I for one welcome our dancing robot overlords - February 19, 2008
As hundreds of movies have gleefully told us, our eventual subjugation by robots is inevitable. According to a new interview with Ray Kurzweil we’ll be helping by implanting them into our own brains (BBC).
Founder of the Kurzweil Technologies company, Kurzweil is a futurologist who has actually got things right in the past including when computers would beat humans at chess. So his claims may stand a closer look. As well as speculating that we will soon be embedding nano-robots into our bodies, he thinks machines themselves will achieve ‘human level intelligence’ by 2029.
“We’re already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. … We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told the BBC.
Even though he apparently counts Alien and The Matrix as among his favourite movies, he added this caveat: “But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”
Mind you if those robots want to get up to our level they’re going to have to get serious. The latest one to come to the Great Beyond’s attention monitors your brainwave patterns and does an interpretive dance based on the results (that’s the video above, in case you were wondering). It’s part of an exhibition entitled BRAINWAVE: Common Senses, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (featured recently in Nature; subscription required).
Comments
I think Kurzweil is being disturbingly naive. I would have to suspect that if in 20 years robots will be able to "interact directly with our biological neurons", then they would at least be capable of enslaving American minds. Not unless, "futurologist" is a polite term for quack?
Posted by: Lilian | February 19, 2008 04:43 PM
Well with peak oil right around the corner the robots better start doing something to find an alternative way to get humans to power them or else we'll devolve back to the person riding a bicycle as man-machine interface.
That's a joke by the way.
Posted by: Matrixism | February 20, 2008 10:40 AM
People, like Lilian and Matrixism above, call him a quack or a joke - but have they even considered the argument for more than one instant? Kurzweil has written thousands of pages of well thought-out and detailed evidence to support his conclusions. It's a very convincing argument. Don't think linearly - think exponentially. Imagine how the world went so long without much technological change and how it now is changing so quickly. If you consider it honestly for more than a moment, you can begin to understand the things he is talking about.
Posted by: Ugly | February 23, 2008 05:22 PM