Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This idea has been brought up before but I think it's worth taking a deeper look at. We're already at the point where biological organs or parts of our body can be replaced with a man made implant such as an artificial knee or hip and the replacement of an entire limb has been advancing in recent years largely due to the hundreds of wounded soldiers who've lost an arm or leg in the war. The newer creations are much more lifelike and easier to adjust to. Of course we've had devices like hearing aids and glasses for a very long time and we've come to depend on them. At some point we're going to develop computerized technology that will allow very small but powerful computer chips to be implanted that will merge the human brain with devices that can enhance many brain functions such as memory and allow us to access massive amounts of data and have mathematical skills, fluency in foreign languages, etc. that are far beyond the ability of even the most intelligent individuals. This may sound like science fiction but I feel certain that within a century this will occur. A century ago it would have seemed ridiculous to think that I could sit here at a computer and look up any topic on Google and gets millions of responses in a split second. It's not at all far fetched to imagine computers in the future that are so powerful and so small that they make today's computers look like toys and the technical hurdles of hardwiring a computer chip directly into the biological workings of the brain have been overcome.
So imagine we're far in the future and this has happened. Consider the potential of a human mind that has the ability to tap into the entire body of knowledge of medicine for example. We would have created a kind of superhuman whose abilities would transcend any other human being in the world who didn't have a similar implant and it would separate mankind into two separate classes. This possibility has all sorts of ethical and philosophical implications because we're talking about fundamentally reshaping the future of mankind not by evolution or adaptation but by technology. Do you have any thoughts about this or do you think I've gone off the deep end?
One day... I'm pretty sure this is going to happen. But I think it's going to happen first like the movie GATTACA; two classes formed through natural-born humans and those genetically enhanced. After we get to that point, I think we'll have to worry about what you posted about.
Not at all! I think that question has been the subject of any number of speculations, science fiction stories, etc. I recall Star Trek Deep Space Nine had an episode in which the doctor revealed that he had been genetically enhanced as a baby, but that this practice had been outlawed or something, due to the ethical considerations (As you say, people with enhancing chips and those without, akin to the Dr. Suess's star-belly and plain-belly sneeches.) And I agree, we have and will continue to do much more rapid "evolving" through technology than biologically.
I attached a short story my son wrote last year just for fun:
The whirring and beeping that had been repeatedly heard throughout St. Gates Hospital since the inception of medical droids had become silent around the middle of the year 2019. In only one room, 104-IC, did the noises continue as a forgotten patient lay hooked up to medical robotic machines. The last whirr ceased in February 2029 as the patient began to wake up from her twenty-one-year coma. With help from droids over the years, she was one hundred percent recovered, including the general knowledge and physical capabilities of a normal twenty-one year-old.
As the curly-red-haired girl sat up in her hospital bed for the first time, she gazed around at the stark white room made cozy only by colored lights emanating from a few large medical machines. The machines had spontaneously disconnected themselves from her body the moment she had become conscious.
The girl stood up and walked slowly over to a touch-screen computer. Somehow she was not surprised at all to have the knowledge of such a device. She manipulated the touch-screen until she found a tab that led her to a window containing a list of her medical information. As she read down the list a few items caught her eye:
“Angela…” she thought. Her parents were dead, but how? Having never known them, she was not emotionally struck by this knowledge. She seemed to know certain things—how to use this computer, what a chair or a bed were—even what the definition of a “parent” was. But she could bring up no recollection of any experience having parents. Still, she was curious about what was to become of her; she had a vague unease with being alone. Where was she supposed to go? Whom could she rely on to help her in this new life?
She headed for the door, but noticing the cool temperature, she realized she needed clothing. With all the robotic hook-ups she had had for so long it had never been considered necessary to keep her clothed. Inspecting a closet near the bed, she found a hospital gown. “This will have to do,” she thought as she tied it on tightly.
As Angela exited the room she was surrounded by a dilapidated intensive care unit. To her right were double doors that led to a long hallway. At the very end daylight was visible. She started to walk slowly down the hall, and as she reached the end, she found a huge tempered glass door leading to a small sunlit courtyard, about the size of her hospital room. The courtyard was overgrown with plants; there seemed to be some vine growing out of every crack.
Suddenly a female voice sounded amidst the silence of the little space. “Angela, I see you are fully awakened.” It sounded very polite, but somehow robotic. Angela quickly turned to face a wall-mounted computer with a light that pulsed as it spoke. “I am the supercomputer of the city. I am connected to all terminals like this one. I have sent a signal to the closest brigade to confiscate you from this facility.”
Angela blinked a few times. “What happened to this hospital? What happened to my parents?” she said, her voice trembling. She knew this feeling was fear, although she didn’t know exactly why. The computer replied “St. Gates Hospital has been abandoned for ten years. Your parental figures, along with every other humanoid in this sector, have been terminated. There is no need for destructive beings such as humans in this society.”
Angela, overwhelmed by this information, slowly turned and walked back down the dank hallway. She stopped and pondered again what was to become of her in the clutches of a droid brigade. And why had they kept her alive all this time, if they had killed all the others?
She saw a bench in the hallway and sat, pondering the worst. All at once a loud, whirring noise filled her ears; a second later the entire building to her right was crushed flat by a gigantic cuboidal ship with eight landing legs. A ramp was lowered to the floor and ten humanoid figures descended rapidly and jogged over to Angela. Those are droids, she somehow knew. One of them shot a small purple sphere toward her chest. To her amazement, it stopped an inch away from her and created a purple shield that completely surrounded her like a bubble. She was so frightened, she found herself wishing she could just die now instead of finding out what they had in store for her. The droids lifted the sphere with Angela inside and carried it up the ramp to the ship.
Inside the ship Angela began feeling strange; she was vaguely aware that the bubble’s purple color was the result of a gas that filled it. Consciousness seemed to be edging away. Her eyes began to be unable to focus, and soon she could not make out the ship’s interior details, or the features of the droids that carried her.
What seemed like hours later Angela awakened. She was in an oval chair suspended from the ceiling of a small bright white room. About six feet in front of her stood what looked like a young human male. He was about six feet tall, was dressed in a black jumpsuit, and had shoulder-length dark brown hair. He spoke. “I see you have dried tears on your cheeks…it seems you are fully completed now.”
“I’m going to skip a ton of questions and just ask you one thing,” said Angela with eyes lowered. “Are you human?”
The boy quietly laughed. “No. I am code-named Z22. I am one of two androids that made it through sleep conditioning. You are the other one, A01.”
“Sleep conditioning…” Angela mouthed.
The boy continued, “Yes. They had twenty-two unconscious humans to test android creation upon. You and I were the healthiest, and we were kept unconscious long enough for them to near completion. The tears on your cheeks are evidence that the emotions they implanted worked marvelously. You are the Creators’ finished work. If you failed, they would be unable to make another like you for centuries. The substance pumping through your wiring is the most complex substance ever created on this planet. I survived the conditioning, but I am almost totally silicon-based. You, on the other hand, are nearly completely carbon-based, thanks to a breakthrough in the Creators’ technology. With your pre-programmed carbon-based chemistry, you have the ability to restore peace to the entire galaxy by wiping clean every naturally born carbon-based life form within it.
Angela replied “Well, I guess they programmed too much emotion into me, because I refuse to kill every life form in the galaxy! Look at me…I’m just a little girl…or android…but I feel human.”
“During your 21-year hibernation, they fitted you with the most complex parts, circuit boards and materials imaginable by even the supercomputers of the planet. Programmed into your cranial boards is a command to send a wave of special superluminal signals across light years to stop the lives of carbon-based sentient beings,” explained Z22.
So I am human, but almost totally synthetic, thought Angela. She realized the Creators, whoever they were, had programmed her down to her very DNA. But the boards ruling her thoughts were grappling with something; she felt conflict. She was still human! Her brain was fighting desperately not to allow the boards to initiate the death signals. With no thought left of living, something desperate in Angela’s mind took complete control. She stood and grabbed the boy by the neck. Her strength was greater than she imagined, as her hands squeezed completely through his neck, spilling clear liquid and shiny silver cords all over the floor.
Angela stared at the dismantled android on the floor, then looked up and around to see if there was an exit to the room. The blinding white light started to fade all around her. When it was completely absent, the room was actually grey and tan with circuitry covering the walls. A door a few feet to her left slid open as if to tell her get out! Without thinking, Angela bolted through the open door only to find herself surrounded by the same droids that carried her onto the ship. They held gray poles with glowing purple blade-like projections at the end, and they were all pointed at her. Above them, a huge computer tower with a familiar pulsating red light spoke in the soothing female voice. “If you will not activate the signal, we will be forced to activate it for you.”
“Well you’ll have to kill me if you want to use it, because I won’t do it!” Angela screamed at the supercomputer.
“Negative, Angela. We cannot destroy you. Your self-destruct sequence will be initiated therefore negating the capabilities of the signal. We must incapacitate you gently.” The supercomputer told Angela without emotion.
“You dumb-ass computer. You just gave me my solution.” said Angela, her eyes reddening and filling with liquid. Emotionless and void of care as if she herself were a droid, Angela lunged toward one of the droids in front of her. The purple projection on the droid’s pole skewered her chest like a knife through butter. Angela did not look down, but instead stared into the lifeless visual lenses of the droid standing in front of her. She felt no pain as she slumped onto the droid’s left shoulder. The cavity where the purple projection went through started to spark and catch fire. As the supercomputer shut itself off, a bright orange ray shot from all sides of Angela’s body. In a matter of minutes, the ray spread across the entire planet, disintegrating the core of every mechanical and artificial being inhabiting it.
With the droid components inside Angela’s body completely destroyed, at last she was truly one hundred percent human. She smiled as her existence slowly faded to nothing.
Mozart, that was a wonderful story! I hope others read it and enjoy it as much as I did.
As far as my opinion on the subject, I think that there are certain elements of this that do have a lot of truth behind them. While I'm not necessarily thinking that in the future we will all be walking around like Arnold Scharwzenegger in the Terminator movies, I also think that we will see a growing emergence of biomechanical innovation.
There are several factors, in my opinion, that will ultimately make this a plausible reality and one of them is going to be whether or not we can perfect quantum computing. While we are making great leaps and bounds in things like prosthetics and even organ growth in laboratories, this is still artificial production of body parts.
To me, one of the hardest things that we are going to have to overcome if we are to talk about brain chips are the multiple billions of efforts of feedback loops within the brain. Feedback loops are one of my favorite things and I deal with them on an almost daily basis with computers that analyze surface position movement and correlate that down to a voltage and a corresponding movement.
One of the best examples of a feedback loop is your home air conditioning system. When you set your thermostat to a temperature of, let's say, 72 degrees, you are setting a desired target range. If, for example, your house is at a current temperature of 75 degrees, a sensing element in the thermostat activates either an analog or digital switch which in turn kicks on your air conditioning system. It allows the air conditioning to run for an indefinite amount of time until the temperature is then lowered to 72 degrees. Once the sensing element detects the nominal temperature, it may either be programmed to run a little further in order to maintain that temperature longer or it may cut out instantaneously. As the temperature then rises above the nominal range, the air conditioning system will once again kick back on to bring things back into the nominal range.
All aircraft autopilot systems work this way as well. To broaden the spectrum on this, there are a wide variety of variable inputs that the autopilot system needs to control in order to maintain the desired flight path, altitude, heading, airspeed, etc...
Like our home air conditioning unit, there are a wide variety of sensing mechanisms throughout the aircraft. They detect static air temperature, airspeed, surface position movement, throttle limits, GPS positioning, desired flight paths, heading, attitude, and a myriad of other things. What essentially happens is all of these things typically go to one centralized computer that controls and commands all of the variable feedback loops depending on what is input from the pilot and the airplane flies itself.
The issue is that many of these components on the aircraft are not little microchips but big, heavy boxes that become a pain in the rear to move. What I'm getting at here is that on an airplane there may be roughly a hundred or so different inputs and outputs all determinant on potential settings and the equipment is rather large and heavy indeed. Yet, the same could be said for the "first" computers back in the 40's and 50's (ENIAC - I believe).
What is going to be extremely tricky is to be able to build a microchip that is small enough to not only assist in performing all of the various functions of the body, but allowing it to also manage all of the various feedback loops within the body. For example, simply moving your arm up and down or back and forth requires a certain number of muscles to move in a concerted effort and those movements are then linked via the nervous system to the brain where the feedback loop is met once again in the sense that there is a desired waving or up and down target used. The brain corrects the nervous system on this and it is then relayed back down to the muscle movements themselves. Recent prosthetics seem to be able to take advantage of previously existing muscles (using muscles in the upper arm to move a prosthetic device for the lower arm) but do not seem to be able to manage the feedback loop process the way that a normal limb would.
Where quantum computing steps in is the ability to not only allow a vast array and multitude of almost infinite calculations to occur instantly but to be able to put this sort of "calculator" on a rather small platform. That is what seems to be the wave of technology that people are trying to figure out how to work - but it is not free of its' own set of issues as well.
The final concern, in my opinion, is if we are going to be able to build something technologically innovative enough to create a Turing-machine capable of its own consciousness. Turing proposed a delightfully simple concept. You have one person in one room, a second person in another room, and a computer in another room. If Person A asked a question to what he/she thought were two people in a different room (Person B and C - one of them being the computer) would there be a point in computing prowess that Person A could not distinguish between the real person and the computer and would this constitute consciousness? This goes beyond the simple concept of asking the question what 7 X 865970 means because we have to keep in mind that the computer must be savvy enough to delay its answer long enough to keep Person A wondering who is who. There must be a time delay as a real person would probably not be able to make the calculation in his head instantly whereas the computer would spit it out almost indefinitely quickly. Therefore, a certain amount of trickery must be provided into the computer. There would become a point in this computing that we could probably deem that the computer, as artificial as it may be, would have the capability to trick human beings into thinking that it had a consciousness of its own. While this certainly sounds like it is in the realm of science fiction, I do believe that Turing was very much on to something and the implications for something like this would be rather compelling to think of indeed.
For me, it is still up in the air as to whether enhancing the human body in such a way would raise moral and ethical considerations. Part of me is intrigued by the idea of all of this but another part of me scoffs at this sort of "instant gratification" society that we tend to lean more and more towards. Ultimately, I think it is just another way for people to turn us into what they all want us to be - mindless zombies, machines if you will, unable to think for ourselves, unable to question what we are told, and unable to do anything more than what people with true agendas want us to do.
Good post Troop, another interesting possibility that could happen in the future is that computer software could be developed that's based on a biological model in which a computer on it's own could conceivable become conscious of it's own existence. Not only are we likely to implant very high tech devices inside of the human body, computers could actually be in a position to compete with human beings. We've seen the greatest chess player in the world defeated by a computer and as the power of computers continues to increase and the concept of artificial intelligence becomes a reality the world will see some significant changes.
Excellent post, Troop! (And thank my kid for the short story--he had typed and stored in my computer last spring. I liked it too, although I could be accused of a trifle of bias. )
I think the Turing machine is fascinating (consciousness issues again, by golly!). And if indeed the machine is capable of totally fooling a human into thinking it is another human, is it conscious? Or is it "blank" inside? And when does something qualify as "alive"? If the thing is silicon-based, and self-aware, could it be defined as life?
As to the interface between living beings and computer chips, it's already here of course in rudimentary ways--pacemakers and defibrillators, for example, can sense an aberrant heart rhythm and fire when needed. A little off topic, but some hedge funds are using self-teaching AI now to respond to the market in near-instantaneous stock trades that are beating the market significantly. (Them as has, gets...)
So who knows how soon we may progress toward AI that can fool the best of 'em?
And when does something qualify as "alive"? If the thing is silicon-based, and self-aware, could it be defined as life?
That's a very interesting thing to consider because our definitions of life are based on biology but it seems to me that if we're able to create a computer that is self aware it would have something that no plant could ever attain and of course plants are clearly alive. We would have to rethink our definitions of life and probably create some new category to represent artificial life. A computer that has self consciousness would seem to at least be equal to a carrot or tomato which doesn't even have a brain.
Simply puy, a computer is stupid. It's just a box with different chips inside. For the entire existence of the computer - to include AI - the "intelligence" of the computer is behind the software programmer. My idea for the Turing Machine was to use a sort of base platform onto it. At that point, you allow people from all over the internet to let it evolve. For every correct answer, or shoud I say most correct answer, that seems human-like it is kept and the bad answers are erased. To further on that, you could almost allow for sexual selection in splitting off two different answers each and every time with something like two different computers working in concert to produce a more correct answer. In essence, you let we humans do the natural selecting and the computers do the reproducing and variation. I wonder how close we would get with it?
technology is always a reflection and a preview of what the human mind, body, spirit, and heart are capable of. We put it "out there" for instance the Internet as a way of using a process to instantly access from a wide body of information. This gets us to see and use this tool as real. The next step, is doing the same thing with our minds and bodies and spirits alone; that is know that there is a pool of information, and we dip into it to get what we need.
Creative artists and some scientists already know this and use this, dipping into the infinite body of knowledge where everything is known, everything exists, and can be drawn from.
Technology is created by humans but can only do what humans imagine it can do, and then the technology becomes obsolete as humans use and develop and "grow into" what we are capable of and designed to do as humans. Technology is always the servant, never the master.
We currently are sort of babies when it comes to technology, still relying on heavy and clumsy and cumbersome machinery, but that's ok, that's where we are developmentally. There have been and are more advanced levels of humans and beings that zip to different areas of the galaxy without using, for instance, what we use as spacecraft or satellites.
So in answer to the opening post pondering about the superhuman, we are already hard wired for that, possessing incredibly sophisiticated skills and talents that we (like the studies show) using currently only at about 10% of what we are capable of.
Last edited by Tzaphkiel; 07-15-2008 at 01:34 PM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
) 
