Virtually Human: The Promise---and the Peril---of Digital Immortality

339 Pages·2014·2.31 MB·English

by  Martine Rothblatt

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use
only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright
infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you
are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher
at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
[CONTENTS]
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Foreword by Ray Kurzweil
Introduction: A Clone in the World
Dedication
ONE: The Me in the Machine
TWO: Our Doppelgängers Already Exist
THREE: Mindcloning, Natural Selection, and Digital Eugenics
Illustration: Since mindclones are us, they will have bad hair days too.
FOUR: Pardon Me While I Have Technical Difficulties
Illustration: Mindclones will have humanlike consciousness, so some will likely display humanlike
freakiness, or their own unique version of freaky.
FIVE: Elbow Room
SIX: Evolution or Revolution?
Illustration: Social Acceptance of Weirdness
Illustration: The New Electorate
SEVEN: Rethinking Kinship Systems
Illustration: Fleshism Strikes Back
EIGHT: Law and Liberty
Illustration: The Mindclone Plea
NINE: G-d and Mindclones
Illustration: Alan Turing—Enigma Code Breaker
TEN: The Future of Forever

Glossary
Notes
Also by Martine Rothblatt
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Index
Copyright
[FOREWORD]
In Virtually Human, Martine Rothblatt provides a compelling and convincing
case for virtual humans. After all, what difference does it make if our mental
circuits are biological or electronic if the result is the same? She stakes out the
scientific case that we will see such humans within a small number of decades
and persuasively examines the philosophical and social implications. Both she
and I have been articulating this case since we met fifteen years ago.
In my 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines (ASM), I made the
scientific case that we will see human-level intelligence in a machine by 2029.
These artificial intelligences (AIs) will be capable of passing the Turing test,
Alan Turing’s eponymous exam to determine if an AI is indistinguishable from a
biological human (to biological human judges) using an instant messaging
conversation.
A conference of AI experts was held at Stanford shortly after the publication
of ASM and the consensus then was that human-level AI would indeed happen
but not for hundreds of years. Several lines of criticism of ASM emerged such as
“Moore’s law will come to an end,” “hardware may indeed be expanding
exponentially but software is stuck in the mud,” “consciousness and free will are
impossible in machines,” “human-level AI may be feasible but is not desirable
for biological humans,” and others. I wrote The Singularity Is Near (TSIN) to
address these criticisms, which was published in 2005. In 2006, a conference
called AI@50, was held at Dartmouth to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the
1956 Dartmouth conference that gave artificial intelligence its name, and the
consensus at that meeting was that human-level AI was only twenty-five to fifty
years away. I’ve stuck with my 2029 prediction, which is now a median view
and there is a growing group of people who think I am too conservative.
One piece of evidence of the expanding power of AI is IBM’s Watson,
which won a televised Jeopardy! contest against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings,
the best two (biological) human players in the world. Indeed Watson got a higher
score than Rutter and Jennings combined. Critics often like to dismiss the
significance of AI by saying that it may be good at narrow skills such as playing
chess or driving a car but machine intelligence does not have the broad and
subtle powers of biological human intelligence. But Jeopardy! is not so narrow a
task. It involves the ability to reason over all human knowledge and the queries
are presented in natural language including puns, metaphors, riddles, and jokes.
For example, Watson got this query correct in the rhyme category: “A long
tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping.” The query stumped Rutter
and Jennings, but Watson quickly responded: “What is a meringue harangue?”
What is not widely appreciated is that Watson’s knowledge was not hand
coded by the engineers. It got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several
other encyclopedias, all natural language documents. It does not actually read
these documents as well as you or I. It might read one page and conclude that
“there is a 56 percent chance that Barack Obama is president of the United
States.” You might read that page, and if you didn’t happen to know this ahead
of time, conclude that there is 98 percent chance. So you did a better job at
reading and understanding that page. But Watson makes up for its relatively
weak reading by reading more pages, a lot more, 200 million pages in all. And it
has a good Bayesian reasoning system to combine all of its inferences so it can
conclude overall that there is a 99.9 percent likelihood that Barack Obama is
president. And it can do this type of reasoning on all 200 million pages that it
has read in the three-second Jeopardy! time limit.
Thus one significance of AIs actually reading at human levels, which I
maintain will happen by 2029, is that they will then be able to combine their
human-level understanding with Internet scale and thereby apply that
comprehension to tens of billions of documents.
So what will the significance be of the advent of human-level AI? A lot of
science futurism movies such as Terminator conclude that these AIs will have
little use for biological humans. But if we examine the trajectory of AI, indeed
the entire history of invention, we can come to a different conclusion. Thousands
of years ago, we were unable to reach the fruit at that higher branch, so we
fashioned a tool that extended our physical reach. We then created tools that
expanded the strength of our muscles so we were able to build giant pyramids in
the desert. Today, we can access all of human knowledge with a few keystrokes
with devices we hold close to our bodies. And the distribution of contemporary
AI is not limited to a few wealthy corporations or government agencies but are
in billions of hands. We have thus expanded our physical and mental reach, and
that will continue to be the case as AI at human levels and beyond become a
reality.
A key message of ASM and TSIN is that the price-performance and capacity
of information technologies expand at an exponential pace, currently doubling
about every year, a phenomenon that I call the “law of accelerating returns.” At
the same time, the physical size of these technologies is shrinking at a pace of
about one hundred in three-dimensional volume each decade. So computational
devices in the 2030s will be the size of blood cells and we will introduce them
into our bodies and brains noninvasively.
One application will be to health. Artificial T cells will expand the capability
of our immune system. Today our biological immune system does not recognize
cancer (it thinks that it’s part of you) and is unable to cope with retroviruses. We
will be able to finish the job with a nonbiological immune system that will
download new software from the Internet to deal with new pathogens.
These “nanobots” will also go into the brain via the capillaries and connect
our neocortex (the outer layer of the brain where we do our thinking) to the
cloud. So today, just as we can access many thousands of computers in the cloud
when we need them, in the 2030s and beyond we will be able to access
additional neocortex to think deeper thoughts.
In my recent book, How to Create a Mind, I describe the neocortex as a self-
organizing system of about 300 million modules, each of which can learn,
remember and process a pattern. These modules are organized in a hierarchy and
we create that hierarchy with our own thinking. Only mammals have a
neocortex, so when the “Cretaceous Extinction Event” (a violent sudden change
in the worldwide climate probably caused by a meteor) occurred 65 million
years ago, the ability of the neocortex to quickly devise and master new skills
resulted in mammals overtaking their ecological niche.
Another significant event occurred 2 million years ago: the evolution of
humanoids with a large forehead, which allowed for a significant expansion of
the neocortex. This additional quantity of pattern recognition modules was the
enabling factor for our species to invent language, art, music, science, and
technology.
We are now on the verge of expanding our neocortex again. The panoply of
devices we carry with us is already expanding the power of our brains. Indeed I
felt that a part of my brain had gone on strike during that one day SOPA strike
(when services such as Wikipedia and Google went on strike to express
opposition to new privacy legislation). In the 2030s we will directly expand the
size and scope of our neocortex into the cloud. The only difference this time is
that the expansion will not be limited to a certain physical size, but will continue
to expand exponentially. And remember what happened the last time we
expanded our neocortex when we became humanoids two millions years ago.
That quantitative expansion enabled a profound qualitative leap and this will
happen again.
Rothblatt’s BINA48 is an outstanding example of re-creating the physical
and mental reality of an actual human in a machine. Having met the biological
Bina Rothblatt, her robotic avatar is not yet equivalent, but is wonderfully
suggestive of what is to come.
In my books, I make the case that re-creating the computational capacity of
the human brain requires about 1014 (10 to the fourteenth power or 100 trillion)
calculations per second. We already have that capacity in our supercomputers
and personal computers will have that power in the early 2020s. The software for
human-level intelligence will take longer but we are also making exponential
gains in modeling and re-creating the powers of the neocortex. Creating
synthetic models of the neocortex is what I am currently working on as a director
of engineering at Google. I make the case in my books that we will have the
software capabilities for human-level AI by 2029. Watson is already a
significant milestone in that effort.
Once that is possible, we will be able to create specific personalities
including those of people who have passed. Rothblatt’s Terasem Foundation is
devoted specifically to this scenario, a prospect that is thoroughly examined in
this book. The movie The Singularity Is Near (TSIN), which Martine Rothblatt
was executive producer of (and which I wrote) examined this idea, as did
Transcendent Man, a movie about my ideas by filmmaker Barry Ptolemy. That
movie illustrates my efforts to preserve the documents, music, and other
memorabilia of my father so that future AIs can create an avatar with his
memories, skills and personality. Spike Jonze based his recent movie Her on my
books and the movies TSIN and TM. The heroine of Her is an AI (which in the
movie is called an Operating System or OS) named Samantha whose voice is
provided by Scarlett Johansson. Even though Samantha is nonbiological, she is
sufficiently human to be able to fall in love with Theodore, the biological
protagonist and for Theodore to fall in love with her. The movie also borrows
Rothblatt’s and my idea of creating an avatar to bring back biological humans
who have passed in the form of Alan Watts, the poet and philosopher from the
1960s.
Ultimately we will be able to access the information in our brains that
constitutes our memories, skills, and personalities and back them up. In my
timeline, that is a 2040s scenario. One way that will happen is that by the mid-
2030s our thinking will be a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking.
The nonbiological part (largely in the cloud) will be subject to my law of
accelerating returns. Thus by the 2040s, the nonbiological part of our thinking
will greatly predominate. It will be capable of fully understanding and modeling
the biological part. And it will be fully backed up just as we back up all
nonbiological processes today.
Human-level AI is close at hand. The prospects that Rothblatt writes
eloquently about in this book may seem daunting today but so did the idea of a
massive network of communication that would tie together virtually all humans