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Future technology sure to be fantastic, but will it improve life?
Friday, October 20, 2000 By Byron Spice, Post-Gazette Science Editor
Within the next 50 years, technologists will be able to build tiny robots small enough to navigate the body's circulatory system. Billions of these robots could infiltrate the brain, taking up positions that allow them to interact with individual brain cells.
The result, says artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil, will be "total immersion virtual reality," a system in which an individual can be mentally transported to another world, or another body, where he can experience imaginary adventures with every sense.
Fantastic, yes. But will this and other types of computer-aided technology make life and society better in the next 50 years? Kurzweil and nine other leading scientists and thinkers gave varying answers during a daylong symposium yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University.
The consensus was that computer and technological development in general would help improve the world over the next 50 years, though some benefits may be more modest than some of the current hype would suggest.
"For human beings, technological progress is like breathing," said David Gelertner, a computer scientist at Yale University. To suggest it could somehow be halted or limited would be to deny the very nature of humans, a nature obvious since people first started making stone tools and grass mats.
But if humans happily make tools, that doesn't mean that the tools can make them happy, he added. Computers became ubiquitous in the 1980s and an obsession for some in the 1990s, but "it seems obvious to me ... that, if anything, we're a less happy nation today," he said.
The things that are most important to people -- families, communities, schools, religion -- are only modestly affected, if at all by computers, emphasized Gelertner, who was injured by a Unabomber mail bomb in 1993.
Computers do improve communication and have helped make the United States a wealthier nation, Gelertner acknowledged. "And any way you cut it, wealth is good and information is good."
But there seems to be a threshold for both wealth and information -- if you are below the threshold and are poor or unknowledgeable, you may be unhappy. Chances for happiness improve above the threshold, but happiness doesn't rise proportionately as people amass even greater wealth and information. "Most of us have been beyond the threshold for generations," he added.
Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems was more pessimistic in a taped "virtual interview" presented during the symposium. Joy argues that genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics have the potential to become self-replicating and could threaten mankind's existence if not properly controlled.
He maintains that individuals have too much power to use and deploy such technology, perhaps unleashing a genetically engineered life-form that could devastate the biosphere. Some limits need to be placed on the information that individuals can access, he said.
"Why should everyone need instant access to all the information about smallpox?" Joy wondered. "We wouldn't give them the material [samples of smallpox virus], so why should we give them information about the material," such as its genetic code? He questioned the wisdom of posting the genetic data generated by the Human Genome Project on the Internet, contending that people could eventually use that genetic information to replicate or manipulate the genetic makeup of lifeforms.
Kurzweil acknowledged that any technology has inherent dangers. But Joy's "call for relinquishment of whole areas of technology ... is unrealistic."
Trends toward miniaturization, toward automation, toward unraveling the genetic code permeate many areas of science and technology, Kurzweil explained. To prevent the potential apocalypse Joy fears, "you'd basically have to stop all technological development," he said, and that would likely require militaristic state control.
The creation of self-replicating computer viruses initially incited fears that viruses would cripple computer networks, Kurzweil said. Yet the reality has been that computer viruses have proven to be only nuisances. "No one would suggest we do away with computer networks because of viruses," he added.
Admittedly, computer viruses don't have the lethality of the technologies envisioned by Joy, Kurzweil said. But the official response to lethal misuse of technology would undoubtedly be swift and severe, not the lackadaisical approach given to computer viruses.
Kurzweil said the greatest power of computers and computer networks is as a communications tool. Computers and related technology have become democratization tools, he said, contending that the fall of the Soviet Union had less to do with Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank than with the ubiquitous fax machines and photocopiers that sped the dissemination of news and information.
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