CHAPTER ONE
THE AGE OF AI
You may not think about AI on a daily basis, but it is all around you. It’s here when you do a Google search. It’s here beating the world Jeopardy! and Go champions. And it’s getting better by the minute. But we don’t have general purpose AI yet—AI that is capable of holding an intelligent conversation on its own, integrating ideas on various topics, and even, perhaps, outthinking humans. This sort of AI is depicted in films like Her and Ex Machina, and it may strike you as the stuff of science fiction.
I suspect it’s not that far away, though. The development of AI is driven by market forces and the defense industry—billions of dollars are now pouring into constructing smart household assistants, robot supersoldiers, and supercomputers that mimic the workings of the human brain. Indeed, the Japanese government has launched an initiative to have androids take care of the nation’s elderly, in anticipation of a labor shortage.
Given the current rapid-fire pace of its development, AI may advance to artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next several decades. AGI is intelligence that, like human intelligence, can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. Indeed, AI is already projected to outmode many human professions within the next decades. According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.1
I’ve mentioned that many observers have warned of the rise of superintelligent AI: synthetic intelligences that outthink the smartest humans in every domain, including common sense reasoning and social skills. Superintelligence could destroy us, they urge. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who is now a director of engineering at Google, depicts a technological utopia bringing about the end of aging, disease, poverty, and resource scarcity. Kurzweil has even discussed the potential advantages of forming friendships with personalized AI systems, like the Samantha program in the film Her.
THE SINGULARITY
Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a “technological singularity,” a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren’t able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature.
The idea of a singularity comes from mathematics and physics, and especially from the concept of a black hole. Black holes are “singular” objects in space and time—places where normal physical laws break down. By analogy, the technological singularity is projected to cause runaway technological growth and massive changes to civilization. The rules by which humanity has operated for thousands of years will abruptly cease to hold. All bets are off.
It may be that the technological innovations are not so rapid-fire that they lead to a full-fledged singularity in which the world changes almost overnight. But this shouldn’t distract us from the larger point: we must come to grips with the likelihood that as we move further into the twenty-first century, humans may not be the most intelligent beings on the planet for that much longer. The greatest intelligences on the planet will be synthetic.
Indeed, I think we already see reasons synthetic intelligence will outperform us. Even now, microchips are a faster medium for calculation than neurons. As I write this chapter, the world’s fastest computer is the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee. Summit’s speed is 200 petaflops—that’s 200 million billion calculations per second. What Summit can do in the blink of an eye would take all the people on Earth doing a calculation every moment of every day for 305 days.2
Of course, speed is not everything. If the metric is not arithmetic calculations, your brain is far more computationally powerful than Summit. It is the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution (the estimated age of life on the planet) and has devoted its power to pattern recognition, rapid learning, and other practical challenges of survival. Individual neurons may be slow, but they are organized in a massively parallel fashion that still leaves modern AI systems in the dust. But AI has almost unlimited room for improvement. It may not be long before a supercomputer can be engineered to match or even exceed the intelligence of the human brain through reverse engineering the brain and improving on its algorithms or devising new algorithms that aren’t based on the brain’s workings at all.
In addition, an AI can be downloaded to multiple locations at once, is easily backed up and modified, and can survive under conditions that biological life struggles with, including interstellar travel. Our brains, powerful though they may be, are limited by cranial volume and metabolism; AI, in stark contrast, could extend its reach across the Internet and even set up a galaxy-wide “computronium”—a massive supercomputer that utilizes all the matter within a galaxy for its computations. In the long run, there is simply no contest. AI will be far more capable and durable than we are.
THE JETSONS FALLACY
None of this necessarily means that we humans will lose control of AI and doom ourselves to extinction, as some say. If we enhance our intelligence with AI technologies, perhaps we can keep abreast of it. Remember, AI will not just make for better robots and supercomputers. In the film Star Wars and the cartoon The Jetsons, humans are surrounded by sophisticated AIs, while themselves remaining unenhanced. The historian Michael Bess has called this The Jetsons Fallacy.3 In reality, AI will not just transform the world. It will transform us. Neural lace, the artificial hippocampus, brain chips to treat mood disorders—these are just some of the mind-altering technologies already under development. So, the Center for Mind Design is not that far-fetched. To the contrary, it is a plausible extrapolation of present technological trends.
Increasingly, the human brain is being regarded as something that can be hacked, like a computer. In the United States alone, there are already many projects developing brain-implant technologies to treat mental illness, motion-based impairments, strokes, dementia, autism, and more.4 The medical treatments of today will inevitably give rise to the enhancements of tomorrow. After all, people long to be smarter, more efficient, or simply have a heightened capacity to enjoy the world. To this end, AI companies like Google, Neuralink, and Kernel are developing ways to merge humans with machines. Within the next several decades, you may become a cyborg.
TRANSHUMANISM
The research is new, but it is worth emphasizing that the basic ideas have been around far longer, in the form of a philosophical and cultural movement known as transhumanism. Julian Huxley coined the term “transhumanism” in 1957, when he wrote that in the near future, “the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man.”5
Transhumanism holds that the human species is now in a comparatively early phase and that its very evolution will be altered by developing technologies. Future humans will be quite unlike their present-day incarnation in both physical and mental respects and will in fact resemble certain persons depicted in science fiction stories. They will have radically advanced intelligence, near immortality, deep friendships with AI creatures, and elective body characteristics. Transhumanists share the belief that such an outcome is very desirable, both for one’s own personal development and for the development of our species as a whole. (To further acquaint the reader with transhumanism, I’ve included the Transhumanist Declaration in the Appendix.)
Despite its science fiction–like flavor, many of the technological developments that transhumanism depicts seem quite possible: Indeed, the beginning stages of this radical alteration may well lie in certain technological developments that either are already here (if not generally available) or are accepted by many observers in the relevant scientific fields as being on their way.6 For instance, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute—a major transhumanist group—released a report on the technological requirements for uploading a mind to a machine.7 A U.S. Defense Department agency has funded a program, Synapse, that is trying to develop a computer that resembles the brain in form and function.8 Ray Kurzweil has even discussed the potential advantages of forming friendships, Her-style, with personalized AI systems.9 All around us, researchers are striving to turn science fiction into science fact.
You may be surprised to learn that I consider myself a transhumanist, but I do. I first learned of transhumanism while an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, when I joined the Extropians, an early transhumanist group. After poring through my boyfriend’s science fiction collection and reading the Extopian listserv, I was enthralled by the transhumanist vision of a technotopia on Earth. It is still my hope that emerging technologies will provide us with radical life extension, help end resource scarcity and disease, and even enhance our mental lives, should we wish to enhance.
A FEW WORDS OF WARNING
The challenge is how to get there from here in the face of radical uncertainty. No book written today could accurately predict the contours of mind-design space, and the underlying philosophical mysteries may not diminish as our scientific knowledge and technological prowess increase.
It pays to keep in mind two important ways in which the future is opaque. First, there are known unknowns. We cannot be certain when the use of quantum computing will be commonplace, for instance. We cannot tell whether and how certain AI-based technologies will be regulated, or whether existing AI safety measures will be effective. Nor are there easy, uncontroversial answers to the philosophical questions that we’ll be discussing in this book, I believe. But then there are the unknown unknowns—future events, such as political changes, technological innovations, or scientific breakthroughs that catch us entirely off guard.
In the next chapters, we turn to one of the great known unknowns: the puzzle of conscious experience. We will appreciate how this puzzle arises in the human case, and then we will ask: How can we even recognize consciousness in beings that may be vastly intellectually different from us and may even be made of different substrates? A good place to begin is by simply appreciating the depth of the issue.