What will not be achieved in the future by a thousand scientists, each one thousand times smarter than today’s human scientists, each working a thousand times faster than today’s humans? “When scientists are a million times smarter and operate a million times faster, an hour will produce a century of progress in today’s terms,” noted Ray Kurzweil in his book ‘Singulartity is near’ back in 2005.
Yes, the same Raymond Kurzweil, current director of engineering at Google, and scientific expert in computing and artificial intelligence. The same one that is taken daily around 100 pills to reach the year 2049 in full mental and health faculties to be able to cryopreserve his brain, and when technology and science allow it to be transplanted into another human body. And yes, it is traced to the plot of one of the latest Netflix series, Altered Carbon.
Kurzweil defends in his book, which he wrote three decades ago, theories such as that the capacities of machines will be much greater than those of biological human brains, without increasing their size or energy consumption. that the molecular circuits of tomorrow will be based on nanotubes, which are five hundred times smaller than today’s silicon transistors, and will be able to operate at speeds measured in terahertz (trillions of operations per second), rather than speeds measured in a few gigahertz in those that work the current chips; or that nanorobots will carry out functions within the human body, including the reversal of aging; and even that billions of nanorobots in the capillaries of the brain will also greatly increase human intelligence.
These same theories are those that are developed in the science fiction film ‘Transcendent’, starring Johny Deep, Rebeca Hall and Morgan Freeman, among others, and in which Deep himself gives life to a researcher and scientist expert in artificial intelligence that works to create a machine that possesses collective and self-sufficient consciousness, or what Kurzweill defines as “Singularity”, which is the moment when non-biological intelligence will be superior to human.
But not all experts and scientists in the field of artificial intelligence are of the same opinion. This week I had the opportunity to listen at a breakfast organized by Dail Software in Madrid Network, the innovation network of the Community of Madrid, to Mike Dillinger, international expert in Linguistic Engineering and Head of Multilingualization on LinkedIn. And what does Dillinger say about machines and humans? Well, something as reasonable as humans and machines are going to have to walk hand in hand. He says the correct question is not “when will machines surpass humans in intelligence.”
And that is why he coined another term, “hybrid intelligence”, which is nothing other than the sum of artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence. “They will coexist, and they will not replace one another.” And to have more intelligence, people need to understand how much AI is going to contribute to Society, to Industry, to the Economy. That is why Dillinger believes that “we do not need autonomous systems controlled by computers, but automatic systems controlled by people.” “Even today,” he explains, “artificial intelligence is at the level of an animal, not a human who has reason.”
