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I want robot spider legs.
Some pretty scary stuff, sounds like they are talking about turning us into the freaking Borg!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/15/bio.tech/index.html
LONDON, England (CNN) -- A group of experts from around the world will Thursday hold a first of its kind conference on global catastrophic risks.
Some experts say humans will merge with machines before the end of this century.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on earth as we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of sapiens.
"Any en y which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Ins ute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."
Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker of transhumanism -- a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be used to make the very act of living better.
"We want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that," Bostrom told CNN.
Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate a coming era where biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being.
The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans.
"We will begin to use science and technology not just to manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as well," Bostrom told CNN. "The changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution."
Bostrom declined to try to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."
Other experts are already getting ready for what they say could be a radical transformation of the human race in as little as two decades.
"This will happen faster than people realize," said Dr. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who calculates technology trends using what he calls the law of accelerating returns, a mathematical concept that measures the exponential growth of technological evolution.
In the 1980s Kurzweil predicted that a tiny handheld device would be invented sometime early in the 21st century allowing blind people to read do ents from anywhere at anytime -- earlier this year such a device was publicly unveiled. He also anticipated the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s.
Now Kurzweil is predicting the impending arrival of something called the Singularity, which he defines in his book on the subject as "the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots."
"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality," he writes.
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Singularity will approach at an accelerating rate as human-created technologies become exponentially smaller and increasingly powerful and as fields such as biology and medicine are understood more and more in terms of information processes that can be simulated with computers.
By the 2030s, Kurzweil tells CNN, humans will become more non-biological than biological, capable of uploading our minds onto the Internet, living in various virtual worlds and even avoiding aging and evading death.
In the 2040s, Kurzweil predicts non-biological intelligence will be billions of times better than the biological intelligence humans have today, possibly rendering our present brains as obsolete.
"Our brains are a million times slower than electronics," said Kurzweil. "We will increasingly become software en ies if you go out enough decades."
This movement towards the merger of man and machine, according to Kurzweil, is already starting to happen and is most visible in the field of biotechnology.
As scientists gain deeper insights into the genetic processes that underlie life, they are able to effectively reprogram human biology through the development of new forms of gene therapies and medications capable of turning on or off enzymes and RNA interference, or gene silencing.
"Biology and health and medicine used to be hit or miss," said Kurzweil. "It wasn't based on any coherent theory about how it works."
The emerging biotechnology revolution will lead to at least a thousand new drugs that could do anything from slow down the process of aging to reverse the onset of diseases, like heart disease and cancer, Kurzweil said.
By 2020, Kurzweil predicts a second revolution in the area of nanotechnology. According to his calculations, it is already showing signs of exponential growth as scientists begin test first generation nanobots that can cure Type 1 diabetes in rats or heal spinal cord injuries in mice.
One scientist is developing something called a respirocyte -- a robotic red blood cell that, if injected into the bloodstream, would allow humans to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for hours at a time.
Other researchers are developing nanoparticles that can locate tumors and one day possibly even eradicate them.
And some Parkinson's patients now have pea-sized computers implanted in their brains that replace neurons destroyed by the disease -- new software can be downloaded to the mini computers from outside the human body.
"Nanotechnology will not just be used to reprogram but to transcend biology and go beyond its limitations by merging with non-biological systems," Kurzweil told CNN. "If we rebuild biological systems with nanotechnology, we can go beyond its limits."
The final revolution leading to the advent of Singularity will be the creation of artificial intelligence, or superintelligence, which, according to Kurzweil, could be capable of solving many of our biggest threats, like environmental destruction, poverty and disease.
"A more intelligent process will inherently outcompete one that is less intelligent, making intelligence the most powerful force in the universe," writes Kurzweil.
Yet the invention of so many high-powered technologies and the possibility of merging these new technologies with humans may pose both peril and promise for the future of mankind.
"I think there are grave dangers," said Kurzweil. "Technology has always been a double-edged sword."
I want robot spider legs.
As long as we don't end up like this...
really not that scary
"Other experts are already getting ready for what they say could be a radical transformation of the human race in as little as two decades."
Technological changes that drastic don't happen over a period of 2 decades. The "predictions" of these scientists are nothing more than fantasy at this point.
Does not approve.
Domo arigato Mr. Roboto
Pacemakers, people.
The future is now.
Kurzweil talks about what he calls the law of accelerating returns. Basically the rate of technological increase grows exponentially. Think about it this way, it took us hundreds of years to go from the stone age to the iron age, yet it took less than 50 years from the first airplane to the first space flight. A year today sees much more technological growth than it did 10 years ago and ten years from now it will see exponentially more.
Anyone who read the thread on other planets a few weeks ago saw my posts in there on this very subject trumpeting Kurzweil. The dude has some radical ideas of what is going to happen and he's doing a decent job with his "predictions" so far.In the 1980s Kurzweil predicted that a tiny handheld device would be invented sometime early in the 21st century allowing blind people to read do ents from anywhere at anytime -- earlier this year such a device was publicly unveiled. He also anticipated the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s.
Gonna be an interesting time to be alive.
Ya, Im particularly interested in the "cheat death" part....
There are many already walking around with non human parts so big deal.
TPark has been working on this project for years. He has been ing his vacuum cleaner since he was 16.
good luck figuring out the complete picture of neuroscience.
that is a disturbing image.TPark has been working on this project for years. He has been ing his vacuum cleaner since he was 16.
Are you saying we'll never know exactly how the brain works?
nope, IMO. There has been advances and there is hope, but the brain is something that can't be figured out (in the big picture) by science. we can figure out what neuron pattern does this, or what neurons do what, or what part of the brain lights up when so and so happens, but we will never figure out why and how a physical process gives rise to complex en ies such as consciousness for example.
I could take out the brain and insert tons of other items that people in the past have said we'd never figure out. I think that's a pretty foolish statement to make.
What in particular do you think is so complex about the brain that we'll never figure out? Are you just thinking this because we can't figure it out NOW? Do you know of any neuro-scientists who would agree with your point of view?
I can say with all certainty that no one will ever figure out the female brain.
I've been ready for this since the first time I played Deus Ex.
"I've got implants up to my eyeballs"
Gotta watch out for those crazed templars though.
The real issues as far as time is concerned are discovery and implementation...
Show me the exponential growth from 1990 to 2010 compared to the growth from 1900 to 1920.
Do some research on military equipment. You'll find that the military is in the process of implementing technology discovered in the early 90's. Discovery is one thing, but implementation is another.
Kurzweil is a wishful thinker who would like some funding.
You will all be assimilated.
Uh, take one look at microprocessor development? The speed of PCs? Computer development in general? The CPU you have in your cell phone is now EXPONENTIALLY faster than the one we had in major computers in 1990.
Even if I want to use your military equation they are far more advanced today than they were even 5 years ago - especially when you talk about their communications and computer equipment. The fact they are slow isn't a knock on how fast our technology develops but the bureaucracy that has to do with anything in the government. You also don't know what their best equipment is capable of.
As for Kurzweil, I'm fairly certain he's not asking for funding from anyone considering his inventions and books probably have him living quite well.
I just want to get something straight though: You ARE arguing that technology today improves at the same rate it did at the turn of the 20th century? Is that correct?
"They say we're going to become machines."
"SILLY HUMANS. YOUR SCIENCE IS DUMB."
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