A Brave New Species

Richard Yonck

By Richard Yonck

Long-term forecasts are fraught with peril, but anticipating the world at the dawn of the next century is made even more perilous by the possibility of a technological Singularity occurring well before we reach that milestone.

As computer scientist Vernor Vinge and others have pointed out, our ability to anticipate life after the development of a rapidly self-improving superintelligence would be very limited. Not only will we be facing a world of new and incredibly strange technologies, but our social mores, ethics, and institutions will also likely be very different from what they are today.

Nevertheless, some extrapolations can be made based on current technologies and trends. This most certainly includes robotics, a field in which advances currently being made are nothing short of astounding. A range of advancements are occurring all at once: Computer resources are diminishing in scale and growing in processing power, the size of actuators and motors is shrinking, and feedback and pattern-recognition algorithms are improving.

Robotic pack mules such as Big Dog and galloping robots such as Cheetah, both of Boston Dynamics, are currently being developed for military use on the battlefield. Visual-pattern-recognition systems have allowed Google to develop a fleet of driverless vehicles that has logged more than 100,000 cumulative miles.

The ongoing development of interactive humanoid robots suggests that the day may not be not far off when we’ll share the world with a number of cybernetic species. Advances in artificial intelligence could potentially allow these technologies to exceed the intellectual abilities of their creators, at least in some capacities, and possibly in all of them.

The current goal of developing a humanoid robotic soccer team capable of beating a team of world champion human players by the year 2050 seems well within reach. Because the game involves a wide range of cognitive as well as physical skills, it’s considered by many to be an important milestone for robotics and AI.

But this takes us only to the middle of the century. As advancements continue to converge and accelerate, the state of robotics, as gauged by various metrics, will probably have advanced by several orders of magnitude in the remaining decades leading up to 2100. By then, robots could be very superior to unmodified biological organisms.

So how will this change the world? Even assuming that the technological Singularity doesn’t occur, the world will still be a very different place. Technological entities will have basic, essential rights. Perhaps they’ll even be in charge. We’ll interact with them on a daily basis and routinely have physical and social relationships with them. To greater and lesser degrees, we’ll integrate their technologies with our own bodies in order to live better, longer lives.

Both species—human and robot—will probably have moved beyond this one small planet, possibly symbiotically. Assuming that the human race still exists in 2100, we’ll be living in a very different universe indeed.

About the Author

Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future LLC and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Computing and AI. Web site http://intelligent-future.com.