TEARING TOWARD THE SPIKE

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Roads from here and now to the Spike      

I assert that all of these No Spike options are of low probability, unless they are brought forcibly into reality by the hand of some Luddite demagogue using our confusions and fears against our own best hopes for local and global prosperity. If I'm right, we are then pretty much on course for an inevitable Spike. We might still ask: what, exactly, is the motor that will propel technological culture up its exponential curve?
        Here are seven obvious distinct candidates for paths to the Spike (separate lines of development that in reality will interact, generally hastening but sometimes slowing each other):

This is the `classic' model of the singularity, the path to the ultraintelligent machine and beyond. But it seems unlikely that there will be an abrupt leap from today's moderately fast machines to a fully-functioning artificial mind equal to our own, let alone its self-redesigned kin--although this proviso, too, can be countered, as we'll see. If we can trust Moore's Law--computer power currently doubling every year--as a guide (and strictly we can't, since it's only a record of the past rather than an oracle), we get the kinds of timelines presented by Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Michio Kaku, Peter Cochrane and others, explored at length in The Spike. Let's briefly sample those predictions.
        Peter Cochrane: several years ago, the British Telecom futures team, led by their guru Cochrane, saw human-level machines as early as 2016. Their remit did not encompass a sufficiently deep range to sight a Singularity.
    Ray Kurzweil:[8] around 2019, a standard cheap computer has the capacity of a human brain, and some claim to have met the Turing test (that is, passed as conscious, fully responsive minds). By 2029, such machines are a thousand times more powerful. Machines not only ace the Turing test, they claim to be conscious, and are accepted as such. His sketch of 2099 is effectively a Spike: fusion between human and machine, uploads more numerous than the embodied, immortality. It's not clear why this takes an extra 70 years to achieve.
        Ralph Merkle:[9] while Dr Merkle's special field is nanotechnology, this plainly has a possible bearing on AI. His is the standard case, although the timeline is still `fuzzy' , he told me in January: various computing parameters go about as small as we can imagine between 2010 and 2020, if Moore's Law holds up. To get there will require `a manufacturing technology that can arrange individual atoms in the precise structures required for molecular logic elements, connect those logic elements in the complex patterns required for a computer, and do so inexpensively for billions of billions of gates.' So the imperatives of the computer hardware industry will create nanoassemblers by 2020 at latest. Choose your own timetable for the resulting Spike once both nano and AI are in hand.
        Has Moravec:[10] multipurpose `universal' robots by 2010, with `humanlike competence' in cheap computers by around 2039--a more conservative estimate than Ray Kurzweil's, but astonishing none the less. Even so, Dr Moravec considers a Vingean singularity as likely within 50 years.
        Michio Kaku: superstring physicist Kaku surveyed some 150 scientists and devised a profile of the next century and farther. He concludes broadly that from `2020 to 2050, the world of computers may well be dominated by invisible, networked computers which have the power of artificial intelligence: reason, speech recognition, even common sense'.[11] In the next century or two, he expects humanity to achieve a Type I Kardeshev civilization, with planetary governance and technology able to control weather but essentially restricted to Earth. Only later, between 800 and 2500 years farther on, will humanity pass to Type II, with command of the entire solar system. This projection seems to me excessively conservative.
        Vernor Vinge: his part-playful, part-serious proposal was that a singularity was due around 2020, marking the end of the human era. Maybe as soon as 2014.
        Eliezer Yudkowsky: once we have a human-level AI able to understand and redesign its own architecture, there will be a swift escalation into a Spike. Could be as soon as 2010, with 2005 and 2020 as the outer limits, if the Singularity Institute, Yudkowski's brainchild which has now become reality, has anything to do with it (this will be option [C]). Yudkowsky, I should warn you, is a 21 year old autodidact genius, perhaps his generation's equivalent of Norbert Wiener or Murray Gell-Mann. Or maybe he's talking through his hat. Take a look at his site and decide for yourselves.

Why build an artificial brain when we each have one already? Well, it is regarded as impolite to delve intrusively into a living brain purely for experimental purposes, whether by drugs or surgery (sometimes dubbed `neurohacking'), except if no other course of treatment for an illness is available. Increasingly subtle scanning machines are now available, allowing us to watch as the human brain does its stuff, and a few brave pioneers are coupling chips to parts of themselves, but few expect us to wire ourselves to machines in the immediate future. That might be mistaken, however. Professor Kevin Warwick, of Reading University, successfully implanted a sensor-trackable chip into his arm in 1998. A year later, he allowed an implanted chip to monitor his neural and muscular patterns, then had a computer use this information to copy the signals back to his body and cause his limbs to move; he was thus a kind of puppet, driven by the computer signals. He plans experiments where the computer, via similar chips, takes control of his emotions as well as his actions.[12]
        As we gradually learn to read the language of the brain's neural nets more closely, and finally to write directly back to them, we will find ways to expand our senses, directly experience distant sensors and robot bodies (perhaps giving us access to horribly inhospitable environments like the depths of the oceans or the blazing surface of Venus). Instead of hammering keyboards or calculators, we might access chips or the global net directly via implanted interfaces. Perhaps sensitive monitors will track brainwaves, myoelectricity (muscles) and other indices, and even impose patterns on our brains using powerful, directed magnetic fields. Augmentations of this kind, albeit rudimentary, are already seen at the lab level. Perhaps by 2020 we'll see boosted humans able to share their thoughts directly with computers. If so, it is a fair bet that neuroscience and computer science will combine to map the processes and algorithms of the naturally evolved brain, and try to emulate it in machines. Unless there actually is a mysterious non-replicable spiritual component, a soul, we'd then expect to see a rapid transition to self-augmenting machines--and we'd be back to path [B i].