Immortality. Not something we’ve heard much about in recent years, yet a concept that could very well be attainable in the next several decades. Hanson Robotics, working collectively with The Terasem Foundation as well as KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Technology), is bringing robots to life!
These robots aren’t just any robots. They are mechanically able to mimic the human face and all its expressions through the use of 32 servo motors and an artificial skin called Frubber™. The heads are also equipped with two cameras to act as eyes, two microphones for hearing, and so on. Smell and taste are a bit more complicated, but with future technology integrating a digital equivalent of those senses, they are not out of the question. For example, touch now has a digital equivalent in the form of haptic technology, similar to the technology often found in smart phones.
These robots will look like us and act like us through their artificial bodies and programmed human mannerisms. They won’t think like us, though… right?
The Terasem Foundation is working on revolutionary and sophisticated AI technology that could actually mimic human thought at speeds undreamed of. These ‘bots’ would use a bipedal, servo-powered body in concert with a fully expressive robotic head, driven by a digital copy of as much salient information about a person as possible (dubbed ‘mindfile’ by the folks at the Terasem Foundation). The AI programming, as well as the future-tech bioelectric ‘brain’ powering consciousness, will then translate the analog signals and experiences of the replicated person into a digital framework. For example, the firing of a neuron into a synapse could be accomplished digitally through a transistor. The chemical and hormonal signals likely wouldn’t be duplicated as closely as found in our biological brains, but when given a digital equivalent of, say, 0101100, the new brain would be able to recognize that “this makes me happy” or “that makes me sad,” etc.
This new “brain” will be a marvel of computer engineering, as well as unimaginably sophisticated by our current standards. Our thought processes would speed up drastically, as we would no longer be thinking electro-chemically (how neurons exchange signals) but at or near the speed of light. The speed difference is huge. According to Elizer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a theoretical upper bound for the speed of a future artificial neural network could run about 1 million times faster than a real brain. This translates into experiencing about a year of subjective time in only 31 seconds of real time.
Not only would our lives be longer, but we would also be able to live more in the space of the time we had. Imagine the knowledge we could gain, individually and as a species, by doing just that.
So what are the dangers of this innovative new technology that could one day transfer the consciousness of a human exactly as it is into a digital, robotic construct? Well, Skynet comes to mind, but there really isn’t much chance of such a robotic revolution occurring. This is provided that we do three things: first, treat these robots as real and true people to prevent them from adopting a mentality of oppression and the need to revolt; second, accurately program the emotions ‘compassion’, ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ so that, like us, when a robot does something good for others it feels good in return (vice versa for negative emotions); and finally, program an understanding of the utmost importance of sentient life in any form, and general life insofar as it does not interfere with the development and betterment of sentient civilizations.
Robots do not, in any way, have an inherent ‘kill all humans’ mentality, as Futurama’s Bender might have you believe. Even so, some may have the opinion that it is impossible to transfer a human’s ‘soul’, and all it entails, into a robotic housing. In Artificial Intelligence, the transfer is that of consciousness, not necessarily of soul. If you can be conscious with a soul but lose that consciousness without it, this experiment will fail. There will be some value or equation that simply will not work, and robots will never have life as we know it. However, what I’ve seen in the form of Bina48, as well as Hubo and other robotic constructs, makes me hopeful that life will not end for us until we want it to.
Not only would this technology increase life expectancy, relative time lived, and completely eradicate disease, hunger and poverty; it would enable people to go literally wherever we had the technology to send them. Want to see the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Load up your mindfile into a submersible construct and have at it. Fancy some deep space exploration? Just load up that mindfile! The possibilities truly are endless, and the future is staring us in the face.
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