The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (57 page)

If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals
that would be appropriate for the virtual environment.
³³
Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body. After all, the brain does not experience the body directly. As I discussed in
chapter 4
, inputs from the body—comprising a few hundred megabits per second—representing information about touch, temperature, acid levels, the movement of food, and other physical events, stream through the Lamina 1 neurons, then through the posterior ventromedial nucleus, ending up in the two insula regions of cortex. If these are coded correctly—and we will know how to do that from the brain reverse-engineering effort—your brain will experience the synthetic signals just as it would real ones. You could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you normally would, but the nanobots would intercept these interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and instead cause your virtual limbs to move, appropriately adjusting your vestibular system and providing the appropriate movement and reorientation in the virtual environment.

The Web will provide a panoply of virtual environments to explore. Some will be re-creations of real places; others will be fanciful environments that have no counterpart in the physical world. Some, indeed, would be impossible, perhaps because they violate the laws of physics. We will be able to visit these virtual places and have any kind of interaction with other real, as well as simulated, people (of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two), ranging from business negotiations to sensual encounters. “Virtualreality environment designer” will be a new job description and a new art form.

Become Someone Else.
In virtual reality we won’t be restricted to a single personality, since we will be able to change our appearance and effectively become other people. Without altering our physical body (in real reality) we will be able to readily transform our projected body in these three-dimensional virtual environments. We can select different bodies at the same time for different people. So your parents may see you as one person, while your girlfriend will experience you as another. However, the other person may choose to override your selections, preferring to see you differently than the body you have chosen for yourself. You could pick different body projections for different people: Ben Franklin for a wise uncle, a clown for an annoying coworker. Romantic couples can choose whom they wish to be, even to become each other. These are all easily changeable decisions.

I had the opportunity to experience what it is like to project myself as another persona in a virtual-reality demonstration at the 2001 TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference in Monterey. By means of magnetic
sensors in my clothing a computer was able to track all of my movements. With ultrahigh-speed animation the computer created a life-size, near photorealistic image of a young woman—Ramona—who followed my movements in real time. Using signal-processing technology, my voice was transformed into a woman’s voice and also controlled the movements of Ramona’s lips. So it appeared to the TED audience as if Ramona herself were giving the presentation.
³⁴

To make the concept understandable, the audience could see me and see Ramona at the same time, both moving simultaneously in exactly the same way. A band came onstage, and I—Ramona—performed Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” as well as an original song. My daughter, then fourteen, also equipped with magnetic sensors, joined me, and her dance movements were transformed into those of a male backup dancer—who happened to be a virtual Richard Saul Wurman, the impresario of the TED conference. The hit of the presentation was seeing Wurman—not known for his hip-hop moves—convincingly doing my daughter’s dance steps. Present in the audience was the creative leadership of Warner Bros., who then went off and created the movie
Simone
, in which the character played by Al Pacino transforms himself into Simone in essentially the same way.

The experience was a profound and moving one for me. When I looked in the “cybermirror” (a display showing me what the audience was seeing), I saw myself as Ramona rather than the person I usually see in the mirror. I experienced the emotional force—and not just the intellectual idea—of transforming myself into someone else.

People’s identities are frequently closely tied to their bodies (“I’m a person with a big nose,” “I’m skinny,” “I’m a big guy,” and so on). I found the opportunity to become a different person liberating. All of us have a variety of personalities that we are capable of conveying but generally suppress them since we have no readily available means of expressing them. Today we have very limited technologies available—such as fashion, makeup, and hairstyle—to change who we are for different relationships and occasions, but our palette of personalities will greatly expand in future full-immersion virtual-reality environments.

In addition to encompassing all of the senses, these shared environments can include emotional overlays. Nanobots will be capable of generating the neurological correlates of emotions, sexual pleasure, and other derivatives of our sensory experience and mental reactions. Experiments during open brain surgery have demonstrated that stimulating certain specific points in the brain can trigger emotional experiences (for example, the girl who found everything funny when stimulated in a particular spot of her brain, as I reported in
The
Age of Spiritual Machines
).
³⁵
Some emotions and secondary reactions involve a pattern of activity in the brain rather than the stimulation of a specific neuron, but with massively distributed nanobots, stimulating these patterns will also be feasible.

Experience Beamers.
“Experience beamers” will send the entire flow of their sensory experiences as well as the neurological correlates of their emotional reactions out onto the Web, just as people today beam their bedroom images from their Web cams. A popular pastime will be to plug into someone else’s sensory-emotional beam and experience what it’s like to be that person, à la the premise of the movie
Being John Malkovich
. There will also be a vast selection of archived experiences to choose from, with virtual-experience design another new art form.

Expand Your Mind.
The most important application of circa-2030 nanobots will be literally to expand our minds through the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence. The first stage will be to augment our hundred trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobot communication.
³⁶
This will provide us with the opportunity to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of nonbiological intelligence. The technology will also provide wireless communication from one brain to another.

It is important to point out that well before the end of the first half of the twenty-first century, thinking via nonbiological substrates will predominate. As I reviewed in
chapter 3
, biological human thinking is limited to 10
¹⁶
calculations per second (cps) per human brain (based on neuromorphic modeling of brain regions) and about 10
²⁶
cps for all human brains. These figures will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering adjustments to our genome. The processing capacity of nonbiological intelligence, in contrast, is growing at an exponential rate (with the rate itself increasing) and will vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s.

By that time we will have moved beyond just the paradigm of nanobots in a biological brain. Nonbiological intelligence will be billions of times more powerful, so it will predominate. We will have version 3.0 human bodies, which we will be able to modify and reinstantiate into new forms at will. We will be able to quickly change our bodies in full-immersion visual-auditory virtual environments in the second decade of this century; in full-immersion virtualreality environments incorporating all of the senses during the 2020s; and in real reality in the 2040s.

Nonbiological intelligence should still be considered human, since it is fully derived from human-machine civilization and will be based, at least in part, on reverse engineering human intelligence. I address this important philosophical issue in the next chapter. The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and nonbiological thinking mediums, but more important, one of method and organization of thinking, one that will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way.

Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained. As the nonbiological portion of our thinking begins to predominate by the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions. Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern-recognition, and cognitive abilities. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another, they will be able to create any set of new neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing), create new hybrid biologicalnonbiological networks, and add completely nonbiological networks, as well as interface intimately with new nonbiological forms of intelligence.

The use of nanobots as brain extenders will be a significant improvement over surgically installed neural implants, which are beginning to be used today. Nanobots will be introduced without surgery, through the bloodstream, and if necessary can all be directed to leave, so the process is easily reversible. They are programmable, in that they can provide virtual reality one minute and a variety of brain extensions the next. They can change their configuration and can alter their software. Perhaps most important, they are massively distributed and therefore can take up billions of positions throughout the brain, whereas a surgically introduced neural implant can be placed only in one or at most a few locations.

M
OLLY
2004:
Full-immersion virtual reality doesn’t seem very inviting. I mean, all those nanobots running around in my head, like little bugs
.

R
AY:
Oh, you won’t feel them, any more than you feel the neurons in your head or the bacteria in your GI tract
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Actually, that I can feel. But I can have full immersion with my friends right now, just by, you know, getting together physically
.

S
IGMUND
F
REUD:
Hmmm, that’s what they used to say about the telephone when I was young. People would say, “Who needs to talk to someone hundreds of miles away when you can just get together?”

R
AY:
Exactly, the telephone is auditory virtual reality. So full-immersion VR is, basically, a full-body telephone. You can get together with anyone anytime but do more than just talk
.

G
EORGE
2048:
It’s certainly been a boon for sex workers; they never have to leave their homes. It became so impossible to draw any meaningful lines that the authorities had no choice but to legalize virtual prostitution in 2033
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Very interesting but actually not very appealing
.

G
EORGE
2048:
Okay, but consider that you can be with your favorite entertainment star
.

M
OLLY
2004:
I can do that in my imagination any time I want
.

R
AY:
Imagination is nice, but the real thing—or, rather, the virtual thing—is so much more, well, real
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Yeah, but what if my “favorite” celebrity is busy?

R
AY:
That’s another benefit of virtual reality circa 2029; you have your choice of millions of artificial people
.

M
OLLY
2104:
I understand that you’re back in 2004, but we kind of got rid of that terminology back when the Nonbiological Persons Act was passed in 2052. I mean, we’re a lot more real than . . . umm, let me rephrase that
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Yes, maybe you should
.

M
OLLY
2104:
Let’s just say that you don’t have to have explicit biological structures to be—

G
EORGE
2048:
—passionate?

M
OLLY
2104:
I guess you should know
.

T
IMOTHY
L
EARY:
What if you have a bad trip?

R
AY:
You mean, something goes awry with a virtual-reality experience?

T
IMOTHY:
Exactly
.