A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from
becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as
we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University
in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what
to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our
planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk
Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended
consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines
that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be
very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of
Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong,
you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the
human species."
Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker
of transhumanism, a movement that advocates not only the study of the
potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to
human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be
used to make the very act of living better.
"We want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that," Bostrom said.
Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate an era in which
biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and
other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our
intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even
enhance our emotional well-being.
The end result would be a new
form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills
so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as
humans.
"We will begin to use science and technology not just to
manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as
well," Bostrom said. "The changes will be faster and more profound than
the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of
years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution."
Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary
biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight
years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."
Other experts are already getting ready for what they say could be a
radical transformation of the human race in as little as two decades.
"This will happen faster than people realize," said Dr. Ray Kurzweil,
an inventor and futurist who calculates technology trends using what he
calls the law of accelerating returns, a mathematical concept that
measures the exponential growth of technological evolution.
In
the 1980s, Kurzweil predicted that a tiny handheld device would be
invented early in the 21st century, allowing blind people to read
documents from anywhere at anytime; this year, such a device was
publicly unveiled. He also anticipated the explosive growth of the
Internet in the 1990s.
Now, Kurzweil is predicting the arrival
of something called the Singularity, which he defines in his book on
the subject as "the culmination of the merger of our biological
thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that
is still human but that transcends our biological roots."
"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality," he writes.
Singularity will approach at an accelerating rate as human-created
technologies become exponentially smaller and increasingly powerful and
as fields such as biology and medicine are understood more and more in
terms of information processes that can be simulated with computers.
By the 2030s, Kurzweil said, humans will become more non-biological
than biological, capable of uploading our minds onto the Internet,
living in various virtual worlds and even avoiding aging and evading
death.
In the 2040s, Kurzweil predicts that non-biological
intelligence will be billions of times better than the biological
intelligence humans have today, possibly rendering our present brains
obsolete.
"Our brains are a million times slower than
electronics," Kurzweil said. "We will increasingly become software
entities if you go out enough decades."
This movement towards
the merger of man and machine, according to Kurzweil, is already
starting to happen and is most visible in the field of biotechnology.
As scientists gain deeper insights into the genetic processes that
underlie life, they are able to effectively reprogram human biology
through the development of new forms of gene therapies and medications
capable of turning on or off enzymes and RNA interference, or gene
silencing.
"Biology and health and medicine used to be hit or
miss," Kurzweil sad. "It wasn't based on any coherent theory about how
it works."
The emerging biotechnology revolution will lead to at
least a thousand new drugs that could do anything from slow down the
process of aging to reverse the onset of diseases, like heart disease
and cancer, Kurzweil said.
By 2020, Kurzweil predicts a second
revolution in the area of nanotechnology. According to his
calculations, it is already showing signs of exponential growth as
scientists begin to test first generation nanobots that can cure Type 1
diabetes in rats or heal spinal cord injuries in mice.
One
scientist is developing something called a respirocyte, a robotic red
blood cell that, if injected into the bloodstream, would allow humans
to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit
at the bottom of a swimming pool for hours at a time.
Other researchers are developing nanoparticles that can locate tumors and one day even eradicate them.
And some Parkinson's patients now have pea-sized computers implanted in
their brains that replace neurons destroyed by the disease; new
software can be downloaded to the mini computers from outside the human
body.
"Nanotechnology will not just be used to reprogram but to
transcend biology and go beyond its limitations by merging with
non-biological systems," Kurzweil said. "If we rebuild biological
systems with nanotechnology, we can go beyond its limits."
The
final revolution leading to the advent of Singularity will be the
creation of artificial intelligence, or superintelligence, which,
according to Kurzweil, could be capable of solving many of our biggest
threats, like environmental destruction, poverty and disease.
"A
more intelligent process will inherently outcompete one that is less
intelligent, making intelligence the most powerful force in the
universe," Kurzweil writes.
Yet the invention of so many
high-powered technologies and the possibility of merging these new
technologies with humans may pose both peril and promise for the future
of mankind.
"I think there are grave dangers," Kurzweil said. "Technology has always been a double-edged sword."
via edition.cnn
