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

the
Matrix Trilogy,
humans are so primitive that they don’t even realize that the machines have already taken over. Humans carry out their daily affairs, thinking everything is normal, oblivious to the fact that they are actually living in pods. Their world is a virtual reality simulation run by the robot masters. Human “existence” is only a software program, running inside a large computer, that is being fed into the brains of humans living in these pods. The only reason the machines even bother to have humans around is to use them as batteries.
    Hollywood, of course, makes its living by scaring the pants off its audience. But it does raise a legitimate scientific question: What happens when robots finally become as smart as us? What happens when robots wake upand become conscious? Scientists vigorously debate the question: not if, but when this momentous event will happen.
    According to some experts, our robot creations will gradually rise up the evolutionary tree. Today, they are as smart as cockroaches. In the future, they will be as smart as mice, rabbits, dogs and cats, monkeys, and then they will rival humans. It may take decades to slowly climb this path, but they believe that it is only a matter of time before the machines exceed us in intelligence.
    AI researchers are split on the question of when this might happen. Some say that within twenty years robots will approach the intelligence of the human brain and then leave us in the dust. In 1993, Vernor Vinge said, “ Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. … I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.”
    On the other hand, Douglas Hofstadter, author of
Gödel, Escher, Bach,
says, “ I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 years to 200 years.”
    When I talked to Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the founding figures in the history of AI, he was careful to tell me that he places no timetable on when this event will happen. He believes the day will come but shies away from being the oracle and predicting the precise date. (Being the grand old man of AI, a field he helped to create almost from scratch, perhaps he has seen too many predictions fail and create a backlash.)
    A large part of the problem with these scenarios is that there is no universal consensus as to the meaning of the word
consciousness.
Philosophers and mathematicians have grappled with the word for centuries, and have nothing to show for it. Seventeenth-century thinker Gottfried Leibniz, inventor of calculus, once wrote, “ If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.” Philosopher David Chalmers has even catalogued almost 20,000 papers written on the subject, with no consensus whatsoever.
    Nowhere in science have so many devoted so much to create so little.
    Consciousness,
unfortunately, is a buzzword that means different things to different people. Sadly, there is no universally accepted definition of the term.
    I personally think that one of the problems has been the failure to clearly define consciousness and then a failure to quantify it.
    But if I were to venture a guess, I would theorize that consciousness consists of at least three basic components:
     
    1. sensing and recognizing the environment
    2. self-awareness
    3. planning for the future by setting goals and plans, that is, simulating the future and plotting strategy
    In this approach, even simple machines and insects have some form of consciousness, which can be ranked numerically on a scale of 1 to 10. There is a continuum of consciousness, which can be quantified. A hammer cannot sense its environment, so it would have a 0 rating on this scale. But a thermostat can. The essence of a thermostat is that it can sense the temperature of the environment and act on it by changing it, so it would have a ranking of 1. Hence, machines with feedback mechanisms have a primitive form of consciousness. Worms also have this ability. They can sense the presence of food, mates, and danger and act on this information, but can do little else. Insects, which can detect more than one parameter (such as sight, sound, smells, pressure, etc.), would have a higher numerical rank, perhaps a 2 or 3.
    The highest form of this sensing would be the ability to recognize and understand objects in the environment. Humans can