These technologies are not the vanguard of an intelligent invasion that will compete with and ultimately displace us. Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we have used our tools to extend our reach, both physically and mentally. That we can take a device out of our pocket today and access much of human knowledge with a few keystrokes extends us beyond anything imaginable by most observers only a few decades ago. The “cell phone” (the term is placed in quotes because it is vastly more than a phone) in my pocket is a million times less expensive yet thousands of times more powerful than the computer all the students and professors at MIT shared when I was an undergraduate there. That’s a several billion-fold increase in price/performance over the last forty years, an escalation we will see again in the next twenty-five years, when what used to fit in a building, and now fits in your pocket, will fit inside a blood cell.
In this way we will merge with the intelligent technology we are creating. Intelligent nanobots in our bloodstream will keep our biological bodies healthy at the cellular and molecular levels. They will go into our brains noninvasively through the capillaries and interact with our biological neurons, directly extending our intelligence. This is not as futuristic as it may sound. There are already blood cell–sized devices that can cure type I diabetes in animals or detect and destroy cancer cells in the bloodstream. Based on the law of accelerating returns, these technologies will be a billion times more powerful within three decades than they are today.
I already consider the devices I use and the cloud of computing resources to which they are virtually connected as extensions of myself, and feel less than complete if I am cut off from these brain extenders. That is why the one-day strike by Google, Wikipedia, and thousands of other Web sites against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) on January 18, 2012, was so remarkable: I felt as if part of my brain were going on strike (although I and others did find ways to access these online resources). It was also an impressive demonstration of the political power of these sites as the bill—which looked as if it was headed for ratification—was instantly killed. But more important, it showed how thoroughly we have already outsourced parts of our thinking to the cloud of computing. It is already part of who we are. Once we routinely have intelligent nonbiological intelligence in our brains, this augmentation—and the cloud it is connected to—will continue to grow in capability exponentially.
The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.
From quantitative improvement comes qualitative advance. The most important evolutionary advance in Homo sapiens was quantitative: the development of a larger forehead to accommodate more neocortex. Greater neocortical capacity enabled this new species to create and contemplate thoughts at higher conceptual levels, resulting in the establishment of all the varied fields of art and science. As we add more neocortex in a nonbiological form, we can expect ever higher qualitative levels of abstraction.
British mathematician Irvin J. Good, a colleague of Alan Turing’s, wrote in 1965 that “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” He defined such a machine as one that could surpass the “intellectual activities of any man however clever” and concluded that “since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion.’”
The last invention that biological evolution needed to make—the neocortex—is inevitably leading to the last invention that humanity needs to make—truly intelligent machines—and the design of one is inspiring the other. Biological evolution is continuing but technological evolution is moving a million times faster than the former. According to the law of accelerating returns, by the end of this century we will be able to create computation at the limits of what is possible, based on the laws of physics as applied to computation.5 We call matter and energy organized in this way “computronium,” which is vastly more powerful pound per pound than the human brain. It will not just be raw computation but will be infused with intelligent algorithms constituting all of human-machine knowledge. Over time we will convert much of the mass and energy in our tiny corner of the galaxy that is suitable for this purpose to computronium. Then, to keep the law of accelerating returns going, we will need to spread out to the rest of the galaxy and universe.
If the speed of light indeed remains an inexorable limit, then colonizing the universe will take a long time, given that the nearest star system to Earth is four light-years away. If there are even subtle means to circumvent this limit, our intelligence and technology will be sufficiently powerful to exploit them. This is one reason why the recent suggestion that the muons that traversed the 730 kilometers from the CERN accelerator on the Swiss-French border to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy appeared to be moving faster than the speed of light was such potentially significant news. This particular observation appears to be a false alarm, but there are other possibilities to get around this limit. We do not even need to exceed the speed of light if we can find shortcuts to other apparently faraway places through spatial dimensions beyond the three with which we are familiar. Whether we are able to surpass or otherwise get around the speed of light as a limit will be the key strategic issue for the human-machine civilization at the beginning of the twenty-second century.
Cosmologists argue about whether the world will end in fire (a big crunch to match the big bang) or ice (the death of the stars as they spread out into an eternal expansion), but this does not take into account the power of intelligence, as if its emergence were just an entertaining sideshow to the grand celestial mechanics that now rule the universe. How long will it take for us to spread our intelligence in its nonbiological form throughout the universe? If we can transcend the speed of light—admittedly a big if—for example, by using wormholes through space (which are consistent with our current understanding of physics), it could be achieved within a few centuries. Otherwise, it will likely take much longer. In either scenario, waking up the universe, and then intelligently deciding its fate by infusing it with our human intelligence in its nonbiological form, is our destiny.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Here is one sentence from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:
Aureliano Segundo was not aware of the singsong until the following day after breakfast when he felt himself being bothered by a buzzing that was by then more fluid and louder than the sound of the rain, and it was Fernanda, who was walking throughout the house complaining that they had raised her to be a queen only to have her end up as a servant in a madhouse, with a lazy, idolatrous, libertine husband who lay on his back waiting for bread to rain down from heaven while she was straining her kidneys trying to keep afloat a home held together with pins where there was so much to do, so much to bear up under and repair from the time God gave his morning sunlight until it was time to go to bed that when she got there her eyes were full of ground glass, and yet no one ever said to her, “Good morning, Fernanda, did you sleep well?,” nor had they asked her, even out of courtesy, why she was so pale or why she awoke with purple rings under her eyes in spite of the fact that she expected it, of course, from a family that had always considered her a nuisance, an old rag, a booby painted on the wall, and who were always going around saying things against her behind her back, calling her churchmouse, calling her Pharisee, calling her crafty, and even Amaranta, may she rest in peace, had said aloud that she was one of those people who could not tell their rectums from their ashes, God have mercy, such words, and she had tolerated everything with resignation because of the Holy Father, but she had not been able to tolerate it any more when that evil José Arcadio Segundo said that the damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck-up highlander, just imagine, a bossy highlander, Lord save us, a highlander daughter of evil spit of the same stripe as the highlanders the government sent to kill workers, you tell me, and he was referring to no one but her, the godchild of the Duke of Alba, a lady of such lineage that she made the liver of presidents’ wives quiver, a noble dame of fine blood like her, who had the right to sign eleven peninsular names and who was the only mortal creature in that town full of bastards who did not feel all confused at the sight of sixteen pieces of silverware, so that her adulterous husband could die of laughter afterward and say that so many knives and forks and spoons were not meant for a human being but for a centipede, and the only one who could tell with her eyes closed when the white wine was served and on what side and in which glass and when the red wine and on what side and in which glass and not like that peasant of an Amaranta, may she rest in peace, who thought that white wine was served in the daytime and red wine at night, and the only one on the whole coast who could take pride in the fact that she took care of her bodily needs only in golden chamberpots, so that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, may he rest in peace, could have the effrontery to ask her with his Masonic ill humor where she had received that privilege and whether she did not shit shit but shat sweet basil, just imagine, with those very words, and so that Renata, her own daughter, who through an oversight had seen her stool in the bedroom, had answered that even if the pot was all gold and with a coat of arms, what was inside was pure shit, physical shit, and worse even than any other kind because it was stuck-up highland shit, just imagine, her own daughter, so that she never had any illusions about the rest of the family, but in any case she had the right to expect a little more consideration from her husband because, for better or for worse, he was her consecrated spouse, her helpmate, her legal despoiler, who took upon himself of his own free and sovereign will the grave responsibility of taking her away from her paternal home, where she never wanted for or suffered from anything, where she wove funeral wreaths as a pastime, since her godfather had sent a letter with his signature and the stamp of his ring on the sealing wax simply to say that the hands of his goddaughter were not meant for tasks of this world except to play the clavichord, and, nevertheless, her insane husband had taken her from her home with all manner of admonitions and warnings and had brought her to that frying pan of hell where a person could not breathe because of the heat, and before she had completed her Pentecostal fast he had gone off with his wandering trunks and his wastrel’s accordion to loaf in adultery with a wretch of whom it was only enough to see her behind, well, that’s been said, to see her wiggle her mare’s behind in order to guess that she was a, that she was a, just the opposite of her, who was a lady in a palace or a pigsty, at the table or in bed, a lady of breeding, God-fearing, obeying His laws and submissive to His wishes, and with whom he could not perform, naturally, the acrobatics and trampish antics that he did with the other one, who, of course, was ready for anything, like the French matrons, and even worse, if one considers well, because they at least had the honesty to put a red light at their door, swinishness like that, just imagine, and that was all that was needed by the only and beloved daughter of Doña Renata Argote and Don Fernando del Carpio, and especially the latter, an upright man, a fine Christian, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, those who receive direct from God the privilege of remaining intact in their graves with their skin smooth like the cheeks of a bride and their eyes alive and clear like emeralds.