I don't wanna be a robot

I was listening to the BBC World Service last night in an attempt to get to sleep when one of their business programmes ran a feature on artifical intelligence - what stage it's at, what previous predictions said it'd be like, and what could happen in the future.

It started out by suggesting that what people used to think of as "AI" is in fact all around us, integrated into products. Of course, most thinkers and futurists fifty years ago didn't predict the internet and our current communication culture - but we are surrounded by machines that help us and even make logical decisions in our daily lives. We just think of them as products and not 'robots'.

So that's all nice and safe. I can cope with that. The business angle of the programme was that artificial intelligence is likely to make bigger and bigger decisions on our behalf. Already it's being used on the stockmarket and the abilitly to identify and predict much more complicated, comprehensive trends is expected soon.

But those are just glorified versions of applications that have been around for ages, right? One of the people interviewed (I wish I'd been awake enough to pay attention to who they were now) said that like the 'intelligent' stock market software and future AI would be integrated into products, like I mentioned above.

However, another commentator said that he predicted that a human brain could be replicated in digital form by 2029.

That blew my puny man-mind a bit. If that's accurate (and hell, it probably isn't), that could well be within my lifetime. AI, I'm comfortable with, but self-aware AI? And then this same guy said that following the usual rate of technological progress, the capabilities of electronic intelligence would quickly become far superior to our own.

I had real difficulty getting to sleep after that. The implications are obviously massive and I know a great many people have already thought about them in great depth. But it's only now that it could happen in my lifetime that I've really thought about its impact. Suddenly Ghost in the Shell's cyberbrains, or even the more political man-and-machine ideas in the Matrix or Battlestar Galactica etc. seem surprisingly viable.

Keeping me awake:

• Humanity changing forever
• Being conscious beyond the means of our flesh bodies (e.g. extended 'life'): could we handle it psychologically?
• Would a digital replica of a human brain think, feel and behave exactly like a human?
• The horrific threat of crime: would you like to have your entire consciousness stored on a digital medium? 'Ghost-hacking' could be a real possiblity. And think of the spam!
• Two tiers of intelligent life: the technologically 'enlightened', cyborg, digitally-eternal beings of the 'first world' compared to the mortal, hungry, vulnerable humans of the 'third world'.
• And so on.

Yeah. Maybe I'll leave the radio off tonight.