From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Sat Sep 23 2000 - 10:37:00 MDT
http://www.discover.com/oct_00/featworld.html
13. Nanotechnology disaster Before you've even gotten the keyboard dirty, your
home computer is obsolete, largely because of incredibly rapid progress in
miniaturizing circuits on silicon chips. Engineers are using the same technology
to build crude, atomic-scale machines, inventing a new field as they go called
nanotechnology. Within a few decades, maybe sooner, it should be possible to
build microscopic robots that can assemble and replicate themselves. They might
perform surgery from inside a patient, build any desired product from simple raw
materials, or explore other worlds. All well and good if the technology works as
intended. Then again, consider what K. Eric Drexler of the Foresight Institute
calls the "grey goo problem" in his book Engines of Creation, a cult favorite
among the nanotech set. After an industrial accident, he writes, bacteria-sized
machines, "could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the
biosphere to dust in a matter of days." And Drexler is actually a strong
proponent of the technology. More pessimistic souls, such as Bill Joy, a
cofounder of Sun Microsystems, envision nano-machines as the perfect precision
military or terrorist tools.
16. Robots take over People create smart robots, which turn against us and take
over the world. Yawn. We've seen this in movies, TV, and comic books for
decades. After all these years, look around and still- no smart robots. Yet Hans
Moravec, one of the founders of the robotics department of Carnegie Mellon
University, remains a believer. By 2040, he predicts, machines will match human
intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they'll get even better. He
envisions an eventual symbiotic relationship between human and machine, with the
two merging into "postbiologicals" capable of vastly expanding their
intellectual power. Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence expert at MIT,
foresees a similar future: People will download their brains into
computer-enhanced mechanical surrogates and log into nearly boundless files of
information and experience. Whether this counts as the end of humanity or the
next stage in evolution depends on your point of view. Minsky's vision might
sound vaguely familiar. After the first virtual-reality machines hit the
marketplace around 1989, feverish journalists hailed them as electronic LSD,
trippy illusion machines that might entice the user in and then never let him
out. Sociologists fretted that our culture, maybe even our species, would
whither away. When the actual experience of virtual reality turned out to be
more like trying to play Pac-Man with a bowling ball taped to your head, the
talk died down. To his credit, Minsky recognizes that the merger of human and
machine lies quite a few years away.
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