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

has designed, which are used by top musicians, such as Stevie Wonder. He explained to me that there was a turning point in his life. It came when he was unexpectedly diagnosed with type II diabetes when he was thirty-five. Suddenly, he was faced with the grim reality that he would not live long enough to see his predictions come true. His body, after years of neglect, had aged beyond his years. Rattled by this diagnosis, he now attacked the problem of personal health with the same enthusiasm and energy he used for the computer revolution. (Today, he consumes more than 100 pills a day and has written books on the revolution in longevity. He expects that the revolution in microscopic robots will be able to clean out and repair the human body so that it can live forever. His philosophy is that he would like to live long enough to see the medical breakthroughs that can prolong our life spans indefinitely. In other words, he wants to live long enough to live forever.)
    Recently, he embarked on an ambitious plan to launch the Singularity University, based in the NASA Ames laboratory in the Bay Area, which trains a cadre of scientists to prepare for the coming singularity.
    There are many variations and combinations of these various themes.
    Kurzweil himself believes, “ It’s not going to be an invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizon. We’re going to merge with this technology. … We’re going to put these intelligent devices in our bodies and brains to make us live longer and healthier.”
    Any idea as controversial as the singularity is bound to unleash a backlash. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, says that the singularity is “ intelligent design for the IQ 140 people. … This proposition that we’re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it’s fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all the frantic arm-waving can’t obscure that fact for me.”
    Douglas Hofstadter has said, “ It’s as if you took a lot of good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas,and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.”
    No one knows how this will play out. But I think the most likely scenario is the following.
    MOST LIKELY SCENARIO: FRIENDLY AI
    First, scientists will probably take simple measures to ensure that robots are not dangerous. At the very least, scientists can put a chip in robot brains to automatically shut them off if they have murderous thoughts. In this approach, all intelligent robots will be equipped with a fail-safe mechanism that can be switched on by a human at any time, especially when a robot exhibits errant behavior. At the slightest hint that a robot is malfunctioning, any voice command will immediately shut it down.
    Or specialized hunter robots may also be created whose duty is to neutralize deviant robots. These robot hunters will be specifically designed to have superior speed, strength, and coordination in order to capture errant robots. They will be designed to understand the weak points of any robotic system and how they behave under certain conditions. Human can also be trained in this skill. In the movie
Blade Runner,
a specially trained cadre of agents, including one played by Harrison Ford, are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot.
    Since it will take many decades of hard work for robots to slowly go up the evolutionary scale, it will not be a sudden moment when humanity is caught off guard and we are all shepherded into zoos like cattle. Consciousness, as I see it, is a process that can be ranked on a scale, rather than being a sudden evolutionary event, and it will take many decades for robots to ascend up this scale of consciousness. After all, it took Mother Nature millions of years to develop human consciousness. So humans will not be caught off guard one day when the Internet unexpectedly “wakes up” or robots suddenly begin to plan for themselves.
    This is the option preferred by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who envisioned each robot hardwired in the factory with three laws to prevent them from getting out of control. He devised his famous three laws of robotics to prevent robots from hurting themselves or humans. (Basically, the three laws state that robots cannot