Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind

Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind

Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children , Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine. This is science fiction without the fiction--and more mind-bending than anything you ever saw on Star Trek . Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a not-too-distant future in which robots of superhuman intelligence have picked up the evolutionary baton from their human creators and headed out into space to colonize the universe. This isn't anything that a million sci-fi paperbacks haven't already envisioned. The difference lies in Moravec's practical-minded mapping of the technological, economic, and social steps that could lead to that vision. Starting with the modest accomplishments of contemporary robotics research, he projects a likely course for the next 40 years of robot development, predicting the rise of superintelligent, creative, emotionally complex cyberbeings and the end of human labor by the middle of the next century. After Moravec makes this point, his projections start to get really wild: robot corporations will take up residence in outer space with rogue cyborgs; planet-size robots will cruise the solar system looking for smaller bots to assimilate; and eventually every atom in the entire galaxy will be transformed into data-storage space, with a full-scale simulation of human civilization running as a subroutine somewhere. His last chapter, which mingles the latest in avant-garde physics with hints of Borges's most intoxicating metaphysical conceits, is a breathtaking piece of hallucinatory eschatology. Moravec concludes by reminding us that even the wildest long-range predictions about the technological future never turn out to be as unhinged as they should have been. --Julian Dibbell Given the ever-increasing speed and memory size available to computer scientists, Moravec, who founded Carnegie Mellon's major robotics program, predicts that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2050. He argues further that it is only a matter of time before we have computer simulations that will substitute for human functionality. (Yes, robots will take over the work force, but ultimately humans will benefit from a fully automated economy.) Moravec considers the various arguments, philosophical and otherwise, that have been made regarding whether computers can "think" and devotes a fair amount of coverage to questions Turing raised 50 years ago. His comparison of libraries to knowledge bases is simplistic?apparently, Moravec doesn't see any intellectual component to cataloging?but overall his interpretations are imaginative and his arguments interesting if not always convincing. There will probably be a fairly broad audience for this work.?Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Moravec, founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, foresees big things for robots. "Barring cataclysms, I consider the development of intelligent machines a near-term inevitability." First- generation universal robots, with lizard-scale intelligence, will be at hand by 2010, he says. No more than 30 years later, fourth-generation robots will have human-scale processing power. "The fourth robot generation ... will have human perceptual and motor abilities and superior reasoning powers. They could replace us in every essential task and, in principl