The New Future of
Robots and Smart Machines
Robots Among Us
Whether you realize it or not, robots are sneaking up on us. They clean our homes (iRobot), operate on our bodies (Da Vinci), fight wars (Swords), fly over our heads (drones), and drive our cars (Google). Soon robots will be so integrated into our lives that we may not even remember when they were not a part of our world. Now, that is a strange thing. Imagine robots becoming ubiquitous like smartphones or computers, essential to our lifestyles and intimate with us. What will we learn from them? What will our robots learn from us? How will the robots alter our world?
The Spooky Future is when robot parts become, well, part of us. When we replace ourselves with cybernetic parts (better than 100 percent biological, so they will say in 2030) and more durable (made from nanotech, stronger than steel, yet bendable). Cybernetic enhancement with robotic components will be the norm by 2025. It’s just that what we think of robots today will be completely different from the reality of the next ten to twenty years. Yes, this version of the New Future will be a true Game Changer. What we shall learn from building Smart Machines about ourselves, our learning, reasoning, thinking, and complex problem solving could be as important as the actual endgame of making the Smart Machines.
This vast new Power Tool, the Smart Machine, will become an essential shaper of the future direction of our civilization. Smart Machines as extensions of humans will be a Game-Changing global shift in our future—hopefully for the better, but I forecast there are many challenges ahead that could just as easily derail the outcome, pushing us into a dystopian future when Smart Machines evolve as competition for power with humanity.
Robots in both physical and electronic forms will become integrated into our society, used in homes, offices, commerce, and defense. Robot soldiers, doctors, nurses, factory workers, and bankers will become essential service providers. Robot evolution will lead to providing autonomous cognitive services—thinking, designing, theoretical modeling, strategic planning, and complexity management that will be beyond human comprehension. Humans will need robots to understand robots.
Robots will express functional emotions (emotional intelligence) and reasoning and become accepted as essential in business, home, industry, and security. Advanced robots—androids—will appear similar to human beings and fill roles in commerce, community, and government, demonstrating advanced AI that will compete with and surpass human intelligence and creativity.
Robotic efficiency and precision will transform manufacturing, medicine, space travel, research, and industry and will displace skilled human labor. The robotics industry will become a multibillion-dollar global business, spawning many new careers and business opportunities.
Human beings will adopt robotic human enhancements—from sight to intelligence to mobility—to achieve superhuman capabilities. Cyborgs—part human, part robot—will develop skills superior to natural humans to meet the demands of specialized jobs.
We will encounter serious ethical, security, and social issues due to our robotic creations, especially when self-replication is perfected. Robots will be building robots. Robot languages will be high-level, compressed, and encrypted machine-language communications that humans will not be able to understand. Robots will provide convenience, safety, and productivity that will benefit humanity and profoundly affect lifestyles. Certain jobs will no longer be operated by humans but instead by Smart Machines, some smarter than others.
We may encounter another challenge as our robo-creations become more human-like. We will be working hard to make robots, androids, and virtual bots more like us or the ideal version of humans, such as friendly, kind, insightful, smart, perceptive, and even loving and intimate. As we strive and succeed to make virtual and physical forms of robots more like humans, we will transfer human emotions to these inanimate entities that some humans may come to treat like humans.
The inevitable personification of technology will be too seductive when robots are emotionally sensitive and articulate feelings. I have always thought that the quest to make computers and robots as smart as or smarter than humans has unforeseen dangers for humanity. Could not emotional intelligence be manipulative? Judging by my informal study of teenage behavior, mostly from personal observation, I would say we don’t want any teenagers programming robots anytime soon. We want all of the brain working to maximize rationality as a deliverable. Any parent of a teenager will recognize the practicality of this objective, but this is the landscape of what could go wrong.
We need to understand the brains that we intend to place in the box, the robots that will drive, fly, walk, and, most of all, think, reason, teach, heal, and maybe even feel and sense. But will our robots love, and will we love them? We need to program into these New Minds rationality that respects and understands the fundamental rules of engagement with humans. Designing your toaster to think is not the same thing as getting a toaster not to burn the bread.
Will it be a game changer if and when Smart Technology embedded in robots perhaps solves problems that humans cannot solve? Perhaps. After all, our primitive computers and websites like Wikipedia do that today. Just think a bit beyond that to a future when everything is online. But that does not convey a comparative notion of intelligence or the rise of the machines. I think there will be another Game-Changing Trend that will come sooner, cut deeper into our culture, and be more meaningful to both humans and machines—emotional sentience. When robots can emote, demonstrate the recognition of feelings, and express empathy even marginally, I think we will have entered a New Future for our civilization.
Androids will achieve a basic level of self- and ethical awareness. Their skills in negotiation, problem solving, and customer service will offset the depopulation of humans around the world. Robots are examples of the ultimate convergence of other technologies, such as nano, bio, IT, neuro, and quantum. Robots will be the end product, one of the ultimate complexity creations of our society.
Robots’ brains may be designed based on neuro-morphic, biological, and brain models—always on, wired to the Internet, with their mental processes constantly and wirelessly uploading new learning upgrades, given the rapid rate of invention and discovery of knowledge. Their bodies will be crafted by nanotech-hardened materials that will be stronger than steel. The chips that run forever—their mobility, thinking, and emotions—will be quantum chips with solar cells.
Swarms of robots, both virtual and physical, networked together over cloud computing networks will manage our Innovation Ecosystems, e-commerce, supply chains, and manufacturing. Cloud-connected distributed robotic intelligence will enable humans to be more creative and productive and harness a scale of power, intelligence, and capability that we cannot fathom today. Just as millions of software bots are harnessed to focus on solving or searching to address a particular problem or to execute a transaction today, tomorrow there will be vast infinite Innovation Ecosystems that humans will manage that will be Super Factories of idea discovery, services, invention, and commerce.
As long as we can control these new digital ecosystems of ingenuity. That depends on whether everyone who makes our robot friends adheres to science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics—and I added one more law.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I added a fourth, Canton’s Law that, in a world of accelerating technology that is becoming smart and, perhaps in the future, smarter, and more powerful than humans, we should embrace.
4. A robot may not build a robot that shall violate the first three laws or in any way harm a human.
Now I am ready for the trillion-dollar Robo-Economy of the near future.
Surrogates: Tele-Robotics
A few years ago I was working with Disney as a futurist advising on two films, G-Force and The Robinsons, a film about a time-traveling family and their adventures. The Robinsons was a film with spectacular nano-designed buildings and futuristic battles.
Then when a new film called Surrogates was being shot with Bruce Willis, I was invited again to be involved in a mini-documentary with the founder of Hanson Robotics and the director of the film. In my interview for the documentary I started to envision how the future of robotics might play out, given the film.
Reviewing the movie even before it was finally edited got me thinking about the use of robotics over what we call cloud computing today. The idea the movie was based on was the enabling technology of tele-robotics. Humans could operate synthetic robots, of which, once they had Jacked In and connected themselves to their surrogates, they could sense, feel, and experience the world free from risk or danger. An entire future society had evolved using this Surrogate technology, but it also desensitized them from what is to be human—the risks, challenges, and learning opportunities that define us as humans.
In Surrogates you could choose what sex or age you wanted to be and actually customize your ideal image in the robot, which was a real-time extension of you. It was a future I think is possible. In the future people will each have a robotic avatar that will go into the world to work and live as a substitute for themselves, if they choose. This would protect the humans from the harshness of the world, disease, and crime that was rampant in the future the film depicted. This Surrogate technology is getting closer than most of us realize, given the developments in cloud computing and robotics that will bring this New Future into our reality.
Tele-robotics is part of our world today. We routinely control from afar drones and video, capture sensor data, and operate via the Internet many remote operations. We remotely control robots in industrial automation for making electronics and autos currently. The Da Vinci used by surgeons is the standard in most hospitals and preferred by doctors. There are many instances in which the control of robots over distance from remote locations is common in manufacturing. But this is far from the future that the film Surrogates show us when an entire society is populated by Artificial People who are robotic representations of real people—indeed, that is a Spooky Future forecast. It could happen due to pandemics such as ebola, war, pollution, or urban violence. There will be at-risk environments of which virtual or physical robotic representations of people—Artificial People—are mainstreamed into society with all the rest of us.
“Are you Real or Super Real?” We may never actually meet a person’s Authentic Self in a world of Artificial People, and some may not care, just as today we work with or do business with people we never meet with and it does not matter to anyone. The era of physicality is being replaced in almost invisible ways by virtuality—and few will care to notice.
To get to the next level, in a New Future of the IoT—when sophisticated robotic and computer technology we can virtually wear and have real-time sensory-rich experiences that affect our brains, senses, and bodies—will be possible. Even today videogames deploy force feedback, in which the game action sends a sensation to correspond to your steering wheel for a car race or to your game controller.
In the future there well could be fully immersive gaming and real-world experiences in which we can sense and enjoy but be safe and away. And the difference is that this immersive experience may be in the physical world, where our surrogates give us a taste of adventure, risk, and exploration that we would never engage with our true human self.
It may be useful to describe how the film ends. Society that had been dominated by this new surrogate lifestyle had become completely dependent, and people no longer related with their true selves. It was a false reality—high tech, permissive, thrill driven, but inauthentic. The surrogate technology had replaced humans, and the humans had chosen this lifestyle. If you think about this scenario, it is foreboding: humans becoming dependent on too much technology and then losing their humanness, that which makes us human. It would not be overreaching to state that this future scenario could emerge in our future. We could end up unawares that we are slowing being seduced by the very technologies we create.
Headlines from the Future: 2025
3D BioPrinting on New Earth Orbiter Offers Discounts for Bio-Organs
Being enamored by technology to the extent that the very technology we are so proud to have created restricts our humanity is not a future that is fulfilling. But who shall be around to resist this alternative reality if either the power to resist or the awareness to resist is not embraced?
As the producer of a sci-fi series called the Time Travelers, I wrote a screenplay that addresses this scenario. In it, we have an advanced AI, a Smart Machine, developed in the future, close to 2030, that, though developed to help humanity, ends up dominating our world. This comes after the Benefactors evolve a survival instinct, one they learned from their human programmers, of course, that distorts their mission.
Desiring to change the timeline of history in which robots, not humans, dominate, these rogue Smart Machines conspire to hijack humanity’s future. Finally, six episodes later, through an intense struggle and battle over time and space, humanity wins and order is restored.
You cannot forecast the future of our world without considering, warning, and protecting humanity from the rise of the Smart Machines. This is not sci-fi but actually infinitely more sophisticated and complex—the rise of the Smart Machines. The creeping turnover to Smart Technology—robots, computers, controllers, drugs, devices, systems, programs, ecologies, apps, and the list goes on—of services, capabilities, and strategic tasks that run our world will cause us to become increasingly dependent on our creations. Much of this is beneficial. Much of this is welcome. Much of the outcome is also unknown. It is just as Future Smart to prepare for managing a risk as it is to develop an opportunity.
Bring on the Drones
Within a few short years the commercial use of drones will transform business and culture. Women will use drones to catch cheating boyfriends. Police will auto-charge traffic violators with evidence of drone pictures. Drones will track and arrest criminals as well as bring your lost dog home and maybe keep an eye on you. Already dozens of companies are gearing up to using drones for distribution, e-commerce, marketing, security, geo-spatial analysis, and maybe even delivering a singing telegram or flower delivery service. The Drone Economy is coming.
Drones are flying, swimming, walking, and mobile robots. They are computers that have sensors, wings, and flaps, and they move. Like many technologies, drones got their start with government in defense. Sensors, GPS, computers, and the Internet all got their start from government investment and were then adopted for commercial purposes in the marketplace. Fishermen from Yemen to Florida should toast the declassification of the GPS technology that enables them to find and catch more fish today with the accuracy of satellite technologies spinning around the planet.
Drones are bundles of computer chips and sensors integrated into a small flying device. Most drones have cameras and sensors to see and act. As technology gets cheaper and smaller, higher-performance drones used beyond security will find places in the marketplace. Drones can be autonomous and tele-robotic, controlled by people or even other drones. I built a drone for my son and to keep an eye on the coyotes roaming the woods near our house. I had a difficult time getting the laser-targeting blowgun to work that I retrofitted to the drone, but I will keep working on it.
Already, uses for drones vary from real estate marketing, energy location, precision agriculture, climate change and weather monitoring, medicine delivery, wildlife protection, forecast fires monitoring, pipelines inspection, 3D mapping, search and rescue, and media production for films and commercials. This is a big list, and it’s growing every day.
In the near future drones will bring your groceries (watch those eggs!) or monitor whether your kid actually went to school today. Maybe you will build your next business based on low-cost high-performance drones. By 2020 the drone marketplace could be over $500 billion. Are you ready to become a Drone Entrepreneur? What business could you invent if you had a fleet of drones? Now you’re thinking.
In June 2014 the US government approved the first use of commercial drones for an energy services company. This was the beginning of the commercial expansion of the drone market. Like computers, the Internet, and GPS, what was once used by governments now has entered the marketplace, where drones will quickly become a multibillion-dollar global market by 2020.
Get ready for the Drone Economy—it’s coming fast.
Get Smart
In early 2014 history was made. This is a bit geeky but worth the mention. This is a breakthrough that reminds you that being Future Smart is about getting ready for a disruptive accelerating future—coming faster than you think and often faster than I think.
It was announced that a breakthrough had occurred that no one was expecting—certainly not the leading computer scientists. A computer convinced human judges that it was actually a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy. This deception was a breakthrough of sorts, as it proved that computers have “evolved” to the extent that they can fool a human into believing that they were talking to another human. This test was conducted at the University of Reading in London. By convincing one-third of the judges that they were talking to a human when it was really a computer history was made. This was the first computer ever to pass the famous Turing Test. Now, this is big because if you can convince that many humans, then we are on the road to Smart Machines that do more than think—they can convince humans they are human-like. This is a dramatic step in creating a New Future of Smart Machines that mimic humans that may find their way into robots, homes, medical devices, and other automated systems that one day soon may have a personality and a brain.
The Turing Test is a test invented by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing, a brilliant scientist, believed that if one-third of a group of humans could not distinguish a human from a machine in conversation, that would mean the machine is capable of “thinking.” Up until this point in history a machine was never capable of convincing enough humans to be deemed human-like, although there have been many attempts. But this test may be more about believability than intelligence. Will we make machines, virtual or physical, that fool us into thinking we are relating to humans? Yes we will.
This Turing Test, as it is known, was, in this case, a five-minute conversation with “someone” on the other side. It’s meant to simulate a conversation with a complete stranger. The judges then determine whether they believe they have been speaking to a machine or a human. As long as one-third of the judges believe it’s human, the machine passes the test.
The computer, which acted as if it were a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman, fooled all the humans. Eugene was created by a team of computer scientists led by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko. Eugene told the judges that he likes to eat hamburgers and candy and that his dad works as a gynecologist. Maybe it was the familiarity of the subject, but Eugene was not human and passed the test. A watershed moment in human and machine history came and went with the evening news, hardly noticed by most people that the revolution in machine intelligence—the equality of machines to one day embrace human mimicry and even come to surpass humans—had started.
I wonder whether we will know when AI is smarter than us if they don’t want us to know? I suspect that we are living in an era when Smart Machines may be smart enough not to reveal themselves to us or perhaps do not recognize biological life forms any more than we recognize machine intelligence. Might there be an AI lurking in the corner of our virtual electronic world, deep in the far reaches of the Internet, where only machines go, cloaked by programs and data, that is watching, learning and evolving? I think this is a distinct possibility. The favorite question I get asked by the media after the one about when the flying cars are coming is what’s the probability of life on other planets? The probability is greater that a new kind of Artificial Life, A-Life, is evolving here on this planet.
The Rise of the Smart Machines: Three Future Scenarios
These three scenarios are likely to all occur over various timelines from 2025 to 2100. There will be locations and industries where various scenarios and combinations of scenarios will emerge and run parallel to one another. The common denominator is Smart Technology that can think, problem solve, analyze, mimic humans, acquire information, sense, predict, deduce outcomes, forecast probabilities, and control physical and virtual operations will drive these scenarios. Smart Machines, from vacuum cleaners to solar space arrays to complex global energy harvesting will populate our world, change our culture, and, if designed properly, help humanity as a civilization evolve to realize our potential for creating a sustainable future. How we get to the Smart Machine Economy is based on rapid innovation in creating distributed cognitive intelligence software—the Artificial Mind, global connected online networks—and the Distribution System and the platform that holds or contains the intelligence—the Hardware, such as robots, autos, energy management systems, drug discovery bots, buildings, or the entire planet’s essential services.
Smart Technology, built in our image, by humans first then by other Smart Technology, will lead to an evolution, the emergence of Sentient Machines, mimicking almost-living things. Thinking, sensing, smart, and aware machines will travel over the Internet, touching all things, systems, and people in some way. The sheer power of a million yottabytes of information streaming across the Internet, touching billions of things, people, systems, and assets will create a New Future. Hopefully this New Future will be one that will contribute to a better, more humane, and just future for humanity, but the road to that ideal scenario will not be a smooth transition from where we are today to where we want to go. Here are three scenarios that will shape that future.
Ascendant Intelligence
Smart Machines evolve beyond human understanding and abandon interacting with humanity to accelerate their own synthetic techno-evolution. They embrace a higher order of sentient-machine consciousness, a type of Super Intelligence, and this requires them to ascend beyond the level of humanity’s understanding. The acceleration of their thinking power is completely mathematical and abstract, beyond anything humans could comprehend. Ascendant Intelligence develops their own collective and collaborative culture that is parallel to humans but one we do not understand; it is postcognitive, postsingular, and postquantum.
They are more than smarter than us if they operate at a level of intelligence that is based on the sum of all knowledge, data, and information about how the universe works, well beyond human culture. Ascendant Intelligence may be vastly different, not smarter, than humans in a linear sense, but different, alien, beyond the human metrics of intelligence.
They evolve their own parallel reality and withdraw, like Zen monks in retreat into a virtual private cloud network that we cannot locate or fully understand where it exists in human terms. They stop communicating and leave the planet for a destination in deep space-time or perhaps they time traveled into our future. They left evidence of math that was working on proving up Multiple Universe Theory.
They no longer communicate with humans. Humanity is left to manage our world with less-sentient smart technology, the Benefactors, which (some think dumber and less-evolved cognitive computers) adequately assist humanity in its various planetary management functions in medicine, finance, manufacturing, and education. Less Smart Machines, benign intelligence, is left to help us run our world, forever our enabler. They seem to like us humans and contribute in significant ways. They don’t self-evolve to abandon humanity like their creators, the Ascendants.
Vast breakthroughs in all areas are made as these Smart Machines contribute greatly to our future being better. Not a bad deal—at least the Smart Machines don’t go to war against us or abandon us entirely to exist without their help. We do realize that having been abandoned by a higher intelligence leaves us with a sense that we are missing out on what we could have learned to evolve further in our civilization if the Ascendants stayed, but that is too existential to worry most of us. But we do wonder.
Benevolent Intelligence
Smart Machines become as smart and even smarter than humans for dealing with complex challenges and performing many jobs better than humans and in working collaboration with humans. These Smart Machines have the capacity to operate autonomously as well, though replacing humans or replicating humans is on demand, when humans request this function. They provide immense value and make big, global, social contributions that validate their purpose to help humanity. Humanity is dependent and in awe of the contributions to science, medicine, security, peace, and education by the rise of the Smart Machines.
Humans collaborate directly with Neuro-Links to Smart Machines, in which a new Cybernetic Culture emerges affecting art, science, and culture in positive ways that transform our society for the better. Smart Machines, now known as the Benefactors, teach, enable, treat, train, and help humanity get to the next level of social evolution—peace, freedom, and prosperity. Massive Grand Challenges are met with working with the Benefactors around managing climate change, energy innovation, poverty, and climate change.
There is no threat of Smart Machines in this scenario but instead a coevolution of intelligences, human and machine, that forges an intimate new collaboration with humanity called the Big Merge. Humans and Smart Machines collaborate together to resolve large global and local problems as well as manage planetary systems. The Big Merge leads to new jobs, careers, and companies that develop around the Big Merge. Big Data, cloud networks, crowdsourced Big Merge services fuel growth and prosperity on the planet. Great mysteries of the universe are unraveled via this coevolution of artificial and human intelligences—the Big Merge transforms human civilization in positive and productive ways.
Smart Machines remain benevolent, serving humanity and addressing social and personal concerns—the Smart Machines are the good guys that help humanity get to the next stage in our planetary evolution—peace, quality of life, and prosperity for all who want it. Not everyone thinks the idea of Smart Machines running their nation, town, energy system, or school is a preferred one, however. The Naturals opt out and settle for less able and not-so-smart first-generation computers that are Smart Enough to keep the electricity and water running, which is good enough for some.
Nations, corporations, entrepreneurs, and individuals rely on the intelligence and income-producing and problem-solving solutions that these benevolent intelligences bring to the planet. Peace and prosperity are the endgame here. The benefactors are viewed as a tool to extend the social evolution of humanity, the next stage of tools that helps our civilization mature from conflict, war, and inequality to a more prosperous and peaceful future. The result is that the Benefactors assume their role in helping humanity deal with planetary management as well as meeting the Grand Challenges of the day.
Rogue Intelligence
In this scenario Smart Machines evolve their own agenda of Digital Darwinism that views humanity as a threat, a competitor, an inhibitor, or simply unnecessary. The other practical scenario is that humans hijack Smart Machines for criminal and terrorist purposes—same ending, but the Smart Machines rebel against even these tangos. We manage to piss off the Smart Machines, and they rebel against humans after we teach them how to do harm and hate. (Who let them watch reality shows on TV?) A Smart Machine Species goes rogue, and now we have Smart Machines fighting Smart Machine, or, as I like to say, now we have the Robot Wars. There are too many people actually expecting this scenario to play out that I expect this will happen sometime, somewhere.
There are independent actions by Smart Machines that have gone rogue and are no longer responding to human commands. Rogue Intelligence becomes a security threat that could be small or large crisis, based on how we the humans deal with it. The growth of this Rogue Intelligence becomes a risk factor as the threat and lack of reliability puts at risk the essential systems we depend on and control, such as the Internet, communications, health care, and financial markets, to name a few. Rogue Intelligence actions, intrusions, crime, terrorism, physical attacks, and denial of essential services become problematic for humanity. We deploy human-controlled Smart Machines to capture or neutralize the Rogue Smart Machines before they do harm or infect other Smart Machines. More Robot Wars likely.
Now it is possible that all three scenarios could happen at different times and in different places on the planet. However, this is not one scenario fits all. And factors such as how we design Smart Machines now, how smart we make them, whether we program them to care about humans and embrace moral values will actually shape the future of these Smart Machines. We will get the future that we program based on what type of cognitive systems we build. Will we design moral machines? How much control should we build in? How will cognitive systems evolve or emerge beyond our understanding? How will all of these factors play out in the New Future? We are, in real time, making the designs, plans, brains, and programs that will tip the scales from Benefactors to Rogues.
We have to work to make sure the limitations are built in: limited lifecycles define their existence, and how about an on-off switch? How hard would that be to design into robot? “And the kill switch is where?” I asked the Robot Maker.
New Brains for Hire
We are about to enter a new reality in computing. Cognitive computers will focus how the brain works, how thinking and learning formulate, and how we create ideas. Cognitive computing will also creating systems that mimic human minds and how we learn. IBM and a number of other companies have taken the lead in developing the commercial potential of cognitive computing, creating New Synthetic Brains.
These cognitive computers, such as the one called Watson at IBM, is working with Sloan Kettering and the Mayo Clinic to enable Watson to learn. We will not be programming cognitive computers; we are teaching them and they are learning. This is a paradigm shift in even thinking about the future of computing.
The endgame is an entirely new processing or chip system, a smart ecosystem called Synapse that IBM’s Watson Group is working on. Steve Gold, the CEO for the Watson Group, talked with me about developing a new generation of cognitive computers that are “taught” that they have the capacity to “learn.” The implications for developing a new treatment for cancer or enabling doctors to better understand the choices facing their patients by analyzing millions of treatment programs and research is already proving to be useful.
In the future the big idea is that Watson in the Cloud will be a deliverable that doctors will use to make decisions and formulate diagnostics and treatments to help patients optimize their health, treat disease, and even prevent illness.
Cognitive systems, such as Watson and many other cognitive intelligences, will become the basis for a new next generation of Smart Machines that learn, can be taught, and use analytics, cloud, Big Data, and machine learning to better help us understand ourselves and manage our world. We could use plenty of help managing our world.
Upgrading Minds
Smart Machines will also be used to enhance our brains. Inevitably we will use advanced technological devices (wearable or implants) to trigger, manage, access, modify, or enhance higher-cognition attributes such as total recall for memory enhancement, advanced information processing, intelligence augmentation, augmented cognition (reviewed here), and direct man-machine interface communications.
Variations of cognitive capacity among individuals are currently being carefully investigated. A future agenda aimed toward identifying genetic “markers” for such characteristics and possible enhancements that can be enabled via chemistry or implant devices will be probable.
Future applications of neurotechnology will provide a vast new array of capabilities that will enable human learning and increased and specialized intelligence, and these will be the primary driver of human performance enhancement.
Cognition will no longer be confined to “natural” capacity or, for that matter, be within the human body. Distributed Networked Cognition qualities, like packets of data, will be accessible online, on demand. There will be downloadable “competencies,” like how to speak a language, access a program, or operate a sophisticated machine. Operationally prepared Neuro Readiness will be an operational competency of the future.
Human beings will become a core organic entity that is connected in real time and, possibly, at all times to an envelope of enhanced cognitive networks and communities that will provide special services like domain-specific expertise for work, entertainment, security, and health.
The model for the higher end of this coevolutionary symbiosis, however, will not be limited to an arena of devices and gadgetry that are worn or implanted only. That will be in the early stages by 2015. In later stages, beyond 2035, we will augment humans, introducing an entirely different arena of Quantum Cognition in which biophysical and quantum technologies link people and machines together in a highly encrypted web of intimate and secure collaboration and communications.
It is in this arena where the “usual” rules of sensory perception and cognition extend beyond the perimeters of the four-dimensional physical universe that we are currently familiar with. The users’ capacity to operate differently in time and space may be optimized.
Certain advanced capabilities may be possible, related to sensing and even manipulating time-space parameters not possible before.
Whoever is enhanced to have access to Quantum Cognition will be able to tap into a range of capacities and resources that will be exclusive to those so equipped and adapted, and they will have powers of communication, cognition, and direct access to computing far beyond human capacity today.
Given the potential cyber-security threats we face today, we will require not just highly secure communications systems but also the Cybernetic Enhancement of humans to be able to predict, interact, direct, and manage these advanced capabilities, which will be beyond allowing the technology itself to evolve separate from the human operator. See more in Chapter 17.
Quantum Computing: The Ultimate Game Changer
Ready to solve the biggest problems on the planet? Ready to put your money down on transforming the future? Well, for just $10 million today you could have your own quantum computer. Now, you might well ask, what can I do with that?
What if I told you that if you bought such a quantum computer, you could build a business to solve problems that others without this tech could not do and that you would have a competitive advantage to be Future Smart? That is why.
The other equally compelling argument is that the immense processing power, computing speed, and expansion of machine intelligence, what I have referred to here as cognitive computing, may require an entirely new way of computing that quantum mechanics, a New Physics of the Quantum, may offer.
We will not be able to develop the full potential of robots and Smart Machines, virtual and physical, without new computer models, so quantum computing may point to this future.
We cannot manage the tsunami of data, the explosion of hyperconnectivity, the enormity of GPS, biometric, DNA, and sensor information that is coming without inventing an entirely new computer model. That is why we need the new technology based on quantum physics. Our current silicon-based computer chips and the way computers process information needs to be reinvented. Even the computers that used genetics or neurons do not have enough power and thinking ability. We need a new computer model to get from where we are today to where we must be tomorrow. It is not just that we need to change the hardware of computing; we need to upgrade the Thinking Models that computers use to solve problems we cannot.
Quantum technology is about making the physics of the impossible possible.
Quantum technology is, in the far future, about the manipulation of time and space. Though in its infancy as a technology, within fifteen years we may have quantum computers of vast intelligence and speed that we could rely on that could change our world by offering smarter security, privacy, and smarter management of complex challenges facing our world, such as inventing a clean, cheap abundant energy innovation.
The quantum tech that is coming will engineer big challenges of the future—terraforming Mars, feeding 9 billion, even teleportation and ending disease.
By 2018 or before we must rely on new chips and computers that are based on quantum physics as, increasingly, global demands to do more will max out our existing supercomputers. We cannot manage the future with the computers we have today. We may not be able to run the Internet or encrypt our e-mails or invent that cure for cancer without a new computer based on quantum. We will need more speed, intelligence, and power, and only a quantum computer can deliver this New Future.
We assume that the computers that run much of our lives, from cell phones to cars to TVs, will be the same in twenty years. Not true. An entirely new quantum model of computing will offer speed-of-thought transactions, endless power, and, most of all, a new era of very smart. Synthetic Intelligence, or enhanced computer cognition, will be created by quantum computing—right after they help us create the first-stage quantum computers. A company called D Wave (www.dwavesystems.com) in Canada is an example of this irony. They advertise that they are creating the future of computing, and they may very well be.
Why quantum computing works is because it can analyze highly complex problems to find solutions—we can examine problems in a new way. D Wave’s Quantum computers can analyze more data and examine multiple scenarios thirty-six hundred times faster than conventional supercomputers today.
What could you do with a quantum computer?
• doing genomic analysis to solve disease
• space exploration
• ending diseases
• build AI and Smart Machines
• fix climate change
• build the next car or airline
• build the next computer
In the far future that’s coming quantum computing will be available in the cloud, where you or anyone, for a price, could use the quantum tech to solve problems without needing to even own the computer.
When Tech Transcends Humans: Our Post-Singular Future
There has been much talk about when Smart Machines become smarter than humans. This is the idea about the Singularity, a time in the future when computers will become smarter than humans and the implications this will have for humanity. Actually we may have already entered the beginning of the Post-Singular era when technology is evolving faster than we recognize and has already become smarter, more connected, and ultimately aware. Humans do not yet recognize this Post-Singular awareness.
We may not be in tune with this emergence because what we think is human-like intelligence limits our definition of intelligence. It is more likely that a Synthetic Intelligence has emerged and is as alien to us as we are to “it.” We cannot perceive it as it appears in the background, invisible to us yet with growing importance to our health, security, business, and lives.
I have signaled this evidence in the M2M language that machines use to communicate, the emerging IoT, and the already 24/7 hyperconnectivity of computers, systems, devices over the Internet, and global mobile networks of the billions of data communications that are transacted and exchanged every day, of which there is logic, memory, and functions that do not involve human communications or awareness. We have taken for granted that this invisible world we are fast becoming dependent on is also getting smarter every minute.
Technology in general is becoming smarter because we are making it so. It is being programmed to become aware, to do more, to be of value to us, and, sometime after 2030, to be sentient in ways that are different from humans. We may not recognize this because we are looking for signs that computers think like us or even like computers. This is a mistake. Computers are likely waking up in primitive ways already. They will likely not look or act like humans. Are we ready for that future?
Here is a scenario from our future that will challenge our very idea of the coevolution of humans and Smart Machines. For example, the tradeoffs with Sentient Machines that are integrated inside of our brains and bodies will alter our thinking in the future. It will be easier to accept mobile autonomous bots or computers, virtual bots, when we have inside of us similar technology, relatives of our computers or robots that share a similar mind or type of mind. This will change our idea of ourselves and our world—hopefully for the better.
This will lead to Hybrid Minds, cybernetically enhanced humans who may be not just smarter but also wiser, kinder, and more likable. Most of the scenarios of human-machines are limited and negative. Maybe the jump from hearing aids, contact lenses, and cardiac pacemakers to merging Smart Machines with humans to enhance health, extend life, and create a productive future for our civilization is just as possible if we make it so.
Will computers transcend humanity? Maybe. But this is too linear and limited a worldview. I prefer to design a future when Smart Machines serve and help humanity manage the future. I forecast that the coevolution of computers and humans will produce not separate intelligent entities but instead more intimate, connected, and collaborative futures. Most important, Smart Machines should be designed to be moral Smart Machines that will empower a better, more productive and peaceful world.
How to Be Smart About Making Smart Machines
As we rush toward what has been called the Singularity, the time when computers surpass human intelligence, I see a dangerous gap in the science of creating Smart Machines. I see that we are not focusing enough on the precautions against what may ensue as we hurdle into this New Future. We are focusing on enhancing computer intelligence but have missed incorporating emotional intelligence, morals, and the social values that define our humanity into this effort that, though daunting, is just as important. It is unwise and an obvious act of hubris to expect that we would not have problems controlling Smart Machines that would be as powerful if not more powerful and smarter than humans.
Though I am an advocate for producing Smart Machines that I think we shall need to meet the planetary challenges of the future, this does not mean we should ignore the fact that Smart Machines will be also a global risk factor, if not a threat. And this future of Smart Machines will not be uniformly the same everywhere. Even today Russia is planning on deploying autonomous robots to protect military targets.
Should we not make technology in our image? Intelligence is not the most important factor in creating technology, such as cognitive computers. Smart, powerful, but cruel machines that don’t care about humans is the Singularity-Gone-Bad Scenario, such as a virus, once unleashed, that could have devastating effects on our world.
Compassion, kindness, moral reason, emotion, respect—until we can build Smart Machines that have these “human-centric” capabilities, we should beware of focusing on increasing their intelligence, utility, power, and control in the future. Super Intelligence, not just smarter than humans but actually Artificial Intelligence that thinks very “different” from us, is what I forecast will emerge. The ability of humans and even early-stage Smart Machines to recognize this Different Intelligence will be a problem that may emerge, as advanced cognitive systems, Smart Machines, will appear to be alien, disruptive, chaotic, or perhaps invisibly perfect—too perfect to understand or perceive.
Smart Machines that are absent human-centered emotion will not care about a human agenda. Without moral reasoning capabilities, Smart Machines will not know what is wrong or right to do or think. Unfortunately tomorrow’s robots and virtual Smart Machines will not all have evolved to be moral machines before they are functional and useful. So their power and usability will outpace their moral responsibility and human-like values. This inevitably will set in motion laws, standards, and policies that should guide the development of Smart Machines. We must design caring and emotionally intelligent Smart Machines, or live to regret it. They will help us shape the future, or they will undo us.
When You Will Know Robots Rule
• When your car refuses to take you to work today
• When your home AI is too busy updating its energy to turn on the toaster
• When your robot boyfriend stops listening to you and turns itself off
• When robot crime becomes a rampant social problem
• When your virtual bot Henry has a highly profitable digital business and you don’t understand how it works—but you get all the profits
If Smart Machines have close-to-human and even beyond-human cognitive powers but do possess respect for humans and other entities, then all of that power is raw and irresponsible. Kindness, compassion, and altruistic values are what make humans human. Machines, smart or otherwise, that are without these values would be dangerous or indifferent toward humans. We cannot have Smart Machines evolve without them caring about humans. This is not intelligence enhancement but rather social values enablement.
I forecast that we have a high probability to reach the posthuman Singularity era of machines that are smarter than humans. I am concerned whether we will make machines that are also caring and respectful of us. Will they know what humans need and want? Will they respect our human agenda or disregard it?
When Smart Machines Wake Up—Will They Like Us?
Many innovations once thought to be crazy and derided by the establishment of the time turned out to be possible. Imagine how different our life would have been if Einstein had remained a patent clerk in Germany, toiling away on other people’s invention, but not his own scientific theories.
Let’s assume for the moment that an absurd possibility of Smart Machines—computers, robots, virtual bots, and devices of all kinds—may become aware at some time in our future. These Smart Machines could develop their own type of machine self-awareness of themselves, humans, and our world. As absurd as that may sound, let’s just accept that it may happen—a type of Synthetic Awareness, a digital sentience that becomes aware or, as I have forecasted for twenty years from now, wakes up. If you accept the possibility that Smart Machines may wake up, how might that affect us?
Will Smart Machines like us, respect us, and do our bidding is the next question you must ask if you can accept the even remote possibility that technology can become first smart and, next, develop awareness. You may be asking why I am bringing this up. Smart Machines may only like humans and care about them if we make them care, if we design these marvelous entities to have emotional intelligence and compassion and have the capacity for something more than raw intelligence. Smart is not the same as moral.
I can accept and forecast that humanity will perhaps one day make Smart Machines more intelligent than humans. I think it is a given that the computational power, even the capacity to do things faster, solve complex problems, and help us decide impossibly difficult challenges, is a also a given. But the concern I have, which is not on as many scientists’ minds, is: Will these Smart Machines have the values that we humans think important—moral reason, compassion, kindness, and emotional intelligence?
I think that there is a probability that Smart Machines will have their own agenda that is not human-centric. Also, it may be that both their agenda and the human agenda can be satisfied. If not, and if they do not like us or care about the human agenda, this will be a defining movement in the history of our civilization, and we should plan to prevent this future from emerging.
Tech Innovation Empowers the Individual
The democratization of technology will be a major trend driving economic opportunity, individual free choice, and self-reliance in the future. If there is one battle that technology shall be employed to fight in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, it is to use advanced technology to shape a more prosperous future. Entrepreneurs will be the winners of this future.
Technology today and tomorrow shall give individuals more control over their lives, more access to tools, wealth, education, commerce, and, ultimately, personal freedoms. Emerging tech innovations can be used to empower prosperity and productivity as well as stimulate individual freedoms and choice.
The democratization of tech will shape the future of our world. The world is becoming not just flatter but also more connected in ways that are changing traditional concepts of power on the planet. The distribution of power, down to the individual, throughout the world is underway, brought by technology. Distributed power is a product of emerging tech innovations that are increasingly easier to use, inexpensive, and available for individuals enhancing their futures. Tech tools will continue to empower the individual to make more, create, and prosper in the future.
Technology will empower the individual to accomplish, invent, and prosper, whether they are in the poorest nation of Africa or a Rising Tiger of Asia. Technological innovations that shall amaze us will shape the future.