MT: In the sixties we had a vision of computers, best summed up by Hal 9000, that wasn’t realized. The reality turned out to be much different. Are we currently engaged in a similar misimagination with respect to the future of nanotech?

Patrick Lin:
Many intelligent people still believe that the HAL scenario might still happen, so I’m not sure we can say that reality turned out to be different or that this is a case of misimagination. Perhaps our time-horizon just needs to be extended to give artificial intelligence – which is much more difficult than scientists have previously imagined – a chance to catch up. It still seems to be a logical possibility that we can create self-aware AI systems; it’s not so much that we got the science wrong – we were just too optimistic on the delivery date.

The same can be said about flying cars and robotic maids. Yes, there was a lot of hype back then – as there is now surrounding today’s emerging technologies – but that doesn’t mean that they will never come to fruition. In any event, technology historically moves much faster than ethics, and given Moore’s Law of exponential progress, we can’t have too much of a headstart in thinking about the implications of possible scenarios.

Also, we can similarly point to a list of inventions – from telephones to cars to airplanes to computers and so on – that experts had said were not possible or practical; nonetheless, they exist now. So we really don’t know what the future holds. But if we believe something to be a real possibility and with important implications, then it seems irresponsible to not at least give it serious consideration.

By the way, “HAL” is only one letter removed from spelling out “IBM”…coincidence? Hmm…

Patrick Lin, Ph.D., is research director for The Nanoethics Group

David Berube:
I am very concerned that the discussion about human enhancement is opening a can of worms that needs to remain shut because it is distracting attention from some of the “real” concerns.

Uploading or downloading consciousness onto hard drives and beaming ourselves to Andromeda is fine in a science fiction writing classes and even some marginal philosophy classes, but it only scares folk, especially the people who vote for Bush.

David M. Berube, Ph.D is Professor of Communication Studies/Film/English, NanoScience and Technology Studies and Communications Director of Nanohype

James Ellis Marsden:
Is Hal really that different to what we have today? A huge array of integrated CPU’s processing vast amounts of information, with a perfectly simple interface to access it. Hal was in control of one spaceship, and the lives of men, but Google can be seen to be in control of information, and those that rely on its inner workings are subject to the way it thinks. A change of algorithm at Google could mean the difference between thousands of paying customers and bankruptcy to a business relying on its Google ranking. The thing that’s important about films such as 2001 is never the literal visual, but the conceptual metaphor. I think the metaphor for Hal has been reached in our culture. Many of us are at the mercy of robotic algorithm.

Nanotechnology will just make the interdependence more transparent. The thing that we rarely seem to acknowledge is the fact that disturbing thoughts for us as a generation often have completely opposite effects on our offspring, and vice versa. It’s inevitable that relying on computers for cybernetic body enhancement, intellect enhancement (you may argue that Google facilitates this already) by way of genetic and nano technologies will become as commonplace as tattoos and dyed hair.

The impact of how humans view themselves and respond to their environment in the generative culture of the future, we can’t possibly predict.

James Ellis Marsden. James is the MD of FuturLab Ltd, a design and development team focused on developing concept rich user experiences.

Related posts:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response to this post, or trackback from your own site. Wax-political uses threaded comments so you can reply to any comment directly by clicking on the relevent reply to comment link.