Instead there was a ripple of polite laughter from some, smiles from everyone else. The tall man on the podium smiled back.
“Or,” he said after a pause, “I should say that they’re already here.”
He turned and spread his arms wide, as if in worship of the images that came and went on the big screen. Machines of every kind, from surgical robots to mechanized drilling platforms to autonomous drones to humanoid figures made from metal and plastic.
“All hail our robot overlords!” cried the man.
More laughter this time, but still not everyone. Not everyone appreciated the jokes or the speaker’s sense of humor. Not everyone knew where this was going. A few of those who did wore the tolerant expressions of people waiting to hear what they already knew. It was a mixed bag, as the audiences of most lectures at the Ethical Society were. Some were the choir here to be preached to, and some were accompanying friends. Some were there because they were curious but not deeply informed on the subject matter; others were there because this was their field and the man who called himself John the Revelator was becoming a voice crying in the technological wilderness — maybe more John the Baptist than the John who wrote the Book of Revelation. Quirky, eccentric, and strange either way. Occasionally offensive but never boring. And his oddball charisma had filled the rest of the seats at the auditorium.
John turned and lowered his arms.
“The technological singularity is regarded as a hypothetical event. One in which, artificially intelligent machines will become so sophisticated that they will make humanity redundant. This is a process that is already well under way. It began when we built computers and wrote software code that allowed robots and other kinds of machines to design and build other robots. It began when we introduced self-learning software into the mix, so that each generation of robots is able to exceed whatever we designed and become something better. Sometimes this evolution follows predicted lines, and sometimes it yields unexpected results. Leaps of self-development that drive these interlocked fields of study forward by orders of magnitude. The machines we make are becoming capable of recursive self-improvement; they are progressively redesigning themselves. Because of the autonomy we’ve designed into them, they are now building smarter and more powerful machines. This is not an aberration. This is what we want them to do, because we’re desperate to reap the benefits of radical technologies.”
His eyes — green as summer grass — roved over the crowd, and there was a small smile on his full lips that never quite went away.
“Alarmists warn us of a runaway effect,” he said quietly. “They say that if we continue to allow autonomous development to progress at its current rate the machines will become so powerful that they may achieve the state of self-awareness. The technological singularity will cease to be a theory and become a fact. And then what?”
The picture on the screen changed and a clip from the movie The Terminator appeared. Armies of robots armed with pulse rifles stalked through an apocalyptic landscape, blasting away at the dwindling band of desperate human resistance fighters.
“Well,” said John, “we all know how that scenario plays out.”
A clip from Terminator 2 showed a playground full of kids and parents being caught in the shock wave of superheated gases as a nuclear device turned them to ash and blew their dust away.
The room was very quiet.
“Or do we know?” asked John. “Is the scenario from a hundred science-fiction movies and a thousand science-fiction novels really predictive of what will happen when the inevitable happens and the robots achieve consciousness? Is there no other possibility? Is there no other result at the end of this long and complex equation?”
There was no sound at all.
John the Revelator smiled at them. “What would happen, do you suppose, if instead of losing control of the technological singularity we embraced it, accepted it, guided it, and became part of it? What if our technological growth explosion is not a pathway to humanity becoming irrelevant but instead was an open door to our own leap forward in evolution. Not human evolution. Not machine evolution. But a shared evolution. Imagine it. Seriously… close your eyes and imagine the possibilities. We are living on a planet that we — collectively we — have overpopulated while failing to provide for the needs of so many. We live on a planet we have raped and brutalized to the point where it is suddenly lashing back at us with droughts and super-storms and blizzards and melting polar ice and with diseases born of imbalance. We share a world where our mishandling of the basic tools of civilized survival — clean water, antibiotics, contraception, fuel, food purity — are failing us because we failed them. We are in a world where we are writing both our eviction notice and our epitaph.”
Behind him the picture changed to show a man and a woman and two children. They were whole and appeared healthy and beautiful. The image morphed slowly so that they were Caucasian and then Asian, black and then Latino, Native American, and on and on, until finally they were clearly mixed-race. It held there, showing people who were gorgeous and healthy and vibrant. Except that they weren’t entirely human. The blue eyes of the woman clicked with mechanical precision, and on the big screen there was a cutaway to show what she saw when she looked down at one of her children. There was a clear image of the child in high definition and full color, but it was framed by data readouts that indicated the child’s age, height, weight, temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, glucose levels, hormone balances, body-fat percentage, blood gases, and a dozen other bits of data. A scale indicated emotional health. A small meter suddenly flashed with an alert saying that the child had a bacterial infection that posed a seventy-percent risk factor. The mother flicked her left wrist quickly from side to side and a section of skin folded back to reveal a small but sophisticated control panel. The mother pressed a few touch keys and the display for the child indicated that nanites had been triggered to release a precise amount of antibiotics into the child’s bloodstream.
Beside the woman, the husband’s smile flickered for a moment and he raised his hand and looked at his palm. The view shifted to show the screen display he saw, and three alerts popped up. One said that he was 3.1 pounds overweight and a list of fat-burning exercises appeared and immediately transferred to his personal calendar, and an alarm was set to remind him to go to the gym. The second alert told him that there was an imbalance in his digestive tract, and a hologram displayed an image of a slice of pepperoni pizza with chili powder on it. A frowning emoji flicked on and off, and a display informed him that a small and carefully regulated dose of famotidine, an H2 receptor antagonist, had been released by nanites. The third alert told him that he had a conference call in fifteen minutes and offered the choice of several business folders for him to peruse.
The picture changed to show a teenage girl walking up to her house carrying schoolbooks. The door scanned her, then its locks clicked open. The camera followed her up the stairs and into her bedroom, where a computer turned itself on and arranged her study notes, homework, and other resources in stacked files on a threefold screen.
Then the image was of a young woman at a bar. As she looked around she got immediate displays of each person, showing age, name, criminal record if any, marital status, occupation, and health warnings. One very handsome man was tagged as having a previous arrest for domestic violence. Another warning said that the very cute guy approaching her had HIV. But the third man was an English teacher — single, no kids, a ninety-seven-percent health rating — who owned his own house and a nice car. Details of his politics, credit score, and social-media platform were included. When that man said hello, the young woman smiled.