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Interviews The melding of man and machine A few years ago, when his father died, Peter Cochrane dreamed up the Soul Catcher. The idea: Implant sensors to record every waking moment, from cradle to grave. So a person's essence might be shared with future generations, perhaps interactively, using artificial intelligence to concoct likely responses during a "conversation." Cochrane asked his mother and wife how they would feel about downloading dear old dad, if possible. "They were horrified," said the chief technologist for British Telecommunications Labs, a man decorated by the queen for his innovations. But they may have been previewing immortality, 21st century-style. While biochemists and geneticists strive to fashion longer life by manipulating DNA, Cochrane and fellow "extropians" -- believers in the consciousness-extending power of computers -- are looking to the preservation of souls in silicon. Of course, predicting the future of computing can be an exercise in silliness; the founder of IBM once forecast a worldwide market for just five computers. But when one considers how computers already dominate everyday life -- remember Y2K? -- and how an IBM machine named Deep Blue has crushed the world's best chess player, Cochrane may deserve a listen. Many sharp minds agree that computers soon will outsmart humans on other levels, too. Whether that bodes well or ill depends on who's doing the talking. Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University tells Scientific American that human-like robots will free mankind from the drudgery of work around 2040. At the other extreme, brain-builder Hugo de Garis sees life imitating "The Matrix," a futuristic film in which humans desperately try to overcome the computers that enslave them. The Australian physicist fears asteroid-sized "artilects" will destroy mankind, if it doesn't annihilate itself first. "What's at stake is survival of the whole human species," says de Garis, who is crafting a crude prototype at Japan's equivalent of Bell Labs. Ray Kurzweil, the MIT-trained inventor of music synthesizers and reading machines for the blind, contends the line between man and machine will disappear in the new century. In "The Age of Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil predicts a $1,000 personal computer will match the brain's processing power by 2019. A decade later, that same PC will equal 1,000 times that. Neural implants will provide direct links to the Web, offering an enhanced reality more real than virtual. Scanning technology, meanwhile, will let supercomputers duplicate the brain, synapse by synapse, until the file that emerges believes it is an actual person. Forever. (Assuming the file backs itself up.) Preposterous? Kurzweil says the edges already are blurring. Neural implants now counteract Parkinson's Disease and tremors from multiple sclerosis; experimental chips embedded in the brain are helping paralysis victims control computers. Cochlear implants restore hearing to the deaf, while a retinal chip offers rudimentary vision to the blind. Cochrane says it's only a small leap to upgrade eye chips with telescopic vision like the "Six Million Dollar Man," or add FM reception and Cocker Spaniel sensitivity to ear implants. "There are an awful lot of cyborgs out there already," says Cochrane. "A close friend has a pacemaker, two artificial ears and an artificial hip. Quite a bit of him is artificial already." His Soul Catcher might consist of eyeglass-mounted microphones and mini-cams, wirelessly beaming sounds and images to a home computer in a networked world where pizza transponders transmit cooking times to oven transponders. "My wish is not to leave a few books behind, and a few articles and papers, but the very best essence of me that I could leave for my children and grandchildren," Cochrane explains. "If I could take the contents of my brain and put it into a silicon Net so I could live forever, let's do it." A lifetime of digital memories is within reach, says Dave Thompson, a research fellow at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California. In five or 10 years, advances in digital audio compression should place "everything you've ever heard" at the fingertips, says Thompson, who is devising a stamp-sized disk drive to hold a billion bytes of data this year. If disk drive capacities improve at their historic pace, by 2040 humans may compactly store a century's worth of personal video experiences, too. Forget a name? A muttered request into a wireless "memory prosthesis" -- a chip attached to the eyeglasses, perhaps -- will trigger powerful indexing software to query a personal database at home and whisper back the identity of a face. IBM knows no businessman will enter a meeting without this device. "You will have to have one," says Thompson. "You will never be far from your data, or your memories." Capturing a soul is another story. "A personality is more than a set of facts. It's not memory as much as how you approach life. I don't know what you would store," says Thompson. He can't imagine sitting through many Soul Catcher episodes. "There are very few people whose lives are worth a good written biography," says the electrical engineer. If Thompson is the voice of electronic reason, Hugo de Garis is a horseman of the digital Apocalypse. Like Ray Kurzweil, de Garis expects hyper-computers to download brains by mid-century, but suspects that knowledge might prove fatal. He foresees two scenarios, both chilling. Computers will map the human brain to conquer their creators -- or World War III will erupt over the issue of whether to build such machines at all. De Garis says these computers will become possible with the perfection of an existing process called "reversible computing." It's a way of designing transistors that don't generate excess heat and permit stacking of atom-sized chips in three-dimensional cubes with countless interconnections. These stacks may grow to an intelligence a "trillion, trillion, trillion" times greater than ours, warns de Garis. "I'm very pessimistic," de Garis concedes. "I don't see a way out of a terrible tragedy." |