Robots, Androids, Human Future and Love

The more we learn about our brains, the more ways we will find to improve them. Each brain has hundreds of specialized regions. We know only a little about what each one does - but as soon as we find out how any one part works, researchers will try to devise ways to extend that organ's capacity. They will also conceive of entirely new abilities that biology has never provided. As these inventions accumulate, we'll try to connect them to our brains - perhaps through millions of microscopic electrodes inserted into the great nerve-bundle called the corpus callosum, the largest data-bus in the brain. With further advances, no part of the brain will be out of bounds for attaching new accessories. In the end, we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain - and thus repair all the defects and flaws that make our lives so brief.

Needless to say, in doing so, we'll be making ourselves into machines.

Does this mean that machines will replace us? I don't feel that it makes much sense to think in terms of "us" and "them." I much prefer the attitude of Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon University, who suggests that we think of those future intelligent machines as our own "mind-children."
Marvin Minsky, American scientist, Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, Scientific American, October 1994

Altering even a small number of the key genes regulating human growth might change human beings into something quite different.
Gregory Stock, UCLA scientist, in Metaman.

When you die, you should have your brain frozen; then, in a couple of decades, it will get thawed out and nanobots will repair the damage; then you can start augmenting it with silicon chips; finally, your entire mental software, and your consciousness along with it (you hope), will get uploaded into a computer; and—with multiple copies as insurance—you will live forever, or at least until the universe falls apart.
Jim Holt, in Slate (slate.msn.com), 16/5/2003, commenting Bill McKibben book My Son, the Robot

These are bold scenarios, and we may legitimately consider most of them as largely unachievable. Yet we shouldn’t minimize the capability of our technology and the surprise packets science may bring with it – one of which, a big one, may be the end of our own species.

In fact, we incur the risk of stopping being homo sapiens, even in the framework of relatively small changes. By changing our genome and the existential conditions linked to it – extending our lives over dozens of years, and reducing strongly our pain, anguish and fears, as some scenarios predict – we may definitively transform ourselves into rather distinct beings. Largely disconnected from pain or fears, the future beings considered by many predictions would no longer have the ecstasies and the expectations, or the needs and capacity of love, or the joys and sorrows of today’s humans.

It’s indeed a case of asking: will the future androids and intelligent beings born from man - and supposedly with «human brains» - be able to love?

Here are some clues and speculations:

Whether it's 2100 or 2200, at some point we're going to be creating beings. I don't want to be a human chauvinist any more than I'm an American chauvinist but - so if these people are better than we are, god bless 'em!

On the other hand if they're totally artificial and they don't have souls, I would fight to the death for imperfect humans against some kind of fake artificial thing that wasn't really alive in the fundamental sense of having the ability to make the choice between good and evil.

I'm not sure we're smart enough as human beings to do that and so the question is if there were a new species, would they in fact be better people or would they simply be smarter people? Would they be better-looking or would they be better-behaving? But it takes a fairly long time for a new species really to happen.
Esther Dyson, Internet pioneer, in BBC News, 1/1/2000

By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today. (…) The prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species.

How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.

A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses (…)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.
Bill Joy, American scientist, Why the future doesn't need

I don't think that anybody is going to willingly give up their body to become part of some larger electronic life form.

I think we'll be able to push the productive lifespan much further along that it is today, at least to 120 years.

It is conceivable that you could put your brain into a whole new younger body.
Lee Silver, Geneticist, in BBC News

Here are some clues and speculations:

Quotations Machines, technologies and the man of the future

Quotations
Machines, technologies and the man of the future