Machine Intelligence vs Cyborgs!!

You may have gathered I have a strong interest in machine intelligence and machine consciousness.  I have many thoughts on the matter, including the moral and ethical aspects involved.

 

Professor Kevin Warwick is a name you may know.  He is the Cybernetics Professor who had an implant in his arm so that he could control a robotic arm, and had it connected up to the internet.  At the time there was some rumbling about the next step being to use it to sense emotions and transmit them to his wife, who was also to have an implant.  Personally, I was not quite sure how emotions were going to be detected in this way, nor indeed how they were going to be translated back from the transmission medium into a form recognizable by his wife, but maybe I was just not thinking in the right way to see the big picture.

 

Anyway, ‘Our Kev’ as I like to think of him, takes a firm stand on the subject of machine intelligence, as it relates to autonomous entities.  He thinks that it is a Bad Thing, and that if lunatics like me get my way, there is a chance that my little babies might take over the world, wreaking havoc and pushing mankind out of his rightful place at the top of the evolutionary ladder.  I am, of course, flattered that the Prof. thinks intelligent robots would be so superior to mankind and exist in such large numbers that they could be a threat.  And I can see his concern – although the mess we have made of things, perhaps being pushed off our pedestal would be no bad thing.

 

Prof. Warwick’s solution to the impending problem of AI robots dominating the world, however, truly fills me with dread.  Cybernetic implants are an exciting possibility, for sure, enabling treatment of conditions such as Parkinson’s.  And I can feel the lure of the possibility of augmenting your own senses with implant technology.  Eyes in the back of your head, anyone?  But if we integrate the machine with the man, haven’t we already chosen to lose some of our humanity, already lost part of the battle he so desperately wants to win?  And are we not more susceptible to a hostile take over by the dread enemy, which does not need to expend resources interfacing with wetware, and can concentrate its efforts on hacking in to our cybernetic modifications?

 

Not that my NMI or NMC would care two hoots – it would, I suspect, be far more interested in learning all it could and hypothesising about the nature of the universe.