Reading - Part 4

Artificial Intelligence

As soon as a computer achieves a level of intelligence comparable to human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. A key advantage is that when one computer learns a skill or gains an insight, it is able to share that wisdom immediately with billions of other machines. My knowledge, skills and memories are embedded in a vast pattern of neurotransmitter concentrations and interneuronal connections and cannot be quickly accessed or transmitted. But when we construct the non-biological equivalents of human neuron clusters, we will almost certainly include built-in, quick-downloading ports.

However, as Moore's law reaches its limit and computing power no longer doubles roughly every 12 to 18 months, conventional silicon chips may not be able to deliver the kind of processing power needed to stimulate the human brain. More important, however, is the software of intelligence. There is no reason why we cannot reverse-engineer the human brain and copy its design. We can peer inside someone's brain today with non-invasive scanners. In the future, to capture the salient neural details of the human brain, the most practical approach would be to scan it from inside.

By 2030, nanobot technology should be available for brain scanning. Nanobots are robots that are the size of human blood cells or even smaller. Billions of them could travel through every brain capillary scanning neural details and compile a brain-scan database. Armed with this information, we can design biologically inspired recreations of the methods used by the human brain. We will be in a position to create highly detailed maps of the human brain - including all the neural details that play a role in the behaviour and functionality of the brain and to re-create these designs in suitable advanced neural computers. By that time, computers will greatly exceed the basic computational power of the human brain. The result will be machines that combine the complex and rich skills of humans with the speed, accuracy and knowledge-sharing ability that machines excel in.

The same nanobots that will scan our brains will also be able to expand our thinking and our experiences. Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality by suppressing inputs coming from the real senses and replacing them with the signals that would be appropriate for a virtual environment.

By 2040, "going to an Internet website" will mean entering a virtual-reality environment. The implant will generate the streams of sensory input that would otherwise come from our real senses, thus creating an all-encompassing virtual environment that will respond to the behaviour of our own virtual body (and those of others) in that environment.