The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (24 page)

Read The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Online

Authors: Ray Kurzweil

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Fringe Science, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Science

BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
11.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
What to Do with the Information
 
There are two scenarios for using the results of detailed brain scans. The most immediate—scanning
the brain to understand
it—is to scan portions of the brain to ascertain the architecture and implicit algorithms of interneuronal connections in different regions. The exact position of each and every nerve fiber is not as important as the overall pattern. With this information we can design simulated neural nets that operate similarly. This process will be rather like peeling an onion as each layer of human intelligence is revealed.
This is essentially what Synaptics has done in its chip that mimics mammalian neural-image processing. This is also what Grinvald, Hübener, and their associates plan to do with their visual-cortex scans. And there are dozens of other contemporary projects designed to scan portions of the brain and apply the resulting insights to the design of intelligent systems.
Within a region, the brain’s circuitry is highly repetitive, so only a small portion of a region needs to be fully scanned. The computationally relevant activity of a neuron or group of neurons is sufficiently straightforward that we can understand and model these methods by examining them. Once the structure and topology of the neurons, the organization of the interneuronal wiring, and the sequence of neural firing in a region have been observed, recorded, and analyzed, it becomes feasible to reverse engineer that region’s parallel algorithms. After the algorithms of a region are understood, they can be refined and extended prior to being implemented in synthetic neural equivalents. The methods can certainly be greatly sped up given that electronics is already more than a million times faster than neural circuitry.
We can combine the revealed algorithms with the methods for building intelligent machines that we already understand. We can also discard aspects of human computing that may not be useful in a machine. Of course, we’ll have to be careful that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Downloading Your Mind to Your Personal Computer
 
A more challenging but also ultimately feasible scenario will be to scan someone’s brain to map the locations, interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components. Its entire organization could then be re-created on a neural computer of sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory.
This is harder in an obvious way than the scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario. In the former, we need only sample each region until we understand the salient algorithms. We can then combine those insights with knowledge we already have. In
this—scanning the brain to download it
—scenario, we need to capture every little detail. On the other hand, we don’t need to understand all of it; we need only to literally copy it, connection by connection, synapse by synapse, neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter. It requires us to understand
local
brain processes, but not necessarily the brain’s global organization, at least not in full. It is likely that by the time we can do this, we will understand much of it, anyway.
To do this right, we do need to understand what the salient information-processing mechanisms are. Much of a neuron’s elaborate structure exists to support its own structural integrity and life processes,and does not directly contribute to its handling of information. We know that neuron-computing processing is based on hundreds of different neurotransmitters and that different neural mechanisms in different regions allow for different types of computing. The early vision neurons, for example, are good at accentuating sudden color changes to facilitate finding the edges of objects. Hippocampus neurons are likely to have structures for enhancing the long-term retention of memories. We also know that neurons use a combination of digital and analog computing that needs to be accurately modeled. We need to identify structures capable of quantum computing, if any All of the key features that affect information processing need to be recognized if we are to copy them accurately.
How well will this work? Of course, like any new technology, it won’t be perfect at first, and initial downloads will be somewhat imprecise. Small imperfections won’t necessarily be immediately noticeable because people are always changing to some degree. As our understanding of the mechanisms of the brain improves and our ability to accurately and noninvasively scan these features improves, reinstantiating (reinstalling) a person’s brain should alter a person’s mind no more than it changes from day to day
What Will We Find When We Do This?
 
We have to consider this question on both the objective and subjective levels. “Objective” means everyone except me, so let’s start with that. Objectively, when we scan someone’s brain and reinstantiate their personal mind file into a suitable computing medium, the newly emergent “person” will appear to other observers to have very much the same personality, history, and memory as the person originally scanned. Interacting with the newly instantiated person will feel like interacting with the original person. The new person will claim to be that same old person and will have a memory of having been that person, having grown up in Brooklyn, having walked into a scanner here, and woken up in the machine there. He’ll say, “Hey, this technology really works.”
There is the small matter of the “new person’s” body. What kind of body will a reinstantiated personal mind file have: the original human body, an upgraded body, a synthetic body, a nanoengineered body, a virtual body in a virtual environment? This is an important question, which I will discuss in the next chapter.
Subjectively, the question is more subtle and profound. Is this the same consciousness as the person we just scanned? As we saw in chapter 3, there are strong arguments on both sides. The position that fundamentally we are our “pattern” (because our particles are always changing) would argue that this new person is the same because their patterns are essentially identical. The counter argument, however, is the possible continued existence of the person who was originally scanned. If he—Jack—is still around, he will convincingly claim to represent the continuity of his consciousness. He may not be satisfied to let his mental clone carry on in his stead. We’ll keep bumping into this issue as we explore the twenty-first century.
But once over the divide, the new person will certainly think that he was the original person. There will be no ambivalence in his mind as to whether or not he committed suicide when he agreed to be transferred into a new computing substrate leaving his old slow carbon-based neural-computing machinery behind. To the extent that he wonders at all whether or not he is really the same person that he thinks he is, he’ll be glad that his old self took the plunge, because otherwise he wouldn’t exist.
Is he—the newly installed mind—conscious? He certainly will claim to be. And being a lot more capable than his old neural self, he’ll be persuasive and effective in his position. We’ll believe him. He’ll get mad if we don’t.
A Growing Trend
 
In the second half of the twenty-first century, there will be a growing trend toward making this leap. Initially, there will be partial porting—replacing aging memory circuits, extending pattern-recognition and reasoning circuits through neural implants. Ultimately, and well before the twenty-first century is completed, people will port their entire mind file to the new thinking technology.
There will be nostalgia for our humble carbon-based roots, but there is nostalgia for vinyl records also. Ultimately, we did copy most of that analog music to the more flexible and capable world of transferable digital information. The leap to port our minds to a more capable computing medium will happen gradually but inexorably nonetheless.
As we port ourselves, we will also vastly extend ourselves. Remember that $1,000 of computing in 2060 will have the computational capacity of a trillion human brains. So we might as well multiply memory a trillion fold, greatly extend recognition and reasoning abilities, and plug ourselves into the pervasive wireless-communications network. While we are at it, we can add all human knowledge—as a readily accessible internal database as well as already processed and learned knowledge using the human type of distributed understanding.
 
THE AGE OF NEURAL IMPLANTS HAS ALREADY STARTED
 
The patients are wheeled in on stretchers. Suffering from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease, they are like statues, their muscles frozen, their bodies and faces totally immobile. Then in a dramatic demonstration at a French clinic, the doctor in charge throws an electrical switch. The patients suddenly come to life, get up, walk around, and calmly and expressively describe how they have overcome their debilitating symptoms. This is the dramatic result of a new neural implant therapy that is approved in Europe, and still awaits FDA approval in the United States.
The diminished levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in a Parkinson’s patient causes overactivation of two tiny regions in the brain: the ventral posterior nucleus and the subthalmic nucleus. This overactivation in turn causes the slowness, stiffness, and gait difficulties of the disease, and ultimately results in total paralysis and death. Dr. A. L. Benebid, a French physician at Fourier University in Grenoble, discovered that stimulating these regions with a permanently implanted electrode paradoxically inhibits these overactive regions and reverses the symptoms. The electrodes are wired to a small electronic control unit placed in the patient’s chest. Through radio signals, the unit can be programmed, even turned on and off. When switched off, the symptoms immediately return. The treatment has the promise of controlling the most devastating symptoms of the disease.
24
Similar approaches have been used with other brain regions. For example, by implanting an electrode in the ventral lateral thalamus, the tremors associated with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and other tremor-causing conditions can be suppressed.
“We used to treat the brain like soup, adding chemicals that enhance or suppress certain neurotransmitters,” says Rick Trosch, one of the American physicians helping to perfect “deep brain stimulation” therapies. “Now we’re treating it like circuitry.”
25
Increasingly, we are starting to combat cognitive and sensory afflictions by treating the brain and nervous system like the complex computational system that it is. Cochlear implants together with electronic speech processors perform frequency analysis of sound waves, similar to that performed by the inner ear. About 10 percent of the formerly deaf persons who have received this neural replacement device are now able to hear and understand voices well enough that they can hold conversations using a normal telephone.
Neurologist and ophthalmologist at Harvard Medical School Dr. Joseph Rizzo and his colleagues have developed an experimental retina implant. Rizzo’s neural implant is a small solar-powered computer that communicates to the optic nerve. The user wears special glasses with tiny television cameras that communicate to the implanted computer by laser signal.
26
Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry have developed special silicon devices that can communicate with neurons in both directions. Directly stimulating neurons with an electrica current is not the ideal approach since it can cause corrosion to the electrodes and create chemical by-products that damage the cells. In the contrast, the Max Planck Institute devices are capable of triggering an adjacent neuron to fire without a direct electrical link. The Institute scientists demonstrated their invention by controlling the movements of a living leech from their computer.
Going in the opposite direction—from neuron to electronics—is a device called a “neuron transistor,”
27
which can detect the firing of a neuron. The scientists hope to apply both technologies to the control of artificial human limbs by connecting spinal nerves to computerized prostheses. The Institute’s Peter Fromherz says, “These two devices join the two worlds of information processing: the silicon world of the computer and the water world of the brain.”
Neurobiologist Ted Berger and his colleagues at Hedco Neurosciences and Engineering have bult integrated circuits that precisely match the properties and information processing of groups of animal neurons. The chips exactly mimic the digital and analog characteristics of the neurons they have analyzed. They are currently scaling up their technology to systems with hundreds of neurons.
28
Professor Carver Mead and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology have also built digital-analog integrated circuits that match the processing of mammalian neural circuits comprising hundreds of neurons.
29
The age of neural implants is under way, albeit at an early stage. Directly enhancing the information processing of our brain with synthetic circuits is focusing at first on correcting the glaring defects caused by neurological and sensory diseases and disabilities. Ultimately we will all find the benefits of extending our abilities through neural implants difficult to resist.
 
 
The New Mortality
 
Actually there won’t be mortality by the end of the twenty-first century. Not in the sense that we have known it. Not if you take advantage of the twenty-first century’s brain-porting technology. Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our
hardware.
When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated. Yeats lamented our dependence on a physical self that was “but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”
30
As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file.
We will be software, not hardware.

Other books

A Week From Sunday by Dorothy Garlock
Goddess in Training by Terry Spear
Each Shining Hour by Jeff High
The Fever by Diane Hoh
The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton
A Rare Gift by Jaci Burton