Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

technology—it’s already here, in the form of a toy. You place EEG electrodes on your head, the toy detects the electrical impulses of your brain, and then it lifts a tiny object, just as in the movie. In the future, many games will be played by sheer thought. Teams may be mentally wired up so that they can move a ball by thinking about it, and the team that can best mentally move the ball wins.
    The climax of
Forbidden Planet
may give us pause. Despite the vastness of their technology, the aliens perished because they failed to notice a defect in their plans. Their powerful machines tapped not only into their conscious thoughts but also into their subconscious desires. The savage, long-suppressed thoughts of their violent, ancient evolutionary past sprang back to life, and the machines materialized every subconscious nightmare into reality. On the eve of attaining their greatest creation, this mighty civilization was destroyed by the very technology they hoped would free them from instrumentality.
    For us, however, this is still a distant danger. A device of that magnitude won’t be available until the twenty-second century. However, we face a more immediate concern. By 2100, we will also live in a world populated by robots that have humanlike characteristics. What happens if they become smarter than us?

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
    —MARVIN MINSKY

2 FUTURE OF AI Rise of the Machines
    The gods of mythology with their divine power could animate the inanimate. According to the Bible, in Genesis, Chapter 2, God created man out of dust, and then “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” According to Greek and Roman mythology, the goddess Venus could make statues spring to life. Venus, taking pity on the artist Pygmalion when he fell hopelessly in love with his statue, granted his fondest wish and turned the statue into a beautiful woman, Galatea. The god Vulcan, the blacksmith to the gods, could even create an army of mechanical servants made of metal that he brought to life.
    Today, we are like Vulcan, forging in our laboratories machines that breathe life not into clay but into steel and silicon. But will it be to liberate the human race or enslave it? If one reads the headlines today, it seems as if the question is already settled: the human race is about to be rapidly overtaken by our own creation.
    THE END OF HUMANITY?
    The headline in the
New York Times
said it all: “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.” The world’s top leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) had gathered at the Asilomar conference in California in 2009 to solemnly discuss what happens when the machines finally take over. As in a scene from a Hollywood movie, delegates asked probing questions, such as, What happens if a robot becomes as intelligent as your spouse?
    As compelling evidence of this robotic revolution, people pointed to the Predator drone, a pilotless robot plane that is now targeting terrorists with deadly accuracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan; cars that can drive themselves; and ASIMO, the world’s most advanced robot that can walk, run, climb stairs, dance, and even serve coffee.
    Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, an organizer of the conference, noting the excitement surging through the conference, said, “ Technologists are providing almost religious visions, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” (The Rapture is when true believers ascend to heaven at the Second Coming. The critics dubbed the spirit of the Asilomar conference “the rapture of the nerds.”)
    That same summer, the movies dominating the silver screen seemed to amplify this apocalyptic picture. In
Terminator Salvation,
a ragtag band of humans battle huge mechanical behemoths that have taken over the earth. In
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,
futuristic robots from space use humans as pawns and the earth as a battleground for their interstellar wars. In
Surrogates,
people prefer to live their lives as perfect, beautiful, superhuman robots, rather than face the reality of their own aging, decaying bodies.
    Judging from the headlines and the theater marquees, it looks like the last gasp for humans is just around the corner. AI pundits are solemnly asking: Will we one day have to dance behind bars as our robot creations throw peanuts at us, as we do at bears in a zoo? Or will we become lapdogs to our creations?
    But upon closer