X-Message-Number: 15218
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: "Technology: Building Better Humans"
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 20:53:09 -0800

From:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/508404.asp

Technology: Building Better Humans
The great decision ahead of us is philosophical do we want our new machines 
to be like us? Or should we be more like our machines? And does it matter?

By Peter McGrath
NEWSWEEK


      Jan. 2001    In August 1998 Kevin Warwick put his body on the network. 
He had a silicon chip surgically implanted in his left arm, enabling a 
computer at the University of Reading, England, to track him throughout the 
Department of Cybernetics, where he teaches. Over the next nine days, the 
computer would recognize him as he arrived at the main entrance, and its 
voice box would greet him. It opened his lab door for him. It turned on the 
lights. The experiment had a danger: the glass tube containing the implant 
could have shattered inside him.














         BUT IT WAS WORTH THE RISK to find whether an implant could 
communicate with a computer Warwick s next experiment, probably sometime 
next spring, will test an implant s ability to shuttle signals between his 
nervous system and a computer a radical step toward linking brain and 
machine directly. And after that? Perhaps an implant that does internal 
processing, if he can develop one small enough.  The potential for humans, 
if we stick to our present physical form, is pretty limited,  says Warwick. 
 The opportunity for me to become a cyborg is extremely exciting. I can t 
wait to get on with it. 



        The future enters into us long before it happens, the German poet 
Rainer Maria Rilke once said. This is no longer a metaphor. The future is 
entering us. We eat genetically modified food. We submit to implanted 
devices that go well beyond the familiar heart pacemaker. We tinker with 
human tissue, developing artificial bone and skin for transplantation. We 
are on the verge of  smart  prosthetics, such as retinal implants that 
restore vision in damaged eyes. Such devices will ultimately be networked, 
allowing, say, a subcutaneous chip to transmit a person s entire medical 
history to a physician far away. Peter Cochrane, the former chief 
technologist for British Telecom, envisions a world where chip implants are 
commonplace and  as desirable as mobile phones.  Rodney Brooks, the director 
of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, goes even further. Over time, he says,  we will become our 
machines. 

HUMAN HYBRIDS
       When the word  cyborg  first appeared in the middle of the 20th 
century, it was strictly the stuff of science fiction. Everybody knew you 
couldn t put human physiology under mechanical or electronic control. You 
couldn t stitch technology into tissue. The idea of, say, an implant of 
neural circuits inside the skull proposed by Brooks as a cure for cerebellum 
damage would have been at best distasteful. The notion of a hybrid human 
would have seemed like sacrilege.
Today some researchers believe that cyborgs will be possible within 50 
years, or at least that humans will have so many manufactured parts as to be 
virtually indistinguishable from cyborgs.

         That was then. Today some researchers believe that cyborgs will be 
possible within 50 years, or at least that humans will have so many 
manufactured parts as to be virtually indistinguishable from cyborgs. 
Machines might be so assimilated to us or we to them as to raise the most 
fundamental questions. As technology fills you up with synthetic parts, at 
what point do you cease to be fully human? One quarter? One third? Which 
part of us is irreplaceably human, such that if we augmented it with 
technology we would become some other kind of being? The brain? Or is the 
brain merely a conductive medium, our humanity defined more by the content 
of our thought and the intensity of our emotions than by the neural 
circuitry? At bottom lies one critical issue for a technological age: are 
some kinds of knowledge so terrible they simply should not be pursued? If 
there can be such a thing as a philosophical crisis, this will be it. These 
questions, says Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute for Global 
Ethics in Camden, Maine, are especially vexing because they lie at  the 
convergence of three domains technology, politics and ethics that are so far 
hardly on speaking terms. 
        There have always been dangerous technologies. The 20th century, 
which might as well be called the age of industrialized murder, is only the 
most obvious example. But technology is upping the ante by creating fields 
where benign intentions could lead to brutal outcomes. This was the point of 
an article in the April issue of Wired magazine by Bill Joy, the chief 
scientist at Sun Microsystems. Under the title  The Future Doesn t Need Us,  
Joy described advances in three fields: genetic engineering, nanotechnology 
and robotics. The first has created the possibility of gene therapy that 
would at least bring diseases like cancer under control. The second is an 
umbrella term for technologies that manipulate matter on the ultrasmall 
scale of nanometers, or millionths of a millimeter. Nanotechnology would 
enable the creation of novel plant species or new viruses. Finally, robotics 
will eventually raise the possibility of intelligent and self-replicating 
machines whose processes so closely mimic ours that we will wonder if the 
only difference between them and us is that our life form is based on 
carbon.

THE LIMITS OF SILICON
       All three of these technologies depend on a fourth: the continued 
growth in computing power. It s expected that in about 10 years, engineers 
will reach the limits of their ability to put circuitry onto silicon chips. 
But alternatives to silicon are under development. One involves  biological 
computation,  in which DNA or another biological molecule serves as a 
processing medium. Another derives from the counterintuitive principles of 
quantum mechanics: working at the subatomic level, a quantum computer could 
exist in multiple states at the same time, enabling multiple calculations in 
parallel. So promising are these ideas that Joy expects the computers of 
2040 to be a million times faster than today s machines. Putting it another 
way, he says, a calculation that now would take a lifetime could be carried 
out in half an hour.
        At these speeds, technology acquires the inexorability of the ocean 
tides. But is human civilization equipped to keep pace? Engineers tend to 
associate history with progress. But what in our history inspires confidence 
in our ability to channel technology away from destructive uses?  Technology 
is evolving a thousand times faster than our ability to change our social 
institutions,  says Joy.
        But if bioengineering really can  turn off  cancer cells, what s 
wrong with that? If nanotechnology can develop devices that extend our 
physically active lives for decades, is that a problem? If robots can for 
most purposes end our need to do physical labor, should we object? Joy s 
answer was that  with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, 
individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, 
concomitantly, great danger.  Unlike 20th-century technologies like nuclear 
weapons, which were self-limiting because they depended on scarce and 
expensive raw materials, the new technologies could produce  accidents and 
abuses [that] are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups... 
Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.  And, he added,  this 
destructiveness [will] be hugely amplified by the power of 
self-replication.  Nanotechnology could create viruses that reproduce 
uncontrollably and blanket the planet. Intelligent robots could make copies 
of themselves and eventually displace people. The extinction of the human 
species, Joy wrote, is all too conceivable.
        The article was an instant sensation (except in Silicon Valley, 
where, Joy says,  dot-bomb has displaced any other topic ). Theologian 
Leonard Sweet of Drew University called it  the opening salvo of the 21st 
century.  Scientists took it seriously, especially those who had worked on 
advanced weapons programs; in the famous words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 
they had  known sin.  Besides, the writer was not some Luddite from the 
Birkenstock-and-health-food set. As the developer of high-end computer 
architectures going back more than 20 years, Joy had credibility. Still, 
many in the technology sector thought he overstated his case.  The 
science-fiction version of nanotechnology is very different from real 
nanotechnology,  Rodney Brooks said pointedly at the recent Camden 
Technology Conference in Maine. Joy himself says that  if your concern is 
that somebody will program Frankenstein s monster, your concern is probably 
misplaced. 



         One problem is that Joy was asking his colleagues to think 50 years 
out. That is too far, says Sherry Turkle, a social psychologist at MIT and 
the author of  Life on the Screen.  Her own work is at ground level, 
focusing now on robotic dolls, the first commercial version of which came 
out last month from Hasbro. My Real Baby uses an array of sensors to detect 
light and motion, as well as when her skin is being touched. According to 
codeveloper iRobot of Somerville, Massachusetts, she  knows  when she s 
being hugged, rocked and even burped. She can respond in an  emotionlike  
way, with one of hundreds of facial expressions, and can draw on billions of 
different sound combinations. She seems to have moods. She requires 
 nurture.  In other words, she presents herself to a child as a being of 
equal dignity and worth. My Real Baby is a seductive machine, says Turkle: 
 We have to fear not so much the computers as our responses not so much that 
the computers are going to take over as that we ll become like the 
computers... that we ll begin to experience ourselves as machines. 

NO SOUL?
        So what?  say many researchers in the fields of artificial 
intelligence and robotics. Brooks, for one, foresees a gradual convergence 
of humans and intelligent implants, to the point that the difference between 
the two becomes both physiologically and philosophically meaningless. Even 
with humans, he says,  there is nothing beyond physical principles going on. 
There is no soul, no elixir of life, nothing beyond molecules working 
together in the mindless, fixed ways that the physics of their constituent 
particles dictates. 
        Enter philosophy. The most common definitions of  human  proceed 
from an assertion of an intelligence unique to us, but this is precisely 
what technology is eroding. Is there a type of intelligence computers could 
not acquire? Is, for example, intelligence the capacity to innovate? Is it 
the ability to criticize your own projects and values in computing terms, 
the ability to override your instruction set? How about the ability to 
create by accident? Great innovations can occur ambiguously: one winner of 
this year s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was Hideki Shirakawa, whose laboratory 
mistake led to the development of conductive polymers. If cyborgs are less 
error-prone than humans, might they be less creative? And what about sheer 
fancifulness? Albert Einstein always said that thinking like a child was 
what enabled him to hit upon the theory of relativity.
        In the end, the measure of humanity is a philosophical matter. 
Philosophy, however, has almost nothing to say about such things. Academic 
philosophers spent much of the last century bankrupting their discipline. 
With a few honorable exceptions, they preoccupied themselves with questions 
of method and nomenclature, such as: under what linguistic conditions would 
it be meaningful to ask about the definition of  the human ? As Bernard 
Williams wrote in his 1972 book  Morality :  Contemporary moral philosophy 
has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral 
issues at all.    Newsweek.MSNBC.com





        Who, then, can speak on moral issues? Certainly not the engineers. 
Ellen Ullman, a former computer programmer and the author of the 1997 book 
 Close to the Machine: Technology and Its Discontents,  says that  the 
problem is not the technology, which in any event can t be stopped. The 
problem is that engineers are making decisions for the rest of us.  
Programmers are hired guns, she says, and rarely understand in a nuanced way 
their clients  actual work. They are, she says, the last people  to 
understand what is an acceptable risk. 
        This will be the great decision of the next decade. It goes well 
beyond the mere commercial viability of new technologies, though many will 
think that is all we need to know. It goes to who we think we are. One way: 
every possibility is welcome, no matter how dangerous, because we are a 
species that loves knowledge. The other: we don t want to be overcome by 
technology.
        But that s what it means to be human. You have a choice. Take your 
pick.

         2000 Newsweek, Inc.


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15218