[American Greatness] In 1950, the brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing introduced what is now called the Turing Test. It consists of a human interviewing a person and a machine, trying to determine which respondent is the machine. For a machine to pass the Turing Test is considered a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. The test has been administered countless times to date, and while an indisputable machine victory hasn’t happened yet, computer scientists believe it will happen within the next few years.
Alan Turing believed if a machine could pass his test, it was thinking. But most experts do not define thinking and "consciousness" as one and the same. A machine that passes the Turing test is still a machine, an impressive calculator that imitates consciousness, but inside that big calculator, nobody’s home.
That’s hardly the end of the story, of course. In 1988, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson published Infinite in All Directions, a wide-ranging discourse on humanity’s role in the universe. In his book, Dyson predicts that genetic engineering will enable manufactured organic minds that are merged with electronic components including AI, but inside their biological mental core, they will be alive and self-aware.
According to futurists ranging from Dyson and Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk, a millennium from now, if not much, much sooner, only a small fraction of the conscious intelligent beings once known as humans will exist as humanoids we would recognize as ourselves. Others, to present a vivid example, could exist as the conscious brain of a starship, with nerves extending into every system of the craft, interfacing with the minds of similarly cybernetic passengers and crew.
That is the future, and perhaps the not-too-distant future. But what about the next 10 or 20 years? What’s going to happen between now and then? In both bioengineering and cybernetics, the possibilities are mind-boggling, too much to even adequately summarize. Nanobots. Artificial limbs, organs, and nerves. Brain implants.
Credible speculation is limited only by one’s imagination, and it’s happening fast. But what does it mean for society in the short run?
In America, the reality of AI running systems as mundane as a thermostat and as complex as an airliner or a power grid leads to something Victor Davis Hanson alluded to in a recent article in American Greatness, where he wrote, "In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter." |