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

error. He envisioned the day that his robots would explore the solar system, bumping into things along the way. It was an outlandish idea, proposed in his essay “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” but his approach eventually led to an array of new avenues. One by-product of his idea is the Mars Rovers now scurrying over the surface of the Red Planet. Not surprisingly, he was also the chairman of iRobot, the company that markets buglike vacuum cleaners to households across the country.
    One problem, he feels, is that workers in artificial intelligence follow fads, adopting the paradigm of the moment, rather than thinking in fresh ways. For example, he recalls, “ When I was a kid, I had a book that described the brain as a telephone-switching network. Earlier books described it as a hydrodynamic system or a steam engine. Then in the 1960s, it became a digital computer. In the 1980s, it became a massively parallel digital computer. Probably there’s a kid’s book out there somewhere that says the brain is just like the World Wide Web. …”
    For example, some historians have noted that Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the mind was influenced by the coming of the steam engine. The spread of railroads through Europe in the mid-to late 1800s had a profound effect on the thinking of intellectuals. In Freud’s picture, there were flows of energy in the mind that constantly competed with other flows, much like in the steam pipes in an engine. The continual interaction between the superego, the id, and the ego resembled the continual interaction between steam pipes in a locomotive. And the fact that repressing these flows of energy could create neuroses is analogous to the way that steam power, if bottled up, can be explosive.
    Marvin Minsky admitted to me that another paradigm misguided the field for many years. Since many AI researchers are former physicists, there is something called “physics envy,” that is, the desire to find the single, unifying theme underlying all intelligence. In physics, we have the desire to follow Einstein to reduce the physical universe to a handful of unifying equations, perhaps finding an equation one inch long that can summarize the universe in a single coherent idea. Minsky believes that this envy led AI researchers to look for that single unifying theme for consciousness. Now, he believes, there is no such thing. Evolution haphazardly cobbled together a bunch of techniques we collectively call consciousness. Take apart the brain, and you find a loose collection of minibrains, each designed to perform a specific task. He calls this the “society of minds”: that consciousness is actually the sum of many separate algorithms and techniques that nature stumbled upon over millions of years.
    Rodney Brooks was also looking for a similar paradigm, but one that had never been fully explored before. He soon realized that Mother Nature and evolution had already solved many of these problems. For example, a mosquito, with only a few hundred thousand neurons, can outperform thegreatest military robotic system. Unlike our flying drones, mosquitoes, with brains smaller than the head of a pin, can independently navigate around obstacles, find food and mates. Why not learn from nature and biology? If you follow the evolutionary scale, you learn that insects and mice did not have the rules of logic programmed into their brains. It was through trial and error that they engaged the world and mastered the art of survival.
    Now he is pursuing yet another heretical idea, contained in his essay “The Merger of Flesh and Machines.” He notes that the old laboratories at MIT, which used to design silicon components for industrial and military robots, are now being cleaned out, making way for a new generation of robots made of living tissue as well as silicon and steel. He foresees an entirely new generation of robots that will marry biological and electronic systems to create entirely new architectures for robots.
    He writes, “ My prediction is that by the year 2100 we will have very intelligent robots everywhere in our everyday lives. But we will not be apart from them—rather, we will be part robot and connected with the robots.”
    He sees this progressing in stages. Today, we have the ongoing revolution in prostheses, inserting electronics directly into the human body to create realistic substitutes for hearing, sight, and other functions. For example, the artificial cochlea has revolutionized the