[CS-FSLUG] NI: Scary predictions!
Fred A. Miller
fmiller at lightlink.com
Fri Jun 10 11:23:37 CDT 2005
Britain's leading thinker on the future offers an extraordinary vision of
life in the next 45 years.
Airplanes will be too afraid to crash, yogurts will wish you good morning
before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers,
promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich.
These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal
ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson,
head of the futurology unit at BT.
'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able
to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career
problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's
feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when
it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology
is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'
Pearson, 44, has formed his mind-boggling vision of the future after
graduating in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, spending four
years working in missile design and the past 20 years working in optical
networks, broadband network evolution and cybernetics in BT's laboratories.
He admits his prophecies are both 'very exciting' and 'very scary'.
He believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the
rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released
the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than
previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a
human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years
ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.'
The world's fastest computer, IBM's BlueGene, can perform 70.72 trillion
calculations per second (teraflops) and is accelerating all the time. But
anyone who believes in the uniqueness of consciousness or the soul will find
Pearson's next suggestion hard to swallow. 'We're already looking at how you
might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious. There are
quite a lot of us now who believe it's entirely feasible.
'We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same
directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is
based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other
parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis.
Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're
trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion
that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of
intelligence before 2020.'
He continued: 'It would definitely have emotions - that's one of the primary
reasons for doing it. If I'm on an aeroplane I want the computer to be more
terrified of crashing than I am so it does everything to stay in the air
until it's supposed to be on the ground.
'You can also start automating an awful lots of jobs. Instead of phoning up a
call centre and getting a machine that says, "Type 1 for this and 2 for that
and 3 for the other," if you had machine personalities you could have any
number of call staff, so you can be dealt with without ever waiting in a
queue at a call centre again.'
Pearson, from Whitehaven in Cumbria, collaborates on technology with some
developers and keeps a watching brief on advances around the world. He
concedes the need to debate the implications of progress. 'You need a
completely global debate. Whether we should be building machines as smart as
people is a really big one. Whether we should be allowed to modify bacteria
to assemble electronic circuitry and make themselves smart is already being
researched.
'We can already use DNA, for example, to make electronic circuits so it's
possible to think of a smart yoghurt some time after 2020 or 2025, where the
yoghurt has got a whole stack of electronics in every single bacterium. You
could have a conversation with your strawberry yogurt before you eat it.'
In the shorter term, Pearson identifies the next phase of progress as 'ambient
intelligence': chips with everything. He explained: 'For example, if you have
a pollen count sensor in your car you take some antihistamine before you get
out. Chips will come small enough that you can start impregnating them into
the skin. We're talking about video tattoos as very, very thin sheets of
polymer that you just literally stick on to the skin and they stay there for
several days. You could even build in cellphones and connect it to the
network, use it as a video phone and download videos or receive emails.'
Philips, the electronics giant, is developing the world's first rollable
display which is just a millimetre thick and has a 12.5cm screen which can be
wrapped around the arm. It expects to start production within two years.
The next age, he predicts, will be that of 'simplicity' in around 2013-2015.
'This is where the IT has actually become mature enough that people will be
able to drive it without having to go on a training course.
'Forget this notion that you have to have one single chip in the computer
which does everything. Why not just get a stack of little self-organising
chips in a box and they'll hook up and do it themselves. It won't be able to
get any viruses because most of the operating system will be stored in
hardware which the hackers can't write to. If your machine starts going
wrong, you just push a button and it's reset to the factory setting.'
Pearson's third age is 'virtual worlds' in around 2020. 'We will spend a lot
of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer
generated environments to socialise and do business in. When technology gives
you a life-size 3D image and the links to your nervous system allow you to
shake hands, it's like being in the other person's office. It's impossible to
believe that won't be the normal way of communicating.
Source: The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1489635,00.html
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