To alarmists, the rise of the machines must stoke inhuman levels of anxiety. And why not? Technology can be truly discomforting. The US government's top secret Darpa labs are currently improving robots' behavioral learning and anomaly detection programs, both of which will make them "smarter" and more efficient killing machines, literally; auto manufacturers are working on self-driving cars like those that run us down in Daniel H Wilson's predictably plotted thriller Robopocalypse; and just this month word spread that European researchers turned on Raputya, an "internet for computers" that bears an uncanny resemblance to Skynet, the fictional super-computer that launched Terminator into our pop culture landscape.
But to those who embrace technology, these upgrades aren't harbingers hellbent on destroying human life. They're portals into a brighter human future. Such technoptimists believe that as computers evolve, so will we. Google Glass is but the beginning of how technology will be meshed onto our bodies. Researchers are already hyping "e-memory" implants that could make Total Recall a reality; and the US Food and Drug Administration recently approved artificial retinas that use video processors and electrodes give partial sight to the blind, just one of the many examples of how "you", the human, can merge with "them", the machines. Futurist Kurzweil believes that nanotechnology will be able to rebuild injured humans.
"It's not us versus them," he told the New York Times. "We've created these tools to overcome our limitations."
If that's the case, the most transcendental merger between man and machine will be between silicon chips and our own motherboard, the brain, a long misunderstood organ that's suddenly getting fresh attention. The US National Institutes of Health hopes $3bn will help lay out the Brain Activity Map, a cartographical layout announced by Barack Obama this month that will dwarf the Human Genome Project in scope and size.
The European Union is putting up over $1bn for a similar, 10-year undertaking unimaginatively called the Human Brain Project, and the NIH''s other expedition into gray matter, the Human Connectome Project, recently released two tetrabytes of data, a sliver of the amount of data the brain could hold: 100 tetrabytes by some estimates. That's 104,857,600 megabytes. To give you an idea of how far away we are from finish: doctors have yet to completely map a mouse brain, or even a fruit fly's.
This is all very exciting for advocates of "mind uploading", a fantastical, as-of-now hypothetical process by which we would transfer our organic brains, including memories, personalities, tastes and proclivities into artificial bodies, or at least disk drives. According to them, once we have a clearer map of the brain and its memory drives, we can use existing technology to freeze or otherwise preserve our brains, wait 100, 200 or even 1,000 years for science to take its course and be awakened in a future, our experiences uploaded into an artificial body.
Dr Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who maps fruit fly brains by day and advocates for the independent Brain Preservation Foundation by night, says such a process is the final frontier in breaking the barrier between man and machine. "Mind uploading technology is just breaking the barrier," he says. "If you're really jealous of what your avatar is doing, if you're really jealous of your computer's memory, then mind uploading is the logical conclusion; it's saying: 'Okay, I won't beat them, I'll join them.'"
沒有留言:
張貼留言