European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 21, 1987, Darmstadt, Hesse Computerized immortality of of by Michael Hirsh associated press if you can survive beyond Iho next 50 years Orso you May nol have to die at a at least s one vision of the lure being fashioned on the Frontier of robotics and artificial intelligence research where experts on the subject in the United slate Are talking in terms once reserved for the wildest science Liolion. Hans Fai Ravec director of the robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh believes thai computer technology is advancing so swiftly there is Little we can do to avoid a future world run by super intelligent robots. Unless he says we become them ourselves. In an astonishingly Short amount of time scientists will be Able to Transfer the contents of a person s mind into a powerful computer and in the process make him or at feast his living essence virtually immortal Moravec Cairns the things we Are building Are our children the next generations the Burly 39 year old scientist says they re carrying on All our abilities Only they re doing i it better. If you look at it that Way it s not so the Blond austrian born Moravec laughs giddily somewhat like a Movi Cland mad scientist As he expounds his More bizarre notions. But his ideas Are thought chillingly sane by Many of his colleagues. I have found in travelling throughout All of the major robotics and artificial intelligence centers in the . And Japan that the ideas of Hans Moravec Are taken seriously says Grant Fjermedal author of the tomorrow makers. 3 recent Book about the future of computers and robotics. Along with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of technology cum is considered part of a holy Iri Nily of leading american research centers into robotics and artificial or machine intelligence says Fjermedal who Devoles the first live chapters of his Book to the work of Moravec and his proteges at cum. Mit s Gerald j. Sussman who whole the authoritative textbook on artificial intelligence agreed that computerized immortality for people in 1 very Long rom a machine can last forever and even if in does t you can always make backups Sussman told Fjermedal. I m afraid unfortunately thai i m the fast generation to die. Some of my students May manage to Hans Moravec director of robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon uneven Ltd to Tore computer technology it advancing so fast there la Little we can tto to avoid a future world nut by robots. Survive a Little Moravec s futuristic scenario has already come True on the big screen As Well As the Small. In creating Max headroom the cyberpunk computer personality who stars in a weekly television series and recent coca cola commercials and computer fantasies like the movie ton science fiction writers have picked up on some real possibilities Moravec says. Max headroom is to the future what Flash Gordon was to space travel he says. There was a lot of fantasy but it was More real than a lot of people gave it credit for the notion of artificial intelligence also has its detractors of course including some of the key researchers who Are battling he myriad problems of How to teach machines to think and learn independently As humans do cum s Alan Newell one of the so called founding fathers of artificial intelligence cautions that while Little stands in the Way of intelligent machines the Transfer of a human mind into one is going Down a whole other the a Hilly to create intelligent systems is not at All the same As saying i can take an existing mind and capture whal s in that mind. You might be Ablo to create intelligence but not capture the set of biological circumstances that went into making a particular mind he says. In Moravec s forthcoming Book mind children he argues that economic Competition for faster and better information processing systems is facing the human face to Engineer its own technological armageddon Ona thai a nuclear catastrophe can Only delay. Natural evolution is finished he says. The human race is no longer procreating but designing its successors. We owe our existence to organic evolution but we owe it Little Moravec twits we Are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from non life to Moravec s projections Are based on his research showing that on the average the Cost of computation has halved every two years from the time of the primitive adding machines of the late 19th Century to the supercomputers of the 1980s at that Rale since 1he turn of the Century there s been a mind boggling Tel Honold decrease in computing costs figured in bits or Basic units of information processed per second Moravec says moreover the rate is speeding up and the technological pipeline is full of now developments like molecule sized computer circuits and recent advances in superconductors that can sustain the Pace for the foreseeable future he says the implications of a continued steady decrease in computing costs Are even More mind boggling. It is no Surprise Hal studies in artificial intelligence have shown sparse res urls in the Las 20 years Moravec says. Scientists Are severely limited by the calculating Speed and capacity of Laboratory computers. Today s supercomputers running at full my can match in Power Only the 1 Gram brain of a mouse he says. But by the year 2010, assuming the growth rate of the last 60 years continues the Best machines will be a thousand limes taster than they Are today and equivalent in Speed and capacity to the human mind Moravec argues 8y 2030, Calculi ing costs will be so much reduced Hal the average personal computer then a powerful thinking robot could easily be your Best Friend. But increasingly it la be an Impal enl Friend the human race will face its worst dilemma one terrifyingly raised in countless science fiction films but rarely considered a threat once we leave the theater. All of our culture can be taken Over by robots. It la be Boring to be human. If you can gel human equivalence by 2030, what will you have by 2040?" Moravec asks laughing. Suppose you re sitting next to your Best Friend and you re 10 times smarter than he is. Are you going to ask his advice in an economic Competition if you make worse decisions you Don t do As Well he says. We can t beat the computers. So that opens up another possibility we can survive by moving Over into their there Are a number of different scenarios of digitizing the contents of the human mind into a compute Allol which will be made plausible in the next 50 to 100 years by the Pace of current technology Moravec says. One is la Hook up a super powerful computer to the Corpus Caltoum the bundle of nerve fibres thai connects the two hemispheres of the brain the computer can be programmed to Monitor the traffic Between the two and eventually to teach itself to think like the brain. After a while Trie machine begins to insert its own messages into the thought Stream. The computer s coming up with Brilliant solutions and they re just popping into your Hoad Moravec says with a Giggle. Sunday june 21. 1987 the stars and stripes Page 17
