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Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; coauthor (with Martin Nowak), Supercooperators
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For decades, techno-futurists have been worried about that doomsday moment when electronic brains and robots get to be as smart as we are. This “us and them” divide, where humans and machines are thought of as separate, is pervasive. But as we debate endlessly what we mean by human consciousness and the possibilities and perils of a purely artificial intelligence, a blend of the two presents yet another possibility, which deserves more attention.
Millions of primitive cyborgs walk among us already. Over the past decades, humans have gradually fused with devices such as pacemakers, contact lenses, insulin pumps, and cochlear and retinal implants. Deep-brain implants, known as brain pacemakers, now alleviate the symptoms of tens of thousands of Parkinson’s sufferers.
This should come as no surprise. Since the first humans picked up sticks and flints and started using tools, we’ve been augmenting ourselves. Look around at the Science Museum Group’s collections of millions of things from difference engines to smartphones and you can see how people have always exploited new technical leaps, so that the rise of ever smarter machines doesn’t mean a world of us or them but an enhancement of human capabilities.
Researchers are now looking at exoskeletons to help the infirm to walk, and implants to allow paralyzed people to control prosthetic limbs, and digital tattoos that can be stamped onto the body to harvest physiological data or interface with our surroundings—for instance, with the cloud or the Internet of Things.
When it comes to thinking machines, some are even investigating how to enhance human brainpower with electronic plug-ins and other “smartware.” The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched the Restoring Active Memory program to reverse damage caused by a brain injury with neuroprosthetics that sense memory deficits and restore normal function. They work in a quite different way from our brains at present, but thanks to efforts such as the Human Brain Project, the Virtual Physiological Human, and other big brain projects, along with research in neuromorphics, artificial intelligences could become more like our own as time goes by. Meanwhile, there have been attempts to use cultured brain cells to control robots, flight simulators, and more.
As a result of this creeping organic transhumanism, within a few decades it won’t be so easy to tell humans and thinking machines apart. Eventually, many of us won’t solely rely on the meat machines in our heads to ponder the prospect of artificial machines that think. The substrate of future thoughts will sit somewhere on a continuum, within a rainbow of intelligences from regular-I to AI.
