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A nuclear bomb, though hideous in its potential, cannot self-replicate.
Intelligent robots do not have to be small to be evil – just much cleverer than us.
Joy argues that the problems will soon be so complex that humans will be incapable of grasping them.
‘With intelligent machines we will not get a second chance' |
As an undisputed techno-mandarin, Joy created an enormous stir when he wrote of his urgent concern in the magazine Wired, in April 2000, in an article titled ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’:
The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals and small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.
True, a critical difference between the technology of the 21st-century genetics, nanotechnology and robotics and that of the previous 100 years – darkening as they were with nuclear, biological and chemical doom – is that now it is no longer necessary to take over large facilities or access rare raw materials. Yet an even bigger change in the technology of the future, compared to that of the past, is that a nuclear bomb, though hideous in its potential, cannot self-replicate; but something that might – nanorobots – could soon be taking over the planet.
Just browse a few websites that are devoted to ‘problems of preserving our civilization.’ One worry, you will read, is that the manipulation of matter at the level of atoms, the nanotechnology that promises to be ‘the manufacturing industry of the 21st century’, will bring a new enemy – robots scaled down to the billionth of a metre that the nanolevel mandates, minuscule serfs who are focused on assembling copies of themselves. What might happen, one website asks, if such prolific yet single-minded operatives fell into the hands of even a lone terrorist? But then, of course, intelligent robots do not have to be small to be evil – just much cleverer than us. Common-or-garden human-sized machines might also soon be able to self-assemble, and, more importantly, to think autonomously.
Bill Joy had never thought of machines heretofore as having the ability to ‘think’; now he is worried that they will, and in so doing lead us into a technology that may replace our species. He worries that humans will become so dependent on machines that we will let machines make decisions. And because these machines will be so much better than humans at working out the best course of action, soon we will capitulate entirely. Joy argues that, in any case, the problems will soon be so complex that humans will be incapable of grasping them. Considering that, in addition to greater mental prowess, these silicon masterminds will have no need to sleep in, nor to hang out in bars, they will soon be way ahead of us, treating us as a lower species destined, as one website warns, to be ‘used as domestic animals’ or even ‘kept in zoos’.
Kevin Warwick’s predictions are similarly ominous. ‘With intelligent machines we will not get a second chance. Once the first powerful machine, with an intelligence similar to that of a human, is switched on, we will most likely not get the opportunity to switch it back off again. We will have started a time bomb ticking on the human race, and we will be unable to switch it off.’
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The elite will simply destroy this useless press of humanity.
‘As we are downloaded into our own technology, our humanity will be lost.’
If not actually inside our bodies and brains then sprinkled throughout our clothes
‘I think it is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil.'
‘If literally nothing is held sacred anymore … what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life”.' |
Equally nightmarish would be an elite minority of humans commanding large systems of machines, whilst the masses languish redundant. Either the elite will simply destroy this useless press of humanity or, in a more benign mood, generously brainwash them so that they give up reproducing and eventually make themselves extinct – it would be kindest to ensure that at all times the masses are universally content. They will be happy, but not free. It is a disturbing thought that these are the views of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski; though he was obviously criminally insane, and no one would for a moment condone his actions, still Joy felt compelled to confront the sentiment that ‘as we are downloaded into our own technology, our humanity will be lost.’
The coming Age of IT, then, offers a raft of possibilities from conscious automata to self-assembling autocrats to carbon-silicon hybrids. Extreme though such possibilities might seem, especially to The Cynics, it is very likely that a more modest version of carbon-silicon interfacing will be invisible and ubiquitous – if not actually inside our bodies and brains then sprinkled throughout our clothes, in our spectacles and watches, and conveting the most unlikely inanimate objects into ‘smart’ interactive gadgets.
The real problem is not what is technically feasible but the extent to which what is technically feasible can change our values. The gadgets of applied technology are the direct consequences of the big scientific breakthroughs of the previous century, and promise any day now to influence, with unprecedented intimacy, the previously independent, isolated inner world of the human mind. Yet this widespread availability of modern technology is, for some, a loud enough wake-up call for us to re-evaluate our priorities as a society. Bill Joy again: ‘I think it is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.’
But of course not all of this third group, The Technophobes, are scientists. Not surprisingly, and indeed more typically, non-scientists’ fears are usually grounded in a more romantic view of life, but the fears are there nonetheless. In his Reith Lecture in 2000 Prince Charles summed up the worries of many: ‘If literally nothing is held sacred anymore … what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life”, with potentially disastrous long-term consequences?’
It may be a little unfair, and certainly incautious, to write off this type of view as simply that of latter-day Luddites, striving in vain to hold back progress with a misconceived vision of some golden bygone age when humans adhered to a Rousseau-like natural nobility, and no one died in childbirth, suffered poor housing, worked at mind-numbing manual tasks or froze to death … It’s just that for many there is a very real fear that science, and the technology that is has spawned, have outpaced the checks and balances we need for society to survive – indeed for life as we know it to continue at all.
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