The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (28 page)

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Authors: Ray Kurzweil

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BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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There are a variety of proposals for nanotechnology swarms, in which the real environment is constructed from interacting multitudes of nanomachines. In all of the swarm conceptions, physical reality becomes a lot like virtual reality. You can be sleeping in your bed one moment, and have the room transform into your kitchen as you awake. Actually, change that to a dining room as there’s no need for a kitchen. Related nanotechnology will instantly create whatever meal you desire. When you finish eating, the room can transform into a study, or a game room, or a swimming pool, or a redwood forest, or the Taj Mahal. You get the idea.
Mark Yim has built a large-scale model of a small swarm showing the feasibility of swarm interaction.
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Joseph Michael has actually received a U.K. patent on his conception of a nanotechnology swarm, but it is unlikely that his design will be commercially realizable in the twenty-year life of his patent.
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It may seem that we will have too many choices. Today, we have only to choose our clothes, makeup, and destination when we go out. In the late twenty-first century, we will have to select our body, our personality, our environment—so many difficult decisions to make! But don’t worry—we’ll have intelligent swarms of machines to guide us.
THE SENSUAL MACHINE
 
Made double by his lust
he sounds a woman’s groans.
A figment of his flesh.
—from Barry Spacks’s poem “The Solitary at Seventeen”
 
 
I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology.
Therefore, when
virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
—Dogbert
 
 
The first book printed from a moveable type press may have been the Bible, but the century following Gutenberg’s epochal invention saw a lucrative market for books with more prurient topics.
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New communication technologies—the telephone, motion pictures, television, videotape—have always been quick to adopt sexual themes. The Internet is no exception, with 1998 market estimates of adult online entertainment ranging from $185 million by Forrester Research to $1 billion by Inter@active Week. These figures are for customers, mostly men, paying to view and interact with performers—live, recorded, and simulated. One 1998 estimate cited 28,000 web sites that offer sexual entertainment.
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These figures do not include couples who have expanded their phone sex to include moving pictures via online video conferencing.
CD-ROMs and DVD disks constitute another technology that has been exploited for erotic entertainment. Although the bulk of adult-oriented disks are used as a means for delivering videos with a bit of interactivity thrown in, a new genre of CD-ROM and DVD provides virtual sexual companions that respond to some mouse-administered fondling.
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Like most first-generation technologies, the effect is less than convincing, but future generations will eliminate some of the kinks, although not the kinkiness. Developers are also working to exploit the force-feedback mouse so that you can get some sense of what your virtual partner feels like.
Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, virtual reality will enable you to be with your lover—romantic partner, sex worker, or simulated companion—with full visual and auditory realism. You will be able to do anything you want with your companion except touch, admittedly an important limitation.
Virtual touch has already been introduced, but the all-enveloping, highly realistic, visual-auditory-tactile virtual environment will not be perfected until the second decade of the twenty-first century. At this point, virtual sex becomes a viable competitor to the real thing. Couples will be able to engage in virtual sex regardless of their physical proximity. Even when proximate, virtual sex will be better in some ways and certainly safer. Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense and pleasurable than conventional sex, as well as physical experiences that currently do not exist. Virtual sex is also the ultimate in safe sex, as there is no risk of pregnancy or transmission of disease.
Today, lovers may fantasize their partners to be someone else, but users of virtual sex communication will not need as much imagination. You will be able to change the physical appearance and other characteristics of both yourself and your partner. You can make your lover look and feel like your favorite star without your partner’s permission or knowledge. Of course, be aware that your partner may be doing the same to you.
Group sex will take on a new meaning in that more than one person can simultaneously share the experience of one partner. Since multiple real people cannot all control the movements of one virtual partner, there needs to be a way of sharing the decision making of what the one virtual body is doing. Each participant sharing a virtual body would have the same visual, auditory, and tactile experience, with shared control of their shared virtual body (perhaps the one virtual body will reflect a consensus of the attempted movements of the multiple participants). A whole audience of people—who may be geographically dispersed—could share one virtual body while engaged in a sexual experience with one performer.
Prostitution will be free of health risks, as will virtual sex in general. Using wireless, very-high-bandwidth communication technologies, neither sex workers nor their patrons need leave their homes. Virtual prostitution is likely to be legally tolerated, at least to a far greater extent than real prostitution is today, as the virtual variety will be impossible to monitor or control. With the risks of disease and violence having been eliminated, there will be far less rationale for proscribing it.
Sex workers will have competition from simulated—computer generated—partners. In the early stages, “real” human virtual partners are likely to be more realistic than simulated virtual partners, but that will change over time. Of course, once the simulated virtual partner is as capable, sensual, and responsive as a real human virtual partner, who’s to say that the simulated virtual partner isn’t a real, albeit virtual, person?
Is virtual rape possible? In the purely physical sense, probably not. Virtual reality will have a means for users to immediately terminate their experience. Emotional and other means of persuasion and pressure are another matter.
How will such an extensive array of sexual choices and opportunities affect the institution of marriage and the concept of commitment in a relationship? The technology of virtual sex will introduce an array of slippery slopes, and the definition of a monogamous relationship will become far less clear. Some people will feel that access to intense sexual experiences at the click of a mental button will destroy the concept of a sexually committed relationship. Others will argue, as proponents of sexual entertainment and services do today, that such diversions are healthy outlets and serve to maintain healthy relationships. Clearly, couples will need to reach their own understandings, but drawing clear lines will become difficult with the level of privacy that this future technology affords. It is likely that society will accept practices and activities in the virtual arena that it frowns on in the physical world, as the consequences of virtual activities are often (although not always) easier to undo.
In addition to direct sensual and sexual contact, virtual reality will be a great place for romance in general. Stroll with your lover along a virtual Champs-Élysées, take a walk along a virtual Cancún beach, mingle with the animals in a simulated Mozambique game reserve. Your whole relationship can be in Cyberland.
Virtual reality using an external visual-auditory-haptic interface is not the only technology that will transform the nature of sexuality in the twenty-first century. Sexual robots—sexbots—will become popular by the beginning of the third decade of the new century. Today, the idea of intimate relations with a robot or doll is not generally appealing because robots and dolls are so, well, inanimate. But that will change as robots gain the softness, intelligence, pliancy and passion of their human creators. (By the end of the twenty-first century, there won’t be a clear difference between humans and robots. What, after all, is the difference between a human who has upgraded her body and brain using new nanotechnology and computational technologies, and a robot who has gained an intelligence and sensuality surpassing her human creators?)
By the fourth decade, we will move to an era of virtual experiences through internal neural implants. With this technology, you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just about anyone, real or imagined, at any time. It’s just like today’s online chat rooms, except that you don’t need any equipment that’s not already in your head, and you can do a lot more than just chat. You won’t be restricted by the limitations of your natural body as you and your partners can take on any virtual physical form. Many new types of experiences will become possible: A man can feel what it is like to be a woman, and vice versa. Indeed, there’s no reason why you can’t be both at the same time, making real, or at least virtually real, our solitary fantasies.
And then, of course, in the last half of the century, there will be the nanobot swarms—good old sexy Utility Fog, for example. The nanobot swarms can instantly take on any form and emulate any sort of appearance, intelligence, and personality that you or it desires—the human form, say, if that’s what turns you on.
THE SPIRITUAL MACHINE
 
We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human.
—Jacquelyn Small
 
 
Body and soul are twins. God only knows which is which.
—Charles A. Swinburne
 
 
We’re all lying in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde
 
 
Sexuality and spirituality are two ways that we transcend our everyday physical reality. Indeed, there are links between our sexual and our spiritual passions, as the ecstatic rhythmic movements associated with some varieties of spiritual experience suggest.
Mind Triggers
 
We are discovering that the brain can be directly stimulated to experience a wide variety of feelings that we originally thought could only be gained from actual physical or mental experience. Take humor, for example. In the journal Nature, Dr. Itzhak Fried and his colleagues at UCLA tell how they found a neurological trigger for humor. They were looking for possible causes for a teenage girl’s epileptic seizures and discovered that applying an electric probe to a specific point in the supplementary motor area of her brain caused her to laugh. Initially, the researchers thought that the laughter must be just an involuntary motor response, but they soon realized they were triggering the genuine perception of humor, not just forced laughter. When stimulated in just the right spot of her brain, she found everything funny “You guys are just so funny—standing around” was a typical comment.
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Triggering a perception of humor without circumstances we normally consider funny is perhaps disconcerting (although personally, I find it humorous). Humor involves a certain element of surprise. Blue elephants. The last two words were intended to be surprising, but they probably didn’t make you laugh (or maybe they did). In addition to surprise, the unexpected event needs to make sense from an unanticipated but meaningful perspective. And there are some other attributes that humor requires that we don’t understand just yet. The brain apparently has a neural net that detects humor from our other perceptions. If we directly stimulate the brain’s humor detector, then an otherwise ordinary situation will seem pretty funny.
The same appears to be true of sexual feelings. In experiments with animals, stimulating a specific small area of the hypothalamus with a tiny injection of testosterone causes the animals to engage in female sexual behavior, regardless of gender. Stimulating a different area of the hypothalamus produces male sexual behavior.
These results suggest that once neural implants are commonplace, we will have the ability to produce not only virtual sensory experiences but also the feelings associated with these experiences. We can also create some feelings not ordinarily associated with the experience. So you will be able to add some humor to your sexual experiences, if desired (of course, for some of us humor may already be part of the picture).
The ability to control and to reprogram our feelings will become even more profound in the late twenty-first century when technology moves beyond mere neural implants and we fully install our thinking processes into a new computational medium—that is,
when we become software.
We work hard to achieve feelings of humor, pleasure, and well-being. Being able to call them up at will may seem to rob them of their meaning. Of course, many people use drugs today to create and enhance certain desirable feelings, but the chemical approach comes bundled with many undesirable effects. With neural implant technology, you will be able to enhance your feelings of pleasure and well-being without the hangover. Of course, the potential for abuse is even greater than with drugs. When psychologist James Olds provided rats with the ability to press a button and directly stimulate a pleasure center in the limbic system of their brains, the rats pressed the button endlessly, as often as five thousand times an hour, to the exclusion of everything else, including eating. Only falling asleep caused them to stop temporarily.
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