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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
If we want to stop machines from taking over, we better start becoming more like them.
Oct 20, 1999 | "The Matrix," last summer's sci-fi box-office smash, envisions a future in which artificially intelligent computers take over. Instead of programming the computers, humans become the slave race, serving as living batteries that provide energy for their former desktop tools.
What a bummer. But hey, that's just Hollywood science fiction, right? Wrong, says Kevin Warwick, a professor at the department of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England -- the British equivalent of the M.I.T. Media Lab -- who has spent his career working on robotics, creating machine intelligence and, most controversially, building human-computer implants for use in his own body. Author of the recent computers-can-think book "March of the Machines: Why the New Race of Robots Will Rule the World," Warwick is the futurist most likely to be quoted throughout British newspapers direly predicting that computers may conquer the world within our lifetime. As he himself describes his work, "It's like creating science fiction."
Last year, Warwick made headlines when he implanted an electronics-filled glass capsule under the skin of his arm in order to remotely control his computer. The experiment, more hypothetical in nature than practical in application, was simultaneously praised and derided in his native Great Britain: The Guardian called it "a stunt in cybernetics"; the Glasgow Herald described him as a "publicity-hungry scientist, out there on the funding stump, ready with his party tricks"; even his daughter called him crazy. He enjoys a nutty-professor reputation at his own University of Reading; other observers point out that his work is frivolous compared with cutting-edge medical experiments with body-control implants.
Warwick is now developing an even more complex implant project -- he is planning to hard-wire his brain directly to his computer. Call him "Professor Cyborg," if you will (it's just one of his media nicknames); but our ability to be cyborgs, he warns, may save the human race if the worst possible scenario -- the "Matrix" future -- comes true.
"Some computer scientists have their head in the sand in their thinking -- believing that things are programmed, and that we [humans] can always determine what they are doing to do. It's a complete load of rubbish, that is!" Warwick exclaims. "Sure, we've got implants for people with disabilities, like pacemakers, but we're not looking ahead as to how we might possibly increase human brainpower. So really that's the direction I've been going -- with a view to maybe save the world."
