One day about three years ago, a neurosurgeon in North Carolina was conducting a pain relief operation when he misplaced the electrodes in the spine of his patient. As he passed the electric current through the implants the woman had an orgasm. Science had found a precise means of manipulating our sexual sensations.
Those who dream of a machine that delivers a virtual experience so real that it is indistinguishable from actual sex point to the sci-fi prototypes — the “Pleasure Organ” in the 1968 film Barbarella and the “Orgasmatron” in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Virtual sex will apparently be possible within a few decades, which will allow any 55-year-old man to make love to a young woman or, indeed, enjoy an online orgy with as much of humanity as he wants. But the tricky issue is what we actually feel beyond the instant of orgasm. More than satisfying a powerful drive, sex, for many, meets a still greater human need. Few would deny those other emotions that arise from our bond with partners. For most of us, these place a real sexual relationship at a premium over one-night stands and masturbation.
The biggest question is whether, in a future cyberworld, there will still be a human need for these wider, gentler and more complex feelings. Or will we all end up as though autistic, unable to empathise with anybody else, locked into a remote and numbing isolation, or trapped in a speedy, giggly cycle of endless cyber-flirting, with deeper needs and pleasures lost for ever? This scenario raises other questions: will future generations have the same emotional needs as us? And is there really such as thing as human nature, which even the hi-tech world cannot obliterate, and the needs of which cannot be met by any amount of mind-blowing IT?
Futurologists have long predicted that at some time we will share the planet with a species that will outshine us, not just in brute mental prowess but also as broadminded, deep-thinking citizens. But how likely is that in the 21st century? Almost a certainty. Or so it would seem, if we reflect on the way we are becoming increasingly absorbed by the cyberworld. Consider that fixture of many households: the glassy-eyed, monosyllabic adolescent in deep dialogue with their screen and keyboard. They are living in a different world, where the inhabitants spend long hours surfing the net, sending text messages or playing computer games. The lives of future generations look set to revolve less around face-to-face relationships than around relationships conducted via the computer, or even with the machine itself as the direct recipient of people’s attentions. But while computers may dominate our lives, we know where the division lies between the screen and “out there”. Robots, on the other hand — moving about as they do in three dimensions — have the potential to seduce us away from the real world. Instead of simply doing things to data, a new generation of robots will be much closer to the physiology of our ever-adaptive human brains. In short, robots of the future will be prepared to learn.
It is undeniable that different genres of robots — each with a single job to do — eventually will dominate medicine and surgery, for example. A robot could take biopsies of brain tumours with greater precision than a human surgeon can consistently achieve. The surgeon Henry Marsh has likened current neurosurgical practice to a large JCB digger attempting to pick up a safety pin. An error of mere fractions of a millimetre can make all the difference to how a patient lives the rest of his life. Clearly, there is a case for a more mechanised and reliable approach. When these automated procedures prove to be completely safe, robots will begin to replace human surgeons. It is easy to imagine a scenario, not too far off, in which the surgeon takes a back seat and is on hand only for unexpected emergencies. Gradually engineers may feature in surgical planning and procedures more than doctors, who may be sitting in another room, perhaps miles away, interfacing with the machines by voice command. In this century we will see a radical change in the medical professions. For those with a premium on a large amount of quickly accessed information, combined with utterly reproducible manual precision, robots will be strong candidates. Further down the line, machines could even replace the human designers . . .
With the rapid increases in computer power, we will soon reach a point at which nothing need be wasted and everything can be recorded and saved — just as e-mail has led to a torrent of copied-in-correspondence and one-line musings preserved for posterity. Of course, this will be coupled with easier communications, condensing complex messages. We will carry cards that express key facts about ourselves, which can be easily swiped when we meet others. Instant and incessant communication via videophones, or phones so small that they are unseen by others, will become part of everyday life. Real, fleshy and haphazard face-to-face interactions will diminish as more time is spent speaking online in a virtual space. And it is speaking, not reading or writing, that will predominate.
Even though smells and hand-waving may be lacking, machines and humans will eventually communicate in natural language. We can already talk to machines that transcribe what we say, but these have only a limited, literal ability. At the moment a translation machine might convert “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into “the vodka is good but the steak is lousy”. Soon, however, we will be able to talk to machines that will “understand”; these will answer questions or access information regarding the deeper meaning of what we say.
Yet no matter how intimate and interactive the robots of the future, and however invisible the computers, initially at least they will respect our boundaries — working with us, rather than forming part of us. On the one hand, succeeding generations may well have different ideas from ours of what they expect from, and give to, a relationship. What will it be like to have artificial systems internalised, invading our bodies, effectively making us cyborgs?
Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, made headlines recently when he announced that he wanted to have an electrode placed in his arm that would be controlled by a computer program. The electrode would interpret and modify impulses entering his brain as well as registering those coming out. In this way, Warwick argued, a computer might be able to modify his emotions. But the proposed experiment doesn’t stop there. His wife, Irena, has nobly agreed to receive a similar implant, so that signals relayed to her husband’s brain could be passed to her own. The pair intend to subject themselves to their phobias, to find out if they can experience each other’s fear. Would she know first-hand, therefore, how he feels? Or, more sinister, might the third party, the computer, control the marriage? If the experiment works, Warwick will try to record signals relating to certain emotions and states of mind and play them back — to relive, for example, feelings of sexual arousal or drunkenness. Small wonder the story made the tabloids.
The scientific reality, sad to say, is a far cry from such sensationalism. As yet the physiology of our emotions is only poorly understood, though we know it is a complex result of physico-chemical phenomena throughout the body and, most elusively of all, within the brain. Feedback from the body to the brain is, indeed, a factor that can change how you feel — for example, if you are nervous, slowing the heart with drugs known as beta-blockers will signal to your brain that the heart is at a pace that signifies you must be relaxed, so you accordingly feel relaxed. But such signals come from many different organs within the body, as well as chemicals that circulate in the blood.
The ability to commandeer someone else’s brain is unlikely to become a reality. However, the idea of prosthetic devices to combat medical problems is far from novel. Heart pacemakers have been in use since the Sixties, and implants for cosmetic purposes — contact lenses, breast enhancements, anti-wrinkle injections and plastic surgery — are increasingly popular. We could soon customise the way we look as never before. Pioneering plastic surgery has been reported that could make a “face transplant” possible. There could be procedures for changing skin colour, muscle strength and facial shape. Micro or nanomachines will release pigments to match skin colour with clothing or mood. It has been suggested that we might sample green skin for a day, or polka dot flesh to match a skirt. Such thoughts should not be dismissed as freakish — think how many people today have tattoos and piercings, sights that would have caused consternation on the high street of the Fifties.
There are two issues for the potential artificial brain of the future. The first is creating synthetic brains that have faster processing power than ours do — an issue of quantity. The second is designing synthetic brains that do what ours do, perhaps even better — an issue of quality that does not necessarily follow from improved quantity. Unlike most things to do with the brain, its brute processing power can be measured and compared with that of present and future computers. According to Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, by 2019 a mere $1,000 will buy processing power to match that of the human brain. Another prediction holds that within 15 years the artificial “processing power” of machines will allow them to operate a hundred times more rapidly than we do while thinking.
But speed is not everything. The brain is not merely an information cruncher or homogeneous tabula rasa; rather, in some as yet poorly understood grand scheme, brain regions have differentiated functions. A puzzle that has plagued me is why electrical signals arriving at one part of the cortex give rise to a visual experience, and in another to an auditory one. How can one signal be intrinsically different from the other when their electrical features are the same?
Whatever the answer, it seems certain that, on the quantitative level, computers will soon overtake us in processing power — so long as we can deal with the problem posed by the physical limitation on the storage of information. Once they do so they will be more capable of artificial evolution, designing machines more effectively than humans. Such machines will accelerate other areas of technology. By 2021 computers will control economic management, so that supply and demand become perfectly balanced. In one sense, the computers will have taken control of the planet. But that doesn’t necessarily entail a superior intellect. As the physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr once admonished a student: “You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.”
From Tomorrow’s People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel, by Susan Greenfield (Allen Lane)
