"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal
computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.

As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of
the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous
transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the
opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating
and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to
become realms of human endeavor.

In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I
was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and
the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent that, even as a
possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future.

But now, with 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 do I feel
about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build
reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will
not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience
suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how
we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even
possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with
great caution?


The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us,
allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such
ideas,Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "In the game of life and
evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and
machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side
of the machines." As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not
survive the encounter with the superior robot 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; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get
used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines.
(We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer
devices into the human body, as illustrated on thecover ofWired 8.02.)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will