Ray Kurzweil, in a recent issue of Discover magazine, argues that machines will become conscious by the year 2029. Such claims are always a bit suspect since there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on what consciousness really means. Kurzweil takes a pass at defining the term.

My own view is that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex physical system. In this view, a dog is also conscious but somewhat less so than human. An ant has some level of consciousness, but much less than that of a dog. The ant colony, on the other hand, could be considered to have a higher level of consciousness than the individual ant; it is certainly more intelligent.
By this reckoning, a sufficiently complex machine can also be conscious. A computer that successfully emulates the complexity of the human brain would also have the same emergent consciousness as a human.

We understand that there are machines now that “sense” light, sound, even smells (in the sense of sensing floating chemicals.) But we don’t believe that those machines have the interior sense of seeing, hearing or smelling that we do. Kurzweil seems to be saying that machines will get so complex that they will develop those interior senses, along with the ability to think and feel. It seems like a reasonable enough claim.

Now, a classic science-fiction narrative is the idea that machines become hyper intelligent and declare war on the human race or some such. (This is “The Terminator” storyline.) In the philosophical “Straw Dogs” book that I’m reading, this scenario is contemplated.

Humans are no more masters of machines that they are of fire or the wheel. The forms of artificial life and intelligence they are constructing today will lose human control just as naturally occurring forms of life have done. They may even replace the creators.

Natural life forms have no built-in evolutionary advantage over organisms that began their life as artefacts. Adrian Woolfson writes: ‘ it is by no means certain that living things constructed from natural biological materials would be able to outcompete their synthetic and ahistorically designed machine-based rivals’. Digital evolution — natural selection among virtual organisms in cyberspace — may already be at work…. But the new virtual environment is no more controllable than the natural world. According to Mark Ward, ‘once a system is handed over to the living, breathing software there is no turning back’.

The author of “Straw Dogs” then goes on to theorize that humans, struggling to survive in a world dominated by machines, might turn to bioengineering their selves (genetic engineering etc.) to better compete with machines. In the course of this, all trace of humanity as we know it would be destroyed.

Happy Sunday!