This week, the greatest minds in science and technology
pleaded with the world to prevent an artificial intelligence "
arms race" — an apocalyptic scenario in which terrorists would have access to highly advanced weapons like killer robots.
The
issue arose back in April when representatives from Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School wrote a
paper
calling for the United Nations to ban "killer robot" production until
regulation and legal stipulations — for instance, who's at fault when a
robot shoots an unassigned target — could be put in place.
We should be listening when some of the
most trusted minds in tech, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking, are
warning the world
about letting AI weapons go off the rails. But history and science
demonstrate that their predictions for hyperintelligent computers aren't
as far-fetched as they sound. Computers could soon "think" faster than
human beings too.
Computers of the future: A principle called
Moore's law predicts
that computing will increase in power while simultaneously grow
exponentially cheaper and smaller. A perfect example: In 1956, IBM
needed a forklift
to put a 5-megabyte hard drive, then the size of two refrigerators, on
an airplane. Today, for $20, you can buy a 16-gigabyte flash drive that
fits on your keychain. That's 3,200 times more data capacity than the
aforementioned behemoth.
Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (available as a
Google PDF)
charts our modern era's computational power and compares it to a mouse
brain. But in order to reach human-brain levels of processing, the way
we approach the technology may need to be approached differently.
Kurzweil anticipates
optical computing, which operates extremely fast but needs much less power.
Thanks to a Duke University research team, which developed an "ultrafast spontaneous emission source" to set a new
speed record, that technology could be closer than expected.
The $1,000 brain: Engineer Peter Diamandis used the now
50-year-old Moore's law to make
eight predictions
about where technology will go in the next decade. His very first
prediction is that we'll have a $1,000 "human brain" — that is, a
computer that can perform 10,000 trillion calculations every second, or
the same as a human....
MORE
