Please read the questions in attachments.

Will you live on in the mind of a computer?

an AP wire story by Michael Hirsh, June 1987 original source: June 14, 1987 edition of Milwaukee Journal, page 1J reprinted by permission of Norm Goldstein, APN special projects

Pittsburgh, Pa. — If you can survive beyond the next 50 years or so, you may not have to die at all — at least, not entirely.

That is one vision of the future being fashioned on the frontier of robotics and artificial intelligence research, where many of the nation’s experts are talking in terms once reserved for the wildest science fiction.

Hans Moravec, director of the mobile robot laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, believes that computer technology is advancing so swiftly there is little we can do to avoid a future world run by superintelligent robots.

Unless, he says, we become them ourselves.

In an astonishingly short amount of time, scientists will be able to transfer the contents of a person’s mind into a powerful computer, and in the process, make him — or at least his living essence — virtually immortal, Moravec claims.

“The things we are building are our children, the next generations,” the burly, 39-year-old scientist says. “They’re carrying on all our abilities, only they’re doing it better. If you look at it that way, it’s not so devastating.”

Moravec’s ideas are thought chillingly sane by many of his colleagues.

“I have found in traveling throughout all of the major robotics and artificial intelligence centers in the US and Japan that the ideas of Hans Moravec are taken seriously,” says Grant Fjermedal, author of “The Tomorrow Makers,” a recent book about the future of computers and robotics.

Along with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon is considered part of a “holy trinity” of leading American research centers into robotics and artificial — or machine — intelligence, says Fjermedal, who devotes the first five chapters of his book to the work of Moravec and his protégés at Carnegie.

MIT’s Gerald J. Sussman, who wrote the authoritative textbook on artificial intelligence, agreed that computerized immortality for people “isn’t very long from now.”

“A machine can last forever, and even if it doesn’t you can always make backups.” Sussman told Fjermedal. “I’m afraid, unfortunately, that I’m the last generation to die. Some of my students may manage to survive a little longer.”

[snip]

The notion of artificial intelligence also has its detractors, of course, including some of the key researchers who are battling the myriad problems of how to teach machines to think and learn independently, as humans do.

Carnegie Mellon’s Alan Newell, one of the so-called founding fathers of artificial intelligence, cautions that while little stands in the way of intelligent machines, the transfer of a human mind into one is “going down a whole other path.”

“The ability to create intelligent systems is not at all the same as saying I can take an existing mind and capture what’s in that mind.” Newell says. “You might be able to create intelligence but not [capture] the set of biological circumstances that went into making a particular mind.”

In Moravec’s forthcoming book, “Mind Children,” he argues that economic competition for faster and better information-processing systems is forcing the human race to engineer its own technological Armageddon, one that a nuclear catastrophe can only delay.

Natural evolution is finished, he says. The human race is no longer procreating, but designing, its successors.

“We owe our existence to organic evolution. But we owe it little loyalty,” Moravec writes. “We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from non-life to life.”

[snip]

“There are a number of different scenarios of “digitizing” the contents of the human mind into a computer, all of which will be made plausible in the next 50 to 100 years by the pace of current technology, Moravec says.

One is to hook up a superpowerful computer to the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. The computer can be programmed to monitor the traffic between the two and, eventually, to teach itself to think like the brain.

After a while, the machine begins to insert its own messages into the thought stream. “The computer’s coming up with brilliant solutions and they’re just popping into your head.” Moravec says.

As you lose your natural brain capacity through aging, the computer takes over function by function. And with advances in brain scanning, you might not need any “messy surgery,” Moravec says. “perhaps you just wear some kind of helmet or headband,” he suggests. At the same time, the person’s aging, decrepit body is replaced with robot parts.

“In the long run, there won’t be anything left of the original,” he says.

This scenario is probably more than 50 years away, Moravec says, but because breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology are likely to extend people’s life spans, “anybody now living has a ticket.”

Such talk is dismissed as sheer speculation by Moravec’s detractors, among them his former teacher, Stanford’s John McCarthy, who is also one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence research.

McCarthy says that while he respects Moravec’s pioneering work on robots, his former doctoral student is considered a “radical.”

“I’m more uncertain as to how long it [human equivalence] will take. Maybe it’s five years. Maybe it’s 500. He has a slight tendency to believe it will happen as soon as computers are powerful enough. They may be powerful enough already. Maybe we’re not smart enough to program them.”

Even with superintelligent machines, McCarthy says, it is hardly inevitable that computers will take over the world.

“I think we ought to work it out to suit ourselves. In particular, it is not going to be to our advantage to give things with human-level intelligence human-like emotions [like ambition]. You might want something to sit there and maybe read an encyclopedia until you’re ready to use it again.” he says.

George Williams, an emeritus professor of divinity at Harvard University, calls Moravec’s scenario “entirely repugnant.” Williams says he wishes the Vatican had grappled with this issue rather than with human reproduction, as it did in its recent edict.

“We have not yet as religious people and as Christians fully developed ... a doctrine of man, of who we are.” he says.

“The whole of civilization in all of its achievements is based on the assumption that our life is brief. The perpetuation of it in this artificial manner would negate all that’s gone before. It would be a new species of life ... It almost seems monstrous to me.”