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

mercenaries.
    These surrogates and avatars are not possible today but may be possible in the future.
    Recently, ASIMO has been programmed with a new idea: remote sensing. At Kyoto University, humans have been trained to control the mechanical motion of robots by using brain sensors. For example, by putting on an EEG helmet, students can move the arms and legs of ASIMO by simply thinking. So far, four distinct motions of the arms and head are possible. This may open the door to another realm of AI: robots controlled by the mind.
    Although this is a crude demonstration of mind over matter, in the coming decades it should be possible to increase the set of motions we can control in a robot, and also to get feedback, so we can “feel” with our new robotic hands. Goggles or contact lenses would allow us to see what the robots see, so we might eventually have full control over the body’s motions.
    This may also help alleviate the immigration problem for Japan. Workers may be located in different countries, yet control robots thousands of miles away by donning brain sensors. So not only can the Internet carry the thoughts of white-collar workers, it might also carry the thoughts of blue-collar workers and translate them into physical motion. This might mean that robots will become an integral part of any nation grappling with exploding health costs and a shortage of workers.
    Controlling robots by remote sensing may also have applications elsewhere. In any dangerous environment (for example, underwater, near high-voltage lines, in fires), robots controlled by human thoughts may be used in rescue missions. Or undersea robots may be connected directly to humans, so that humans can control many swimming robots by thoughts alone. Since the surrogate would have superpowers, it would be able to chase criminals (unless the criminals also have superpowered surrogates). One would have all the advantages of merging with robots without changing our bodies at all.
    Such an arrangement might actually prove useful for space exploration, when we have to manage a permanent moon base. Our surrogates may perform all the dangerous tasks of maintaining the moon base, while the astronauts are safely back on earth. The astronauts would have the superstrength and superpowers of the robots while exploring a hazardous alien landscape. (This would not work if the astronauts are on the earth controlling surrogates on Mars, however, since radio signals take up to 40 minutes to go from the earth to Mars and back. But it would work if the astronauts were sitting safely in a permanent base on Mars while the surrogates went out and performed dangerous tasks on the Martian surface.)
    HOW FAR THE MERGER WITH ROBOTS?
    Robot pioneer Hans Moravec takes this several steps further and imagines an extreme version of this: we become the very robots that we have built. He explained to me how we might merge with our robot creations by undergoing a brain operation that replaces each neuron of our brain with a transistor inside a robot. The operation starts when we lie beside a robot body without a brain. A robotic surgeon takes every cluster of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull. As each cluster of neurons is duplicated in the robot, it is discarded. We are fully conscious as this delicate operation takes place. Part of our brain is inside our old body, but the other part is now made of transistors inside our new robot body. After the operation is over, our brain has been entirely transferred into the body of a robot. Not only do we have a robotic body, we have also the benefits of a robot: immortality in superhuman bodies that are perfect in appearance. This will not be possible in the twenty-first century, but becomes an option in the twenty-second.
    In the ultimate scenario, we discard our clumsy bodies entirely and eventually evolve into pure software programs that encode our personalities. We “download” our entire personalities into a computer. If someone presses a button with your name on it, then the computer behaves as if you are inside its memory, since it has encoded all your personality quirks inside its circuits. We become immortal, but spend our time trapped inside a computer, interacting with other “people” (that is, other software programs) in some gigantic cyberspace/virtual reality. Our bodily existencewill be