First will come the robots. Get ready for that, you can hear it already: the clang of little feet. Don't picture jerking hulks, though, or vacant stares; real-life robots are going to be much much smoother, much sharper than the things you see in comic strips. In the not-so-far future, "mechanical minds" will be more than a figure of speech. The computers that we put into our robots, by and by, will think, the same as you and I. They will even feel. What's more, this is a promise, not a threat.
There are a lot of useful things you could do with intelligent robots. Robots, however, are not my pipedream. Why waste a good pipedream on something your kids already take for granted? Robots are a development of merely world-historic importance. If robots aren't going to get beyond robothood, if all they're going to be is intelligent competitors for people's jobs, who needs them?
I enthuse over robots -- assuming we can make them intelligent, agile, and feeling -- because they are the necessary starting point of a much vaster vision. I mean, if we're going to let our imaginations off the leash, let's think big. Let us evoke a prospect of human destiny. Let us allow ourselves a glimmering of hope so immense that it is painful to think of, knowing how likely we are to blow it all. Let us, in fact, reinvent salvation in believable form -- nothing less.
Suppose for the sake of argument -- just suppose -- that the "artificial intelligence" problem can be solved. Suppose we can make machines that think, feel, maybe play the violin or the piano if it catches their fancy. Suppose we can implement the human being in alternative hardware.
That is not so much to suppose as you might suppose. Artificial intelligence is no longer a science fiction theme, it is a current research interest. Most computer science departments offer a course or two on the subject; some make a really big deal of it. (The department at Stanford University, I am told, requires knowledge in this area as one of three competences needed for admission.) I doubt that you could get a science fiction story published, these days, if artificial intelligence were all the further out it went.
Well, suppose it, then: we can make a good imitation of man. Isn't it obvious what the next conjecture should be? Maybe we can read out the one into the other. Maybe a transplant is possible -- memory, consciousness, "soul", and all. Having prepared an alternative vehicle for sentience, maybe we can climb into it. Maybe, in short, death is an unnecessary affliction.
There, I told you it would be big. Considering what happened to Prometheus, I get a twinge in the liver just looking at my words in print. But after all, it's not my idea. Variants of this theme have been standard fare in science fiction for years. If I am unique at all, it is only in proposing that the time may be at hand to take this one seriously.
Immortality is not the end of it, either. If we can realize man in alternative hardware, then we can plant man in alien environments -- Mars, Venus, the ocean bottom, the hard vacuum of outer space, you name it. The bonds of space and time become as nothing; there is no resource in the universe that is out of our reach. Even pollution shall lose its sting, for that which is harmful waste to one implementation of man can be resource to another.
The best of it is that these are no surrogates of ourselves that shall do these things -- no evolutionary successors that cut us down and replace us, no remote and alien beings whose success is small consolation to us. No -- these shall be us, transplanted and continuing, triumphant over our limitations, bursting upon the universe.
I look forward to a future in which flesh and bone shall be only the larval stage of human existence. The mature human being will look something more like the Tin Woodman (with heart) -- or any of a thousand other forms, as may be convenient. At some stage after the mortifications begin to outweigh the pleasures of the flesh, a man will simply abandon it in favor of a more durable medium.
There, friends, you have a more cheerful vision of where science may be leading us -- if 1984, Brave New World, On the Beach, or A Silent Spring doesn't get us first.
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Work in Progress: The Gathering Rainbow. |
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