Physics of the Future

by Michio Kaku

This is also evidence of a theory that says the brain is extremely plastic, not fixed, and constantly rewires itself as it learns new tasks and adjusts to new situations. Hence, the brain will be adaptable enough to accommodate any new appendage or sense organ. They may be attached to the brain at different locations, and the brain simply “learns” to control this new attachment. If so, then the brain might be viewed as a modular device, able to plug in and then control different appendages and sensors from different devices. This type of behavior might be expected if our brain is a neural network of some sort that makes new connections and neural pathways each time it learns a new task, whatever that task might be.

  Rodney Brooks writes, “Over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a cultural shift, in which we will adopt robotic technology, silicon, and steel into our bodies to improve what we can do and understand the world.” When Brooks analyzes the progress made at Brown University and Duke University in hooking up the brain directly to a computer or a mechanical arm, he concludes, “We may all be able to have a wireless Internet connection installed directly into our brains.”

  In the next stage, he sees merging silicon and living cells not just to cure the ailments of the body but to slowly enhance our capabilities. For example, if today’s cochlear and retinal implants can restore hearing and vision, tomorrow’s may also give us superhuman abilities. We would be able to hear sounds that only dogs can hear, or see UV, infrared, and X-rays.

  It might be possible to increase our intelligence as well. Brooks cites research in which extra layers of neurons were added to the brain of a rat at a critical time in its development. Remarkably, the cognitive abilities of these rats were increased. He envisions a time in the near future when the human brain’s intelligence might also be improved by a similar process. In a later chapter, we will see that biologists have already isolated a gene in rats that the media has dubbed the “smart mouse gene.” With the addition of this gene, enhanced mice have much greater memory and learning abilities.

  And by midcentury, Brooks envisions a time when seemingly fanciful enhancements of the body might be possible, giving us abilities far beyond those of the ordinary human. “Fifty years from now, we can expect to see radical alterations of human bodies through genetic modification.” When you also add electronic enhancements, “the human menagerie will expand in ways unimaginable to us today …. We will no longer find ourselves confined by Darwinian evolution,” he says.

  But anything, of course, can be taken too far. How far should we go in merging with our robot creations before some people rebel and find it repulsive?

  SURROGATES AND AVATARS

  One way in which to merge with robots, but without altering the human body, is to create surrogates or avatars. In the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, in the year 2017 scientists have discovered a way for people to control robots as if they were inside them, so that we can live our lives in perfect bodies. The robot responds to every command, and the person also sees and feels everything the robot sees and feels. While our mortal bodies decay and wither, we can control the motions of our robot surrogate, which has superhuman powers and is perfectly shaped. The movie gets complicated because people prefer to live out their lives as beautiful, handsome, and superpowerful robots, abandoning their rotting bodies, which are conveniently hidden away. The entire human race, in effect, willingly becomes robotic rather than face reality.

  In the movie Avatar, this is taken one step further. Instead of living our lives as perfect robots, in the year 2154 we might be able to live as alien beings. In the movie, our bodies are placed in pods, which then allow us to control the motion of specially cloned alien bodies. In a sense, we are given entirely new bodies to live on a new planet. In this way, we can better communicate with a native alien population on other planets. The movie plot thickens when one worker decides to abandon his humanity and live out his life as an alien, protecting them from mercenaries.

  These surrogates and avatars are not possible today but may be possible in the future.

  Recently, ASIMO has been programmed with a new idea: remote sensing. At Kyoto University, humans have been trained to control the mechanical motion of robots by using brain sensors. For example, by putting on an EEG helmet, students can move the arms and legs of ASIMO by simply thinking. So far, four distinct motions of the arms and head are possible. This may open the door to another realm of AI: robots controlled by the mind.

  Although this is a crude demonstration of mind over matter, in the coming decades it should be possible to increase the set of motions we can control in a robot, and also to get feedback, so we can “feel” with our new robotic hands. Goggles or contact lenses would allow us to see what the robots see, so we might eventually have full control over the body’s motions.

  This may also help alleviate the immigration problem for Japan. Workers may be located in different countries, yet control robots thousands of miles away by donning brain sensors. So not only can the Internet carry the thoughts of white-collar workers, it might also carry the thoughts of blue-collar workers and translate them into physical motion. This might mean that robots will become an integral part of any nation grappling with exploding health costs and a shortage of workers.

  Controlling robots by remote sensing may also have applications elsewhere. In any dangerous environment (for example, underwater, near high-voltage lines, in fires), robots controlled by human thoughts may be used in rescue missions. Or undersea robots may be connected directly to humans, so that humans can control many swimming robots by thoughts alone. Since the surrogate would have superpowers, it would be able to chase criminals (unless the criminals also have superpowered surrogates). One would have all the advantages of merging with robots without changing our bodies at all.

  Such an arrangement might actually prove useful for space exploration, when we have to manage a permanent moon base. Our surrogates may perform all the dangerous tasks of maintaining the moon base, while the astronauts are safely back on earth. The astronauts would have the superstrength and superpowers of the robots while exploring a hazardous alien landscape. (This would not work if the astronauts are on the earth controlling surrogates on Mars, however, since radio signals take up to 40 minutes to go from the earth to Mars and back. But it would work if the astronauts were sitting safely in a permanent base on Mars while the surrogates went out and performed dangerous tasks on the Martian surface.)

  HOW FAR THE MERGER WITH ROBOTS?

  Robot pioneer Hans Moravec takes this several steps further and imagines an extreme version of this: we become the very robots that we have built. He explained to me how we might merge with our robot creations by undergoing a brain operation that replaces each neuron of our brain with a transistor inside a robot. The operation starts when we lie beside a robot body without a brain. A robotic surgeon takes every cluster of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull. As each cluster of neurons is duplicated in the robot, it is discarded. We are fully conscious as this delicate operation takes place. Part of our brain is inside our old body, but the other part is now made of transistors inside our new robot body. After the operation is over, our brain has been entirely transferred into the body of a robot. Not only do we have a robotic body, we have also the benefits of a robot: immortality in superhuman bodies that are perfect in appearance. This will not be possible in the twenty-first century, but becomes an option in the twenty-second.

  In the ultimate scenario, we discard our clumsy bodies entirely and eventually evolve into pure software programs that encode our personalities. We “download” our entire personalities into a computer. If someone presses a button with your name on it, then the computer behaves as if you are inside its memory, since it has encoded all your personality quirks inside its circuits. We become immortal, but spend our time trapped inside a computer, interacting with other “people” (that is, other software programs
) in some gigantic cyberspace/virtual reality. Our bodily existence will be discarded, replaced by the motion of electrons in this gigantic computer. In this picture, our ultimate destiny is to wind up as lines of code in this vast computer program, with all the apparent sensations of physical bodies dancing in a virtual paradise. We will share deep thoughts with other lines of computer code, living out this grand illusion. We have great, heroic exploits conquering new worlds, oblivious to the fact that we are just electrons dancing inside some computer. Until, of course, someone hits the off button.

  But one problem with pushing these scenarios too far is the Cave Man Principle. As we mentioned earlier, the architecture of our brains is that of a primitive hunter-gatherer who emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago. Our deepest desires, our appetites, our wants were all forged in the grasslands of Africa as we evaded predators, hunted for game, foraged in the forests, looked for mates, and entertained ourselves at the campfire.

  One of our prime directives, buried deep in the fabric of our thoughts, is to look good, especially to the opposite sex and our peers. An enormous fraction of our disposable income, after entertainment, is devoted to our appearance. That is why we have had the explosive growth in plastic surgery, Botox, grooming products, sophisticated clothing, as well as learning new dance steps, muscle building, buying the latest music, and keeping fit. If you add all this up, it becomes a huge portion of consumer spending, which in turn generates a large fraction of the U.S. economy.

  This means that, even with the ability to create perfect bodies that are nearly immortal, we will probably resist the desire for robotic bodies if we look like a clumsy robot with implants dangling out of our heads. No one wants to look like a refugee from a science fiction movie. If we have enhanced bodies, they must make us attractive to the opposite sex and enhance our reputation among our peers, or we will reject them. What teenager wants to be enhanced but look uncool?

  Some science fiction writers have relished the idea that we will all become detached from our bodies and exist as immortal beings of pure intelligence living inside some computer, contemplating deep thoughts. But who would want to live like that? Perhaps our descendants will not want to solve differential equations describing a black hole. In the future, people may want to spend more time listening to rock music the old-fashioned way than calculate the motions of subatomic particles while living inside a computer.

  Greg Stock of UCLA goes further and finds there are few advantages to having our brains hooked up to a supercomputer. He said, “When I try to think of what I might gain by having a working link between my brain and a supercomputer, I am stymied if I insist on two criteria: that the benefits could not be as easily achieved through some other, noninvasive procedure, and that the benefits must be worth the discomforts of brain surgery.”

  So although there are many possible options for the future, I personally believe that the most likely path is that we will build robots to be benevolent and friendly, enhance our own abilities to a degree, but follow the Cave Man Principle. We will embrace the idea of temporarily living the life of a superrobot via surrogates but will be resistant to the idea of permanently living out our lives inside a computer or altering our body until it becomes unrecognizable.

  ROADBLOCKS TO THE SINGULARITY

  No one knows when robots may become as smart as humans. But personally, I would put the date close to the end of the century for several reasons.

  First, the dazzling advances in computer technology have been due to Moore’s law. These advances will begin to slow down and might even stop around 2020–25, so it is not clear if we can reliably calculate the speed of computers beyond that. (See Chapter 4 for more on the post-silicon era.) In this book, I have assumed that computer power will continue to grow, but at a slower rate.

  Second, even if a computer can calculate at fantastic speeds like 1016 calculations per second, this does not necessarily mean that it is smarter than us. For example, Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing machine, could analyze 200 million positions per second, beating the world champion. But Deep Blue, for all its speed and raw computing power, cannot do anything else. True intelligence, we learned, is much more than calculating chess positions.

  For example, autistic savants can perform miraculous feats of memorization and calculation. But they have difficulty tying their shoelaces, getting a job, or functioning in society. The late Kim Peek, who was so remarkable that the movie Rain Man was based on his extraordinary life, memorized every word in 12,000 books and could perform calculations that only a computer could check. Yet he had an IQ of 73, had difficulty holding a conversation, and needed constant help to survive. Without his father’s assistance, he was largely helpless. In other words, the superfast computers of the future will be like autistic savants, able to memorize vast amounts of information, but not much more, unable to survive in the real world on their own.

  Even if computers begin to match the computing speed of the brain, they will still lack the necessary software and programming to make everything work. Matching the computing speed of the brain is just the humble beginning.

  Third, even if intelligent robots are possible, it is not clear if a robot can make a copy of itself that is smarter than the original. The mathematics behind self-replicating robots was first developed by the mathematician John von Neumann, who invented game theory and helped to develop the electronic computer. He pioneered the question of determining the minimum number of assumptions before a machine could create a copy of itself. However, he never addressed the question of whether a robot can make a copy of itself that is smarter than it. In fact, the very definition of “smart” is problematic, since there is no universally accepted definition of “smart.”

  Certainly, a robot might be able to create a copy of itself with more memory and processing ability by simply upgrading and adding more chips. But does this mean the copy is smarter, or just faster? For example, an adding machine is millions of times faster than a human, with much more memory and processing speed, but it is certainly not smarter. So intelligence is more than just memory and speed.

  Fourth, although hardware may progress exponentially, software may not. While hardware has grown by the ability to etch smaller and smaller transistors onto a wafer, software is totally different; it requires a human to sit down with a pencil and paper and write code. That is the bottleneck: the human.

  Software, like all human creative activity, progresses in fits and starts, with brilliant insights and long stretches of drudgery and stagnation. Unlike simply etching more transistors onto silicon, which has grown like clockwork, software depends on the unpredictable nature of human creativity and whim. Therefore all predictions of a steady, exponential growth in computer power have to be qualified. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the weakest link is software and programming done by humans.

  Engineering progress often grows exponentially, especially when it is a simple matter of achieving greater efficiency, such as etching more and more transistors onto a silicon wafer. But when it comes to basic research, which requires luck, skill, and unexpected strokes of genius, progress is more like “punctuated equilibrium,” with long stretches of time when not much happens, with sudden breakthroughs that change the entire terrain. If we look at the history of basic research, from Newton to Einstein to the present day, we see that punctuated equilibrium more accurately describes the way in which progress is made.

  Fifth, as we have seen in the research for reverse engineering the brain, the staggering cost and sheer size of the project will probably delay it into the middle of this century. And then making sense of all this data may take many more decades, pushing the final reverse engineering of the brain to late in this century.

  Sixth, there probably won’t be a “big bang,” when machines suddenly become conscious. As before, if we define consciousness as including the ability to make plans for the future by running simulations of the future, then there is a spectrum of consciousness. Machin
es will slowly climb up this scale, giving us plenty of time to prepare. This will happen toward the end of this century, I believe, so there is ample time to discuss various options available to us. Also, consciousness in machines will probably have its own peculiarities. So a form of “silicon consciousness” rather than pure human consciousness will develop first.

  But this raises another question. Although there are mechanical ways to enhance our bodies, there are also biological ways. In fact, the whole thrust of evolution is the selection of better genes, so why not shortcut millions of years of evolution and take control of our genetic destiny?

  No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

  —JAMES WATSON, NOBEL LAUREATE

  I don’t really think our bodies are going to have any secrets left within this century. And so, anything that we can manage to think about will probably have a reality.

  —DAVID BALTIMORE, NOBEL LAUREATE

  I don’t think the time is quite right, but it’s close. I’m afraid, unfortunately, that I’m in the last generation to die.

  —GERALD SUSSMAN

  The gods of mythology possessed the ultimate power: the power over life and death, the ability to heal the sick and prolong life. Foremost in our prayers to the gods was deliverance from disease and illness.

  In Greek and Roman mythology, there is the tale of Eos, the beautiful goddess of the dawn. One day, she fell deeply in love with a handsome mortal, Tithonus. She had a perfect body and was immortal, but Tithonus would eventually age, wither away, and perish. Determined to save her lover from this dismal fate, she beseeched Zeus, the father of the gods, to grant Tithonus the gift of immortality so that they could spend eternity together. Taking pity on these lovers, he granted Eos her wish.