The coming artilect wars.
Species dominance in the 21st century.
Hugo de Garis on artificial intelligence and artificial intellects (artilects) in the coming century.
There is a brilliant article on Forbes about the coming artilect wars [1].
Hugo de Garis [2] is currently working in Wuhan, China, directing the building of China's first artificial brain (And hoping to setup a CABA, Chinese Artificial Brain Administration, to build artificial brains for the chinese home robot industry and other applications).
Hugo De Garis.
According to Hugo de Garis: ''It is likely that humanity will be able to build artilects with mental capacities that are literally trillions upon trillions of times above the human level. Humanity will then have to choose whether to become the No. 2 species on the planet or not.''
Taking it for granted that ''..in about a decade there will be a thriving artificial brain industry, and nearly everyone will have a home robot, which will be upgraded every two or three years. Each new home robot generation will be smarter and more useful than the previous generation, so that as the gap between the human intelligence level and the artificial intelligence level gets smaller every year, the species dominance debate will heat up. Millions of people will be asking such questions as: Can the machines become smarter than humans? Is that a good thing?''.
De Garis thinks that humanity will split into three fractions:
The Cosmists will be in favor of building these godlike machines (the artilects), who would be immortal, think a million times faster than humans, have unlimited memory, go anywhere, do anything and take any shape.
The Terrans will be opposed to the construction of artilects, fearing that in a highly advanced form, the artilects may decide to wipe us out (or keep us a pets, see e.g. Moravec [3] for more on AI acceleration, and what might become possible).
To ensure that the probability that this might happen is zero, the Terrans will insist that the artilects are never built in the first place.
The Cyborgists will want to become artilect gods themselves by adding artilectual components to their own brains, thus avoiding the conflict between the Cosmists and the Terrans.
Hugo de Garis asks us to ''
imagine a world in which the cyborgs become increasingly prevalent. A young mother who has just given birth may choose to add a grain of artilectual sand to her newly born baby's brain, converting it into an artilect. There is so much computing capacity in that grain of sand that she has effectively ''killed'' her baby. It is no longer human, but an artilect in human disguise.''
And here he sees a war coming: ''The ''Artilect War'', not between the artilects and human beings, as in the movie Terminator, but between the Terrans, Cosmists and Cyborgists.''
A war about the very survial of Homo Sapiens. Or, at the very least, about what it means to be human. Indeed, forward we march to meet the topological quantum computing [4] artilects...
Posterous: [5]
-Simon
Simon Laub
www.simonlaub.net