The Future is Weirder Than we Imagine
You know, while writing my third article in my Artificial Intelligence series for The Millennium Crossroads of the Mind's Eye i've been delving into the future ethical implications of such technology in our society, and I'm seeing some really strange things happening in the future, probably around half a century or more away but nevertheless, people of tomorrow are going to be very very strange compared to how we are today.
Initially during the early years of integration there is going to be a huge debate and a lot of protests regarding AI and especially intelligent androids that will be walking around in public, most often doing chores people once did. As well the android prostitution industry will explode, probably the first major infusion of this technology will be spawned by agencies who basically rent out an sex android to you for a fee. It will exist within a legal grey area that will come under some serious debate in the future.
Now when you think of an Android maybe you're thinking of something like the Terminator, however when there is a great need for something and there is a massive profit to be made from it, companies will go to any lengths to achieve something that seems impossible or very difficult. I do belive that there will come a day when an android with an Artifiical brain will be physically indestinguishable from a human, thus the vast source of income that will be tapped with the android prostitution industry.
Then as these artifiical beings get reproduced more cheaply and efficiently, it will become a status symbol to own one, kind of like the Big Screen TV's and SUV's of today. People will have androids to do their house chores, but of course there will be husbands who will be cheating on their wives with these beings, and as I take the progression of things out even more years, expect a time when marriage is an antiquated tradition, instead replaced by a kind of intellectual bond, and artificial android sex partners, with children being chosen out of a catalogue of genetic traits by the two parents. I computer will combine and sequence the appropriate genes and fertilize the two reproductive cells in a controlled environment. Artificial wombs? It seems outlandish to me, but there's nothing saying that science won't make artificial wombs possible. I don't think there will be artifical wombs at first, but the genetically engineered zygote will be implanted into the woman to grow naturally into a better than healthy baby.
It's weird because as time passes sex between two humans might end up being considered dirty and less sophisticated in the most modern of tomorrow's cultures. I also forsee hedonistic orgies between humans and androids commonplace as recreational activity.
People of the future will be far more healthier than we are, however they will be inherantly lazier than we are. They won't have to go to the grocery store, or go to the office, or build roads, or even politiicans won't have to leave their homes, AI software systems, AI Androids, and Teleconferencing will do all these things for people. You won't have call centers for customer support, you'll just talk to an AI program that can completely understand human speech and can think on it's own. I imagine humans will basically consider work persuing their creative talents, and spending vast amounts of time learning or traveling and mingling. An AI android infrastructure will be integrated completely into society someday, and something akin to the Department of Transportation or the Department of Energy will be involved in overseeing the operation and distribution of these "slaves."
I can't believe how much that it will innundate our society. They will be programmed to fulfill just about every role a human being would have filled in the past, and leave us to basically just wallow in our culture of automation.
I do believe that it will be determined that AI might get smarter than the human brain and there will be "limiters' placed on how intelligent a machine can be, or for that matter what emotions it is allowed to display. Mass produced androids will be governed by a specific set of guidelines or laws instituted by the government. However there will be achievements in advanced AI brains either through controlled experiment or direct tampering that will result in "unlimited" artificial minds, and such beings might be brought into society as an experiment.
You've got to think about two things when you progress current technology that far into the future. What need will it fulfill? and How will it be profitable?
The one thing that bugs me is, that if all these AI machines, software systems, and androids are doing all the work, then how will humans have any economy at all? How can work = money in the future? I mean will art = money, or music = money, or philosophy = money? I'm sure there will still be a need for scientists to discover new technologies, however with the incredible capacity of computers of tomorrow, it won't be too far fetched of an idea to imagine a computer capable of modeling the physics of the entire galaxy right down to a single subatomic particle. Today we have the Earth Simulator that models the pattern of Earth's weather and other various natural phenomena (Approx 36 Teraflops), however a computer like this tomorrow will be equivalent to pocket calculator of today. What will we be doing with such vast amounts of computational ability?
What sickening level of knowledge will we gain from computers that are more advanced that a million human brains!
Edited by: VIDEO GAMER X 1 at: 10/22/03 4:17 am
Re: The Future is Weirder Than we Imagine
You're probably thinking to yourself how absurd an idea of Androids running around everywhere sounds, and love slaves and the like, but you know here's an example that applies all to well, and I just can't ignore it.
Kids these days. When I talk to kids and teenagers in school right now, they tell me how just about everyone has to have a color screen flip cell phone with a camera, and how people are beinging laptops to class or teachers pass them out in class, and how people keep in touch with all their friends over an instant messanger, and are downloading MP3's to their MP3 player or Burning discs, etc, and I think to myself - ah, when I was in school, nobody had cell phones, no kid had a laptop because they were rediculously expensive and impractical, and there was no such thing as Instant Messanger, Free music was a fantasy, and creating your own CD was as outlandish as the stuff on Star Trek. But ahh, it's all commonplace now, and all these kids are growing up with this technology like it's no big deal. For crying out loud I talked to a teenager who had never played a Super Nintendo! He had never seen 2-dimensional video games! My jaw kind of dropped and I thought, holy $hit, I'm grown up now, and have entered the future I used to wonder about.
So the future I'm seeing now, is more than just an excersize in intellectual philosophy, and has a good deal of viability to it following the initial model of fulfilling a need and maximizing profitablity.
I'm just curious how this will all play out, somewhere around 2020 some of what I've spoke about AI will start to take place, and by 2050 our society may be innundated, and by 2100? People in first world countries will likely be the weird genetically engineered self-indulgent intellectual creative hedonistists I described earlier. Will we even muster up the umph to even bother boarding the spaceships our machines build for us or will we wither away as a race into an oblivion of pleasure.
Edited by: VIDEO GAMER X 1 at: 10/22/03 4:41 am
Abuelo RPG Pain in the ass forget it
(10/22/03 5:01 pm) Reply
Re: The Future is Weirder Than we Imagine
I´m gonna warm up to read all 3 posts.
--------------------- Sorry if i wrote something incorrectly, remember that i´m Venezuelan and my first languaje is the spanish...
Re: The Future is Weirder Than we Imagine
Only one thing is certain: Many years into the future, we'll all still be sitting on our asses posting at The Board, complaining about our wives and reminiscing about the days when keyboards and text chat were still commonplace. I hope we get an android to post here in the future.
Re: dalfkdjas
Well I think (and hope) that the development of AI to the point where it starts to replace human beings daily work ethic would somewhat coincide with the coming of the Space Age.
While not much money would be made on Earth's surface doing petty labor, the time would soon come where some sort of engine or other device with an unlimited power source that can be installed on space-ferring vehicles so that they can travel to other planets without having to worry about running out of fueling resources, and at a speed where we don't have to cryogenically freeze ourselves for the entire journey. It would also be nice if such a system allowed us to make interstellar "jumps" to other galaxies.
If this were to happen while AI is fully developed, it would be just like Columbus discovering the New World - people would flock out to space in the hopes of finding riches and whatnot. You could fly out to some distant remote planet that nobody even knew existed, find out it's entire core was made of some precious resource (or even an unknown resource)and then claim the planet for your own since you were the first to set foot on it.
On the flipside, gigantic corporations would also attempt to seek out and colonize planets rich with materials, and then take them back to Earth for a major profit. This would then lead to more risky individuals mounting weapons onto their ships and pirating the goods and selling it to Earth themselves. So then you would need either an interstellar police force, or maybe just let the corporations have their own internal police forces to protect their convoys.
Either way, the point is that when space colonization takes off, there won't be a shortage of opportunity for humans at all - despite how overwhelming the presence of AI is. Think of Star Wars - there was loads of robots yet humans and other alien species still made their way in life - would such a concept be different for our world?
Seriously, if an "unlimited" power supply was found and perfect AI was developped, there would be no need for capatalism anymore. If Robots could think like a person, there's no job they wouldn't be able to do, and everyone else would be free to sit on their asses all day.
Re: dalfkdjas
...which would allow an evil dictator type to take over our helpless lazy asses overnight with an army of killer androids.
Justice? Who asks for justice? We make our own justice. We make it here...win or die. Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.
Duke Leto Atreides, Dune
Re: dalfkdjas
When I think about the people of tomorrow, and I mean a century from now at least, their equivalent of a retard or stupid person will be someone with a 120 IQ, why? Because when you can insert a specific gene that enhances brain capacity or repair a gene that causes mental illness or a propensity toward violence etc, then you will essentially be able to model humans to grow closer to machinelike perfection. Add to that, that an average child will be as intelligent as today's college professors with an integration of bionic neural interfacing that can infuse information into their brain thus eliminating the need for school. What confounds me on this one is, we less evolved humans of today must have experience in order to learn everything in life, but how in the hell can you just inject knowledge and experience into someone's brain without them actually experiencing it? How can the brain comprehend or form the necessary interneural connections to "save" the information into memory? As well, would just blasting the brain with a pile of data make someone go crazy and result in severe mental instability? I imagine these are questions science will answer in the future, but they exist on the fringes of anything I can even grasp, even with what I know about neurology and digital technology however I must emphasize: If there is a need or a desire to do something that is possible, no matter how improbable it may seem today, it will be done someday especially if it is profitable.
Re: dalfkdjas
One thing that what I have been describing does not address is the divide between first world countries and poor countries. Will the divide in evolution become wider and wider between the "haves" and the "have nots" or will AI become so diffused throughout all of humanity that basically the standard of living for every human person is virtually identical? There are again huge ethical debates here, who will benefit from such miraculous technologies like genetic engineering, AI, and nanotechnology? I wonder about the appearance of another Hitler type.
In Star Trek, Khan Noonian Soong, was essentially a by product of eugenics, the science of persuing human perfection through biological modification. Khan was exceptionally intelligent (Although not as smart as Kirk, cause he got his ass kicked in the U.S.S. Reliant. but that was all for drama) and supposedly physically superior. Khan became this ruthless dictator and banded with all the other people that were products of Eugenics like him and fought the regular human beings, however humanity apparently was able to defeat them, and Khan and his followers escaped aboard the Botany Bay and drifted in space until the Enterprise Found him in cryogenic statis a couple centuries later. (If you care at all about watching the whole Khan story, he appears an original series episode, and then later in the move Star Trek II.)
What the whole Khan example shows is another possibility of genetic engineering, if you create superior people and only a limited amount of people are superior, then you create a disparity. Wouldn't such beings feel superior and assume that the should be in control of the inferior masses?
Re: dalfkdjas
I think the trend of small, personal devices that do lots of fun stuff is gona continue on until we run into the next big technological revolution, which at this rate seems like it's gona be quantum computing. I remember reading an article a while back about how by the end of the decade, computer speeds will be near 50-100GHz, MRam will fully boot computers in seconds, games will look photo-realistic, and the ideas of tele-immersion and stuff like that will be becoming a serious posibility. By 2010, we're also supposed to have developed devices that can fit on top of your head and go over your eye, and be able to do things like scan what people look like, and replicate what a PDA does today. Kinda like those eye things on DBZ.
Re: dalfkdjas
Yeah, you're talking about two technological advances: Ocular displays, and Augmented Reality. Currently both are under institutional study, but Augmented reality will essentially augment the human brain and act as a sub system to help it out by recording people's faces for later recollection, and wirelessly synching personal bio data in associationg with the image. As well augmented reality will allow for GPS integrated mapping where data will be superimposed over reality within your eye's field of view. You'll be able to discover the menu of a restaurant just by looking at it, or phantom billboards and ads will pop up within your field of vision. Holy $hit "reality spam" ugh, shudder... Anyway, this will also allow for real time translation of images in the field of view, for example if you saw a sign written in Japanese, the information would be converted to English and a subtitle might appear in your field of view with the English Translation. Dating with augmented reality will be a lot less confusing as it is today. If a girl is interested in dating, her bio will say so if you look at her and have that mode activated, so you'll know if she single, hetero, bi, or lez without even saying a word to her. There are privacy concerns in this, but enough people born within the technology and computer age will likely do it for benefits like the ones I outlined above. Dunkinbean is about on target on where computers are going by the end of the decade, but I wouldn't imagine we would see the real big benefits of augmented reality until into the 2010's.
Re: dalfkdjas
What amazes me is how much we can talk about these technolgies as being around the corner, when in all the movies and TV shows of the 20th century portrayed all this in the future. I mean I used to pine away about how cool it would be to have a Kirk communicator and walk around outside and be able to just talk to someone far away, and well I have one now thanks to cell phones. I used to imagine GPS voice controlled navigation and stuff similar to Night Rider's Kit, and well a lot of cars now have screens inside with GPS voice controlled navigation, but uh, the cars don't have their own AI yet, oh well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad. I used to imagine what it would be like to see 3-D video games almost as real as television, and I now play them. I used to drool at the flat screen displays in the Enterprise and I now own one. I used to marvel at those PADD's the crew carried around, and I now own a PDA. I used to think that someday they would make movies on CD sized discs, and they made DVD's. Change is happening so fast, that the Ocular Computers, Augmented Reality, and A.I. will be no big deal to people of tommorrow, heck those people will be us, just a lot older and hopefully wiser. Our children will not know of "blowing on the connectors" before played a grany 2-D video game, nor will they invision a computer that doesn't talk back to them, or a world without Email and Instant Messanger. Our kids might give us a funny look when we talk about TV's that are not as thin as a pencil or pine away for the nostaligia of a cassette player and a copy of Doom for DOS.
Re: dalfkdjas
Dude, they thought that we'd be colonizing space and robots would be a household thing by now a few decades ago...don't you go making the same mistake they did and assuming that all this new technology is just around the corner. There are always delays, especially when you're talking about huge, completely new technologies like true A.I. and genetic engineering. You really can't predict this stuff, I think, and you talking as if this is all fact. Who's to say that it is even feasible at all to, say, make a machine in the true likeness of a human mind?
Meh.
Justice? Who asks for justice? We make our own justice. We make it here...win or die. Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.
Duke Leto Atreides, Dune
at: 10/22/03 7:38 pm
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