The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (60 page)

Copying our minds to other mediums raises a number of philosophical issues, which I will discuss in the next chapter—for example, “Is that really me or rather someone else who just happens to have mastered all my thoughts and knowledge?” Regardless of how we resolve these issues, the idea of capturing the information and information processes in our brains seems to imply that we (or at least entities that act very much like we do) could “live forever.” But is that really the implication?

For eons the longevity of our mental software has been inexorably linked to the survival of our biological hardware. Being able to capture and reinstantiate all the details of our information processes would indeed separate these two aspects of our mortality. But as we have seen, software itself does not necessarily survive forever, and there are formidable obstacles to its enduring very long at all.

So whether information represents one man’s sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this:
Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it
. The conclusion that I’ve come to with regard to my DAISI project, after several decades of careful consideration, is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible (without unreasonable levels of effort) decades from now.
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The only way that my archive (or any other information base) can remain viable is if it is continually upgraded and ported to the latest hardware and software standards. If an archive remains ignored, it will ultimately become as inaccessible as my old eight-inch PDP-8 floppy disks.

Information will continue to require constant maintenance and support to
remain “alive.” Whether data or wisdom, information will survive only if we want it to. By extension, we can only live for as long as we care about ourselves. Already our knowledge to control disease and aging is advanced to the point that your
attitude
toward your own longevity is now the most important influence on your long-range health.

Our civilization’s trove of knowledge does not simply survive by itself. We must continually rediscover, reinterpret, and reformat the legacy of culture and technology that our forebears have bestowed on us. All of this information will be fleeting if no one cares about it. Translating our currently hardwired thoughts into software will not necessarily provide us with immortality. It will simply place the means to determine how long we want our lives and thoughts to last in our own figurative hands.

M
OLLY
2004:
So what you’re saying is that I’m just a file
?

M
OLLY
2104:
Well, not a static file, but a dynamic file. But what do you mean “just”? What could be more important
?

M
OLLY
2004:
Well, I throw files away all the time, even dynamic ones
.

M
OLLY
2104:
Not all files are created equal
.

M
OLLY
2004:
I suppose that’s true. I was devastated when I lost my only copy of my senior thesis. I lost six months of work and had to start over
.

M
OLLY
2104:
Ah, yes, that was awful. I remember it well, even though it was over a century ago. It was devastating because it was a small part of myself. I had invested my thoughts and creativity in that file of information. So think how precious all of your—my—accumulated thoughts, experience, skills, and history are
.

. . .
on Warfare: The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual-Reality Paradigm

As weapons have become more intelligent, there has been a dramatic trend toward more precise missions with fewer casualties. It may not seem that way when viewed alongside the tendency toward more detailed, realistic television-news coverage. The great battles of World Wars I and II and the Korean War, in which tens of thousands of lives were lost over the course of a few days, were visually recorded only by occasional grainy newsreels. Today, we have a front-row seat for almost every engagement. Each war has its complexities, but the overall movement toward precision intelligent warfare is clear by examining the number of casualties. This trend is similar to what we are beginning to see
in medicine, where smart weapons against disease are able to perform specific missions with far fewer side effects. The trend is similar for collateral casualties, although it may not seem that way from contemporary media coverage (recall that about fifty million civilians died in World War II).

I am one of five members of the Army Science Advisory Group (ASAG), which advises the U.S. Army on priorities for its science research. Although our briefings, deliberations, and recommendations are confidential, I can share some overall technological directions that are being pursued by the army and all of the U.S. armed forces.

Dr. John A. Parmentola, director for research and laboratory management for the U.S. Army and liaison to the ASAG, describes the Department of Defense’s “transformation” process as a move toward an armed force that is “highly responsive, network-centric, capable of swift decision, superior in all echelons, and [able to provide] overwhelming massed effects across any battle space.”
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He describes the Future Combat System (FCS), now under development and scheduled to roll out during the second decade of this century, as “smaller, lighter, faster, more lethal, and smarter.”

Dramatic changes are planned for future war-fighting deployments and technology. Although details are likely to change, the army envisions deploying Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) of about 2,500 soldiers, unmanned robotic systems,
and FCS equipment. A single BCT would represent about 3,300 “platforms,” each with its own intelligent computational capabilities. The BCT would have a common operating picture (COP) of the battlefield, which would be appropriately translated for it, with each soldier receiving information through a variety of means, including retinal (and other forms of “heads up”) displays and, in the future, direct neural connection.

The army’s goal is to be capable of deploying a BCT in 96 hours and a full division in 120 hours. The load for each soldier, which is now about one hundred pounds of equipment, will initially be reduced through new materials and devices to forty pounds, while dramatically improving effectiveness. Some of the equipment would be offloaded to “robotic mules.”

A new uniform material has been developed using a novel form of Kevlar with silica nanoparticles suspended in polyethylene glycol. The material is flexible in normal use, but when stressed it instantly forms a nearly impenetrable mass that is stab resistant. The army’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT is developing a nanotechnology-based material called “exomuscle” to enable combatants to greatly increase their physical strength when manipulating heavy equipment.
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The Abrams tank has a remarkable survival record, with only three combat casualties in its twenty years of combat use. This is the result of both advanced armor materials and of intelligent systems designed to defeat incoming weapons, such as missiles. However, the tank weighs more than seventy tons, a figure that will need to be significantly reduced to meet FCS goals for smaller systems. New lightweight yet ultrastrong nanomaterials (such as plastics combined with nanotubes, which are fifty times stronger than steel), as well as increased computer intelligence to counteract missile attacks, are expected to dramatically lower the weight of ground combat systems.

The trend toward unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which started with the armed Predator in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, will accelerate. Army research includes the development of micro-UAVs the size of birds that will be fast, accurate, and capable of performing both reconnaissance and combat missions. Even smaller UAVs the size of bumblebees are envisioned. The navigational ability of an actual bumblebee, which is based on a complex interaction between its left and right vision systems, has recently been reverse engineered and will be applied to these tiny flying machines.

At the center of the FCS is a self-organizing, highly distributed communications network capable of gathering information from each soldier and each piece of equipment and in turn providing the appropriate information displays and files back to each human and machine participant. There will be no centralized
communications hubs that could be vulnerable to hostile attack. Information will rapidly route itself around damaged portions of the network. An obvious top priority is to develop technology capable of maintaining integrity of communication and preventing either eavesdropping or manipulation of information by hostile forces. The same information-security technology will be applied to infiltrate, disrupt, confuse, or destroy enemy communications through both electronic means and cyberwarfare using software pathogens.

The FCS is not a one-shot program; it represents a pervasive focus of military systems toward remotely guided, autonomous, miniaturized, and robotic systems, combined with robust, self-organizing, distributed, and secure communications.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Project Alpha (responsible for accelerating transformative ideas throughout the armed services) envisions a 2025 fighting force that “is largely robotic,” incorporating tactical autonomous combatants (TACs) that “have some level of autonomy—adjustable autonomy or supervised autonomy or full autonomy within . . . mission bounds.”
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The TACs will be available in a wide range of sizes, ranging from nanobots and microbots up to large UAVs and other vehicles, as well as automated systems that can walk through complex terrains. One innovative design being developed by NASA with military applications envisioned is in the form of a snake.
⁴⁹

One of the programs contributing to the 2020s concept of self-organizing swarms of small robots is the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS) program of the Office of Naval Research, which envisions a drone army of unmanned, autonomous robots in the water, on the ground, and in the air. The swarms will have human commanders with decentralized command and control and what project head Allen Moshfegh calls an “impregnable Internet in the sky.”
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Extensive research is going into designing swarm intelligence.
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Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex behaviors can arise from large numbers of individual agents, each following relatively simple rules.
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Swarms of insects are often able to devise intelligent solutions to complex problems, such as designing the architecture of a colony, despite the fact that no single member of the swarm possesses the requisite skills.

DARPA announced in 2003 that a battalion of 120 military robots (built by I-Robot, a company cofounded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks) was to be fitted with swarm-intelligence software to enable it to mimic the organized behavior of insects.
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As robotic systems become physically smaller and larger in number, the principles of self-organizing swarm intelligence will play an increasingly important role.

There is also recognition in the military that development times need to be reduced. Historically, the typical time period for military projects to go from research to deployment has been longer than a decade. But with the technology paradigm-shift rate coming down by half every decade, these development times need to keep pace, as many weapons systems are already obsolete by the time they reach the field. One way to accomplish this is to develop and test new weapons using simulations, which enable weapons systems to be designed, implemented, and tested far more quickly than the traditional means of building prototypes and testing them (often by blowing them up) in actual use.

Another key trend is to move personnel away from combat to improve soldiers’ rates of survival. This can be done by allowing humans to drive and pilot systems remotely. Taking the pilot out of a vehicle allows it to take part in riskier missions and to be designed to be far more maneuverable. It also allows the devices to become very small by dispensing with the extensive requirements for supporting human life. The generals are moving even farther away. Tommy Franks conducted the war in Afghanistan from his bunker in Qatar.

Smart Dust.
DARPA is developing devices even tinier than birds and bumblebees called “smart dust”—complex sensor systems not much bigger than a pinhead. Once fully developed, swarms of millions of these devices could be dropped into enemy territory to provide highly detailed surveillance and ultimately support offensive warfare missions (for example, releasing nano-weapons). Power for smart-dust systems will be provided by nanoengineered fuel cells, as well as by conversion of mechanical energy from their own movement, wind, and thermal currents.