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What the movies get wrong

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  • Originally published June 15, 2009 at 8:43 a.m., updated June 15, 2009 at 9:48 a.m.

By Christopher Borrelli

Chicago Tribune

(MCT)

Raymond Kurzweil is smarter than you, smarter than 99 percent of sentient beings on this planet. But, by his own calculations, not for long.

Kurzweil is best described as a futurist, though "inventor" works (he made the first print-to-speech machine for the blind), as does author ("The Age of Spiritual Machines"), university founder (Singularity University, based in Silicon Valley, backed by NASA) and, soon, director.

This fall, two movies about Kurzweil are due: a documentary profile, "Transcendent Man"; and his own, "The Singularity Is Near."

But what he may be best known for (someday, at least) is predicting that, by 2029, computers will be self-aware.

Q. What do the movies get wrong about the future?

A. Well, the one thing the movies never get right is that you see one giant change, like a thinking robot, in an otherwise unchanged universe. The coffeemakers are still the same. Maybe it's hard for audiences to process too much. But it reminds me that always people ask me when artificial intelligence will be here. I picture people in a rain forest who stand there and say they didn't see any life. There may be 50 species at their feet, but they don't notice. It's the same with AI — it's all around us now.

Q. Where do you fall on the robot uprising thing?

A. Technology has been a double-edged sword since we discovered fire. That said, intelligence is arguably the most important phenomenon in the world, and the civilization with the greatest does dominate. Computers vastly smarter than us would not be good. A war (between robots and humans) would be a non-starter — like war between the military industrial complex and the Amish.

Q. But self-awareness — how could we tell? How would we know for sure the robots are self-aware?

A. It's tricky. A robot may talk about its feelings and appear convincing, and you may not believe it yet because of subtle cues.

But will it be conscious? If it claims to be angry, is it? It's a philosophical question, one we have no objective test for yet.

___

(c) 2009, Chicago Tribune.

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.


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