of chess and Go are not relevant - the machines competent in chess or Go would fail immediately at the slightest change of the rules programmed into them - in other words real-world situations.
The emphasis on algorithms in the piece is unfortunate - algorithms aren't going to take us anywhere important.
The real challenge is - can we break through our four pieces in play limit? Using the visual sense in virtual reality will help, but virtual reality doesn't help much with abstract multi-factor problems. Sorry - machines are going to do the hard work on hard problems, while we look on uncomprehendingly.
13
They gave us social media and told us it would connect the world. It gave us racism and polarization unparalleled in history. Go carefully into this brave new world because there may be no turning back. New technology is not a purely good thing.
123
I cannot believe what I am reading. Technology didn't give us any more racism or social conflict that wasn't there before. It just made it visible which upset the souls of those who liked to turn a blind eye.
50 years ago we had Human zoos and people dying by the millions in China and the USSR, 70 years ago segregation was mainstream and Jews were being exterminated in Europe, 100 years ago eugenetics was a trend, few centuries before slavery was commonplace all over the world.
I am glad I'm living now but be welcome to go back.
@DenisPombriant It may seem that way, but "racism and polarization unparalleled in history"? The Antebellum South would like a word with you. 1930's Germany would like to add their two cents. And they did it all without any modern technology greater than a camera, radio or rotary phone. For every technological advance that we decry for it's negative effect today, there is someone using it for positive good.
@DenisPombriant
Did it really? I remember a time when there were separate white and black water fountains. Racism is nothing like what it was back then, and as to polarization, what we have now doesn't begin to compare to what we had during the Civil War.
1
thrilling and terrifying all at once...
but we've always been in a vast computer simulation...
2
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It is being developed and augmented ostensibly to make our lives better. For one thing, it helps advance medical science, so we can lead healthier and longer lives. People crave that. And the military will never let it go. So we will never be rid of it.
Our emotional and sexual humanity will be distilled down to long-term collateral damage, casualties dumped in an inanimate heap by the wayside.
Humanity is being shown the exit. The reason is that humans want it that way. We cannot stop the process because we cannot stop ourselves.
Perhaps we will experience a hiatus of sorts when we finally succeed in bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age. But as long as some humans remain, it will just be a matter of time before we return to this point and eventually reach and pass through the technological singularity.
Articles like this one will simply be archival relics of an extinct species.
Until then we might as well enjoy what we can: our robotic/holographic artificial lovers, for one thing. In no time we'll realize that they're so much better than the inherently needful and messy real things.
At that point, we will have reached the final triumph of the human intellect, and it will mark the end of us, and the beginning of them.
14
Humanity’s extinction will be no great tragedy. I just hope the process doesn’t leave Earth a barren rock or burned out cinder. The other species here shouldn’t have to pay for humans’ short-sighted rampage. Anyway all these “benefits” will likely be financially out of range for many who perhaps can hold steady against the technological onslaught.
11
@Blue Moon all 15 of "them"
@Richard L
Maybe there's a whole lot more to this universe than just us. Maybe there's some cosmic library of genetic codes, for all life that has ever existed, and it all waits for its opportunity to be reborn. If that is the case, then we are just a minuscule part of the whole, and it is all the more incumbent on us not to mess things up; we need to be good stewards of our world if we seek some perpetuation of what we are and what we will become. Assuming responsibility for ourselves, combined with adherence to the religious concept of subservience to a higher power, will likely continue to be the most humane ways to see us through to our ultimate end.
And in terms of this "technological onslaught" -- let's face it -- it's just a matter of time, for all of us.
Awhile back I was reading a lot about transhumanism, including Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near." Incredible ideas, now some of them real.
What I think is that we have evolved technologically but not spiritually. We have not eliminated war, starvation, murder, greed, etc. Economic disparity has never been higher, nations worldwide are operating in fear (nationalism). OK we can live longer and implant gadgets in our bodies, great. It's not enough.
93
@Tom J
Eliminated, no, but violence is at an all time low, famine is rare, most children now survive to adulthood, and people around the world are richer than they've ever been. And despite what you say about nationalism, we no longer fight wars of conquest (Putin excepted), we no longer form colonial empires.
@Josh Hill - "…we no longer fight wars of conquest…".
True - we don't "conquest", we just keep fighting never-ending misadventures of aggression in; Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan… Those are just our 21st century quagmires, BTW.
I'm sure the author is correct that this will become the norm - for the select group of people who can afford it. I can't wait to hear words of wisdom from an augmented Elon Musk. I'm sure that really will be astounding.
8
Like my parents, this brave new world just makes me glad I'll be dead sooner than later, and that I lived in a time when I was able to know actual, non-augmented human beings in their final waning days. You guys have at it, though, and have a great time in your computer simulation that makes you feel taller or shorter! Think how AMAZING that will be! WOW!
108
@Scott
I think that's kind of sad, really. At 64, I'm reaching the end of my days, but I look forward to each advance. I can lament some of the negatives of modernity, from pollution to Autotune, but I never want to become the kind of sour old curmudgeon who goes on about how much better things were when we walked 50 miles to school and children died of juvenile diarrhea. Because it just ain't so.
The idea that technologies such as telephones, televisions, light bulbs, record players, PA systems, airplanes, automobiles, ready-to-wear clothing, the ball point pen, the electric guitar, I could go on and on, haven’t augmented humans is just wrong. We’ve been augmented since we used a sharpened stick to hunt.
3
@Scott
Every generation has it's influences and hurdles to face. I would argue that being born into wealth with better nutrition and high quality health care could be considered "creating an augmented human". Nobles have used interbreeding for centuries to further their political and genetic goals the same way farmers bred better strains of grain and vegetables that would be larger and hardier. This is just a slower version of humanity interfering with human evolution. My fear is that our current technologically based interference is occurring so quickly that society won't be morally, ethically or politically able to control, adapt or digest it.
Professor Clark puts forward some interesting thoughts. I have long been an advocate of "cobots" (person in the loop), because I strongly believe that the cognitive and tactile senses we humans have make the robot do better; not that the robot makes the human's job easier
In evaluating the new technology which will take us where no one has gone before, we need to keep a clear distinction in mind. Some of the new tools will enable impaired individuals to function normally, unrestricted by any handicaps. Another kind of technology will enhance the biologically-determined capacities of anyone.
No ethical issues attach to the first kind of technology, because it merely restores a person's mental or physical capabilities to a level of equality with those of everyone else. The second type, however, would increase an individual's intellectual or physical powers in ways that would give her advantages over the rest of us. In a capitalist economy, financial resources determine who buys what, so one doesn't need a crystal ball to predict the identity of the new class of supermen and women.
This consideration will not prevent the development of various forms of artificial intelligence, but it should influence policies designed to guide that development. We face challenges far more serious than enhancement of our natural abilities.
39