The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (44 page)

BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

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That’s the common wisdom. But I don’t agree with it. My conjecture is that intelligence will ultimately prove more powerful than these big impersonal forces.

Consider our little planet. An asteroid apparently slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago. Nothing personal, of course. It was just one of those powerful natural occurrences that regularly overpower mere life-forms. But the next such interplanetary visitor will not receive the same welcome. Our descendants and their technology (there’s actually no distinction to be made here, as I have pointed out) will notice the imminent arrival of an untoward interloper and blast it from the nighttime sky. Score one for intelligence. (For twenty-four hours in 1998, scientists thought such an unwelcome asteroid might arrive in the year 2028, until they rechecked their calculations.)

Intelligence does not exactly cause the repeal of the laws of physics, but it is sufficiently clever and resourceful to manipulate the forces in its midst to bend to its will. In order for this to happen, however, intelligence needs to reach a certain level of advancement.

Consider that the
density of intelligence
here on Earth is rather low. One quantitative measure we can make is measured in
calculations per second per cubic micrometer (cpspcmm).
This is, of course, only a measure of hardware capacity, not the cleverness of the organization of these resources (that is, of the software), so let’s call this the
density of computation.
We’ll deal with the advancement of the software in a moment. Right now on Earth, human brains are the objects with the highest density of computation (that will change within a couple of decades). The human brain’s density of computation is about 2 cpspcmm. That is not very high—nanotube circuitry, which has already been demonstrated, is potentially more than a trillion times higher.

Also consider how little of the matter on Earth is devoted to any form of computation. Human brains comprise only 10 billion kilograms of matter, which is about one part per hundred trillion of the stuff on Earth. So the average density of computation of the Earth is less than one trillionth of one cpspcmm. We already know how to make matter (that is, nanotubes) with a computational density at least a trillion trillion times greater.

Furthermore, the Earth is only a tiny fraction of the stuff in the Solar System. The computational density of the rest of the Solar System appears to be about zero. So here on a solar system that boasts at least one intelligent species, the computational density is nonetheless extremely low.

At the other extreme, the computational capacity of nanotubes does not represent an upper limit for the computational density of matter: It is possible to go much higher. Another conjecture of mine is that there is no effective limit to this density, but that’s another book.

The point of all these big (and small) numbers is that extremely little of the stuff on Earth is devoted to useful computation. This is even more true when we consider all of the dumb matter in the Earth’s midst. Now consider another implication of the Law of Accelerating Returns. Another of its corollaries is that overall computational density grows exponentially And as the cost-performance of computation increases exponentially, greater resources are devoted to it. We can see that already here on Earth. Not only are computers today vastly more powerful than they were decades ago, but the number of computers has increased from a few dozen in the 1950s to hundreds of millions today. Computational density here on Earth will increase by trillions of trillions during the twenty-first century.

Computational density is a measure of the hardware of intelligence. But the software also grows in sophistication. While it lags behind the capability of the hardware available to it, software also grows exponentially in its capability over time. While harder to quantify,
¹the density of intelligence is closely related to the density of computation. The implication of the Law of Accelerating Returns is that intelligence on Earth and in our Solar System will vastly expand over time.

The same can be said across the galaxy and throughout the Universe. It is likely that our planet is not the only place where intelligence has been seeded and is growing. Ultimately, intelligence will be a force to reckon with, even for these big celestial forces (so watch out!). The laws of physics are not repealed by intelligence, but they effectively evaporate in its presence.

So will the Universe end in a big crunch, or in an infinite expansion of dead stars, or in some other manner? In my view, the primary issue is not the mass of the Universe, or the possible existence of antigravity, or of Einstein’s so-called cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the Universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

TIME LINE
¹ ²