What if by pitting ourselves against future machines, potentially greater in intelligence and discipline and will; what if by imagining our story could somehow be overwritten; what if by hoping for an everlasting legacy (or life), we miss a greater story, and a more essential truth? Does "synthetic" or "artificial" have any real meaning? I figure there's no out-of-this-world, no matter how out-of-this-world. Technically speaking. We have progressively separated ourselves from nature and this is its continuation. It took us quite a long time to evolve the value systems we have today (however feeble they can be), but technology is advancing at an exponential rate. We only recognize local, linear advancement. Peter Diamandis (Singularity University) explains it this way: you can imagine yourself walking 30 steps or 30 meters ahead (linear), but 30 exponential meters gets you 26 times around the planet. When we think of AI advancing, we can kind of imagine cognition that is well beyond our current capacity (maybe IBM's Watson ), but I think that's a fairly flat formulation. Any sufficiently advanced AI would need to be social in order to fit the description. That means it would need to be PRO-social, i.e., have emotions. Why wouldn't it be more human than we are? Us-plus? I could argue that we're collectively evolving; it's possible AI is just what's next on the wacky roadmap that began at atom and moved (very roughly, skipping steps) to molecule to single celled life to fish to bird to mammal to primate to us ---> ?. We're just a chapter. - julie
Julie, yes we are evolving more rapidly than ever. The Internet has been part of our lives for a mere 20 years. In the next 2 years another 3 billion people will be coming online from the third world, including those same people who have been taking all the MIT courses offered for free on the Internet. It's easy to imagine a few thousand Marie Curies, Luies Pasteurs, Albert Einsteins, Maya Angelous, about to shake our world! Technology is now intertwined with our biology. There is much to hope for just as there is much to fear. It's hard if not impossible to see what shape we will be in the future. I think of my children. As they grow it is easy to look at baby pictures and see where they came from, but I can never imagine adequately what they will become. Their physiology is easy to see and remark upon and illustrates this well. But, even more daunting is how their intelligence and behavior evolves. I an in awe of their abilities, so much more than my own at their age. And this is reflected in more than what they say and do - it's in society. For example, I am a math major, but my son has been studying as far back as Jr High many of the concepts I learned only in college. Mythically, our story is in a great transformational age. Yes, it will be a rough ride ahead for many, perhaps us included. Nonetheless, it is the only ride there is! Let's step up, lead not follow, raise our bar, make a new day. Carpe diem!
A few years ago I sat next to a baby on a plane. She reached for my tablet and began swiping right to left—an infant. I looked around and all the babies were swiping. For all I knew, they were e-filing their own taxes. If AI are as cute and adaptive (and emotionally unstable) as babies, we are in trouble. Otherwise, I hope I'm alive to see the machines our babies create.