If you're worried about the dawning of the 21st century, you have a right to be.
But it's not the year-2000 bug that should concern you. Yes, there will be hiccups and some lapses that require legal and technical action, after the fact. They will be overcome, in fairly short order, once identified.
Nor should there be much breath expended on what to call the years of the first decade of this new century. Some slang will quickly be adopted.
What will cause real shocks to the human condition is the likelihood that the interaction of person with machine will become pure. That is, man and machine will merge.
The result: some sort of post-human being who will have the creative and serendipitous thinking process of man, backed by the speed of calculation and depth of accurate information storage of the computer.
Like the Y2K problem, this is not a new thought. As far back as 1984, William Gibson, in the novel Neuromancer, which brought cyberspace to the American tongue, foresaw a future in which our species jacked into the Net through a port at the back of the head; and where virtual reality experiences and tours were "synched" with chips im-planted behind one's eyes. He saw an age where technology had extended the bounds of life, with 135-year-old humans checking into Tokyo clinics to get their DNA reset and thus their deaths postponed.
Such life extension technology was examined more deeply in a popular 1996 novel by Austin, Texas, author Bruce Sterling. In Holy Fire, one's insides are filled with a sterilizing putty, and bodies are submerged in gelatinous fluids, so bacteria could be destroyed and DNA "treatments" could commence.
It is relatively easy to mentally discount the fictional musings of a pair of cyberpunk writers. But now, as this century draws to a close, comes the very sobering assessment by Ray Kurzweil that computers within our lifetimes will exceed humans in intelligence, bringing the very real prospect of a species that will supersede Homo sapiens as the dominant race on this planet.
Kurzweil is no impractical, intellectual ingenue. Indeed, he comes at the question as a silicon entrepreneur, having created technologies and businesses that provide, as George Gilder puts it, such "brain extenders" as speech recognition, music synthesis and machines that read. His company's voice and artificial intelligence technologies were acquired in 1997 by Lernout & Hauspie for $53 million.
His case for this foreboding future is based on the bedrock of modern electronics advances, Moore's Law, which posits a doubling in computing power every 18 months.
Given that computer speed now actually appears to be doubling every year, the prognosis is relatively straightforward. By the year 2025 or perhaps 2020, the "ordinary" personal computer will have the same capacity as a human brain. Then, a gap will quickly build up between the evolution of the human brain and its electronic -- or, some would say, bioelectronic -- equivalents. Within 10 years, that so-called personal computer would have the brain power of a small village; and, by midcentury, that of the entire U.S. population.
Here's where it gets scary. To try and keep pace, it's easy to envision humans asking for -- and getting -- memory strips and processing sheets implanted inside their skulls and connected to the tissue of their brains.
Kurzweil, in fact, envisions a technology that makes cloning of humans not just possible, but seemingly inevitable. Using rapid advances in scanning systems, an individual's brain is converted into a "personal mind file" and installed in a "suitable computing medium." In effect, a personal computer becomes that person, sans corpus. Making digital copies of a personality will be as easy then as it is today for a song.
The kinds of issues with which the conscious computer will confront us are, unfortunately, mind-boggling.
It's safe to say that the human race, as a whole, is not ready for this and will resist it. But, if Kurzweil is right, there will be no stopping the advance of this technology. Economic competition ensures it.
The question is whether human organizations --be they governments or corporations -- are ready to deal with this merger of man and machine mentality in time to preclude a post-human species from achieving the worst of our science fictional fears: pre-eminence in determining the course of human affairs.
If the Y2K bug has taught us anything, it's that it's not too early to begin developing technology, as well as legal checks and balances, to ensure that Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines does not also connote the descent into irrelevance of the human spirit along the way.
