| Life as a cyborg is better than being human says 'mad' British professor |
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| Investigations | |
| Written by Danny Penman | |
 Professor Kevin Warwick was born human but that was just an accident: he really wants to be a cyborg; part man, part machine. He has just taken the first step by implanting a miniature computer into the main nerve canal of his arm. Through this he will link himself to the Internet via another computer. Now he’s connected, the experiments on his nervous system will begin. He will try and develop new senses, design electronic drugs - those that will make him happy or sad with a few pulses of electricity - then, he will begin exploring the outer limits of his newly created man-machine consciousness. He’s also turned his wife into a cyborg. And soon he will wire-up his lab-mates and mankind will take the long dreamt of leap into the far future where man and machine are one and the same. It's the real world of science fiction and the next evolutionary step for humankind. As technology leaps ahead, it is quite possible that Professor Warwick and his successors will eventually become so inter-connected that they will turn into a “hive”: an entirely new lifeform that is far greater than the sum of its human and machine parts, a truly new species that will eventually out-compete the human race. Homo Sapiens will eventually drift into extinction. Then, the cyborgs will face their greatest task; out-competing the super-intelligent robots that will become infinitely smarter and more adaptable than humans in as little as thirty years from now. “I want the work on cyborgs and artificial intelligence to be monitored and stopped before it goes too far,” says Kevin Warwick, Professor of cybernetics at Reading University. “Work like this is not tangible until it is too late. I hope my work is a wake up call for the human race. I want an organisation like Greenpeace to be set up to keep an eye on it and, if necessary, battle against it. “My work will not create a machine that tries to take over the world but I am not the only one. The military use of this type of technology is terrifying. They will create machines that protect and sustain themselves. You will not be able to switch them off. Already, military machines have intelligence. We’re giving them the nastier side of human nature. We are giving them military and intellectual superiority over us. “I keep wondering, in such a world, where we humans would fit in? We could become their pets, their slaves or just an irrelevance. Frankly, I cannot see any future for humans in such a world. “This is where cyborgs come in. If you can’t beat computers and robots, then join ‘em. We should harness the best of machine intelligence for ourselves. We should build it into our own bodies. The worst thing to do is ignore this technology and hope it goes away because the future is screaming towards us whether we like it or not.” At present, Professor Warwick does not look or sound like a cyborg. Waves of human warmth greet you long before he says “hello” in his West Midlands accent and his eyes are continuously aflame with passion for his work. The doors in Reading University’s Department of Cybernetics, however, clearly greet him as one of their own. Everywhere we go, the doors, walls and just about everything else, greet him with: “Good morning Professor Warwick. How are you?” At first it’s amusing but it soon starts to grate. Before long you feel like the world has suddenly been invaded by hordes of annoyingly pleasant McDonald’s restaurant managers. His office is reassuringly chaotic. He clearly has not invented a robotic cleaning lady - which, he tells me, would be a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. He has, however, invented a robotic cockroach that is highly intelligent and models perfectly its six-legged cousins. As the two foot long cockroach stares lifelessly at me across the room, I start to buy Professor Warwick’s vision of the future. It’s not all bleak and soulless, he claims. “When we are all connected it will no longer be an “I” but a “we”. We may all pool our intelligence and consciousness. It would be a kind of meta-consciousness.” I’m looking forward to seeing the world in an entirely different light. “Reality will be different for cyborgs. Reality is what you perceive it to be. Perception is everything. There could be absolutely anything happening around us as we speak and we would not be aware of it. There could be other beings that live outside our sensory range. Some people might call them ghosts. If you start to ally new technology with our minds then who knows what we’ll find living in parallel dimensions to ours. Just imagine, for example, how the world would look if you had X-ray vision or could sense magnetic fields.” Intelligent computers are continuing to gain more and more control over the staples of life. If you went shopping today, it is likely that all of the items you bought were scanned by computer at the check out. As you buy things, they are automatically re-ordered and despatched. Further down the chain, the manufacturer will have canned, say, a tin of beans, to replace the one you bought at the supermarket earlier today. If you use a loyalty card, it is likely that the supermarket’s computers will have predicted what you were planning to buy and ordered them in specifically. Humans, of course, just do the harvesting and re-stock the shelves. Professor Warwick believes that once the really tedious complex tasks have been handed over to intelligent machines then the fun - and dangers - will really begin. He believes that within ten years effective electronic drugs will be developed. These will work by stimulating the nervous system to help it heal the body, fight depression or suppress pain. Soon after, computer games companies could build on these developments to alter a player’s state of mind to make games more realistic and satisfying. Once adopted by the big games companies, the rapid spread of the technology is assured. After the legal games will come the illegal drugs that jack straight into the brain’s pleasure centres, cutting out the need for contaminated chemicals dealt by dodgy characters in back alleys. “People inject themselves, take pills and snort drugs so connecting up to a games machine will not overly worry them,” says Professor Warwick. “At the moment, you would need serious surgery for the necessary implants but three or four years further down the line it will be a lot easier. The games machines will be as close to drugs as it’s possible to get legally. More powerful but illegal versions will be only a few steps behind.” The implications of this work has just started to catch the imaginations of the authorities. Professor Warwick has been approached by British policemen investigating the possibility of trading e-drugs over the Internet. He won’t go into details but it is clear that a ‘secret’ police unit is already investigating the potential problems posed by the emergence of e-drugs. Their task will almost certainly be a lot harder than fighting the chemical-based drug trade. Chilling though these scenarios are, they are still a long way from the world depicted in science fiction books and films, where humans are dominated and driven to extinction by intelligent machines, aren’t they? Apparently not. Professor Warwick claims that as we come to rely more and more on machine intelligence, we will lessen our ability to survive independently. People will be pushed ever closer to the margin as computers take over more of the complex and creative tasks currently done by the best human brains. Eventually, the world will become dominated by companies and authorities controlled entirely by artificial intelligence. It is simply the logical extension of a world dominated by the free market, where efficiency is king. Once this domination is complete, anyone wishing to switch off the machines will be effectively committing suicide. In any case, many machines, probably those controlled by the military, will be designed to withstand the most determined assault, so it will not be possible to switch them off. In this world, Professor Warwick believes only the cyborgs will have a chance of competing with intelligent machines. Humans will become little more than rats running through the ducts of the global computer networks. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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