'AI' tech-wizzards: be careful what you wish for

By Andrew Cowdery

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." Although T.S. Eliot was probably not thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) when he wrote these words, he might as well have been. AI's rise to dominance started innocently enough, with building-sized pocket calculators like ENIAC that were as intellectually formidable as those gorillas who know sign language. But now we face the wrath of ENIAC's grandchildren, who would smirk at our inferiority if we programmed them to do so. Even more frighteningly, if Ray Kurzweil is right, computers soon won't even need us to program them.

Kurzweil, a leading futurist for AI, believes that the contents of the human brain can be encoded into a database by billions of self-replicating robots called "nanobots," which would be introduced into the brain via the bloodstream. The nanobots would scan individual neurons and copy the contents into databases on remote computers via a wireless network—possibly the World Wide Web. According to Kurzweil, within 30 years this process will be entirely possible.

Do not ignore Ray Kurzweil. In 1965, when computers had the processing power of a modern-day alarm clock, Kurzweil wrote a program that composed music by itself, a feat which won the 17-year-old a Westinghouse Science Talent Search award. Since then he has enabled computers to write poetry, recognize human speech, produce music, draw, paint, and read to the blind. He is currently working on Fat Kat, an AI system that makes securities investment decisions. In short, the man knows what he's talking about. Kurzweil sees today's innovations in AI as just another step in our evolution from human to "machine hybrid." Kurzweil's hybrids are normal humans with juiced-up brains that feature memory stored online, wireless Internet links, and—with neural stimulation from nanobots—the ability to create a virtual reality as real as life itself.

I don't wonder how we got to this point. We've always loved the idea of building machines to do our dirty work—is it so surprising that we've become dependent on them? A wise man once said that if aliens descended upon Los Angeles, they would assume that automobiles were the dominant race. And if they assumed that size indicated power and wished to be taken to our leader, humanity would be represented by a Greyhound bus. Outlandish though this may sound, it's no worse than Kurzweil's vision of the future, in which our thoughts are stored online at the mercy of pimply, seventh-graders with mental Internet connections and a desire to replace our childhood memories with a pirated copy of the computer game Tomb Raider.

We are at a crossroads. We have developed computers that can write, draw, beat Gary Kasparov at chess, and download pornography in a matter of seconds. Machines have permeated almost every aspect of human life and, as with pacemakers, have dabbled with our bodies—but they have not yet entered our minds.

Before this happens, we must fight back. I refuse to believe that we are going to surrender to a shipment of poetry-writing, blueberry-flavored iMacs. Today's computers are great at chess and porn location, and that's good enough. Thankfully, we don't have to store our brains online to use these features—so let's just be satisfied with what we have.

I worry that we won't be satisfied, for we are perpetually dissatisfied with what we can improve. This attitude lies at the very root of the ideas and innovations that have landed us in the modern world. However, we must not become overzealous, with our faces glued to the screen until we snap our heads up to find ourselves in hostile terrain. Indeed, Kurzweil's future world has some serious bugs; if people can put nanobots into their own brains to supplement their own thinking and memory, what is there to stop them from putting nanobots into other people's brains? By manipulating the database created by those nanobots, futuristic hackers could conceivably monitor and alter thoughts, or even put their victim into a virtual environment from which he might not be able to escape.

Sound like The Matrix? It should. The possibilities of the near future are sounding more and more like fiction because technology is moving faster than our collective imagination is. But this is not an excuse for us to sit idly by, for the AI wizards will interpret our idleness as tacit consent, and they will continue pushing us toward a new world in which no one can stand on sure feet.

Andrew Cowdery is a freshman in Ezra Stiles.

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