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

future rewards were greater. So being able to see the future consequences of our actions requires a higher level of awareness.
    AI researchers, therefore, should aim to create a robot with all three characteristics. The first is hard to achieve, since robots can sense their environment but cannot make sense of it. Self-awareness is easier to achieve. But planning for the future requires common sense, an intuitive understanding of what is possible, and concrete strategies for reaching specific goals.
    So we see that common sense is a prerequisite for the highest level of consciousness. In order for a robot to simulate reality and predict the future, it must first master millions of commonsense rules about the world around it. But common sense is not enough. Common sense is just the “rules of the game,” rather than the rules of strategy and planning.
    On this scale, we can then rank all the various robots that have been created.
    We see that Deep Blue, the chess-playing machine, would rank very low. It can beat the world champion in chess, but it cannot do anything else. It is able to run a simulation of reality, but only for playing chess. It is incapable of running simulations of any other reality. This is true for many of the world’s largest computers. They excel at simulating the reality of one object, for example, modeling a nuclear detonation, the windpatterns around a jet airplane, or the weather. These computers can run simulations of reality much better than a human. But they are also pitifully one-dimensional, and hence useless in surviving in the real world.
    Today, AI researchers are clueless about how to duplicate all these processes in a robot. Most throw up their hands and say that somehow huge networks of computers will show “emergent phenomena” in the same way that order sometimes spontaneously coalesces from chaos. When asked precisely how these emergent phenomena will create consciousness, most roll their eyes to the heavens.
    Although we do not know how to create a robot with consciousness, we can imagine what a robot would look like that is more advanced than us, given this framework for measuring consciousness.
    They would excel in the third characteristic: they would be able to run complex simulations of the future far ahead of us, from more perspectives, with more details and depth. Their simulations would be more accurate than ours, because they would have a better grasp of common sense and the rules of nature and hence better able to ferret out patterns. They would be able to anticipate problems that we might ignore or not be aware of. Moreover, they would be able to set their own goals. If their goals include helping the human race, then everything is fine. But if one day they formulate goals in which humans are in the way, this could have nasty consequences.
    But this raises the next question: What happens to humans in this scenario?
    WHEN ROBOTS EXCEED HUMANS
    In one scenario, we puny humans are simply pushed aside as a relic of evolution. It is a law of evolution that fitter species arise to displace unfit species; and perhaps humans will be lost in the shuffle, eventually winding up in zoos where our robotic creations come to stare at us. Perhaps that is our destiny: to give birth to superrobots that treat us as an embarrassingly primitive footnote in their evolution. Perhaps that is our role in history, to give birth to our evolutionary successors. In this view, our role is to get out of their way.
    Douglas Hofstadter confided to me that this might be the natural order of things, but we should treat these superintelligent robots as we do ourchildren, because that is what they are, in some sense. If we can care for our children, he said to me, then why can’t we also care about intelligent robots, which are also our children?
    Hans Moravec contemplates how we may feel being left in the dust by our robots: “ … life may seem pointless if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultraintelligent progeny as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby talk that we can understand.”
    When we finally hit the fateful day when robots are smarter than us, not only will we no longer be the most intelligent being on earth, but our creations may make copies of themselves that are even smarter than they are. This army of self-replicating robots will then create endless future generations of robots, each one smarter than the previous one. Since robots can