The Sydney Morning Herald is the latest paper to play Whoops Apocalypse with the Singularity. With a lurid title ("Android Apocalypse"!) and a cheesy painting of the Terminator, reporter Charles Purcell lines up Hugo De Garis as interview numero uno. Garis has written a book for his alarmist vision, The Artilect War, where he predicts the unknowable with aplomb. In visions of the future, there are optimists and pessimists but certainty is a rare and truly mistaken quality.
Yet in his book, The Artilect War, he imagines a scenario where
there will be a terrible battle between the forces who want to
build these massively intelligent machines (the Cosmists) and those
who don't (the Terrans). The Terrans would either fear the
potential for catastrophe - what if a robot soldier accidentally
nukes a city? - or be nervous about the idea of humans being
surpassed by machines.
De Garis says the growth of nanotechnology will give engineers
and scientists powerful new tools. There will be an explosion of
knowledge of how the brain works - companies involved in artificial
brain research "will be the Googles and Microsofts of the
future".
This technology can be used to create artificial brains that
replicate many of our brain's pathways and features for use in the
robotics industry.
Visions of war and gigadeath during the twenty first century, as speciation and genocide stalk the Earth, proves a useful talking point for any article. Yet De Garis's role in China is worth some investigation. He migrated to the communist state in 2006, and subsequently became the director of the China Brain project. The whiff of utopian politics is given off from his unpublished work: Multis and Monos: What the Multi-Cultured Can Teach the Mono-Cultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State
In his role as the dircetor of the China Brain project, De Garis is attempting to create an artificial brain using 15,000 neural network modules, evolved one at a time and structured on evolutionary engineering principles. This project is cheap and quite open, given the strictures that authoritarian states tend to place upon research. Yet China does not surprise in its scientific and technological opening, both aspects of the continued growth of this strange giant.
The willingness of the Chinese state to fund early research on artificial intelligence lends strategic and geopolitical significance to this blue sky project. Perhaps like their counterparts in DARPA, they see these projects as small investments in a future that lies beyond the doom of global warming and resource dieback.
I see robots. So does China. De Garis coined artilects. The term did not fly. the artilect war may not come. Too much Terminator as a child? To see more than ten years ahead is foolhardy at best.