The Coming Artilect War

Species Dominance

The issue of species dominance will dictate our global politics this century. Given the rate at which technologies are developing that enable "artilects"--artificial intellects--it is likely that humanity will be able to build artilects with mental capacities that are literally trillions upon trillions of times above the human level. Humanity will then have to choose whether to become the No. 2 species on the planet or not.

The AI Goldmine

In the coming few decades, the rise of artificial intelligence will be a veritable goldmine for humankind. I predict that by the year 2030, one of the world's biggest industries will be "artificial brains," used to control home robots that will be genuinely intelligent and useful. Millions, if not billions, of people will be prepared to spend more money on a household robot than on a car. It is my personal ambition in the next five to 10 years to persuade the federal government in China (where I'm directing the building of China's first artificial brain) to create a CABA (Chinese Artificial Brain Administration), similar in scope to America's NASA, consisting of thousands of scientists and engineers, to build artificial brains for the Chinese home robot industry and other applications. I suggest that the U.S. do something similar--a NABA.

Moore's Law and e-Neuroscience

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. This trend has been valid for over 40 years and is likely to continue until around 2020, by which time we will be able to place one bit of information on a single atom. These atom-bits will be able to switch their state (a 0 or a 1) in femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths (1015) times of a second. There are a trillion, trillion (1024) atoms in a handheld object, such as an apple, so potentially, the information processing capacity of such an object would be about 1040 bits per second. Compare this number with the estimated equivalent of the human brain, which is about 1016 bits per second, or a trillion, trillion times smaller. You'll begin to see why I believe that the rise of the artilect, a godlike intelligent machine, will be so disruptive later this century.

You may object that a massive bit-processing rate is only a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for generating hyper-intelligence. Agreed. What is also needed is the appropriate human brain-like neural circuitry, but this is coming too. Nanotechnology, or molecular scale engineering, is increasingly supplying the tools to decipher the secrets of human brain function. Today, thanks to Henri Markram's work in Switzerland, every neural connection is known in a single cortical column of a rat brain's cortex. (A rat has about a thousand such columns, each consisting of about 10,000 highly interconnected neurons, and the human brain contains about a million.)

This detailed connectivity knowledge has been put into supercomputers, so that computer-savvy neuroscientists can perform experiments in a computer, that is, conduct "e-neuroscience." So a supercomputer will be able to perform the same functions as a rat's cortical column, but a million times faster--at electronic speeds compared to the rat's chemical speeds. Following Moore's Law, the whole rat brain will be thus simulated within a decade, and the human brain a decade or two later.

The Species Dominance Debate

So in about a decade there will be a thriving artificial brain industry, and nearly everyone will have a home robot, which will be upgraded every two or three years. Each new home robot generation will be smarter and more useful than the previous generation, so that as the gap between the human intelligence level and the artificial intelligence level gets smaller every year, the species dominance debate will heat up. Millions of people will be asking such questions as: Can the machines become smarter than humans? Is that a good thing? Should there be a legislated upper limit to machine intelligence? Can the rise of machine intelligence be stopped? What if China's soldier robots are smarter than America's solder robots?" And so on and so forth.

Considering all this, I predict that humanity will split into three major philosophical, ideological, political groups, which I label as follows.

--The Cosmists (based on the word "cosmos") will be in favor of building these godlike machines (the artilects), who would be immortal, think a million times faster than humans, have unlimited memory, go anywhere, do anything and take any shape. The Cosmists would take a quasi-religious view that they are god builders. Privately, I am a Cosmist, but publicly, I have mixed feelings about the rise of the artilect.

--The Terrans (based on the word "terra," meaning the earth) will be opposed to the construction of artilects, fearing that in a highly advanced form, the artilects may decide to wipe us out. To ensure that the probability that this might happen is zero, the Terrans will insist that the artilects are never built in the first place. But this strategy runs utterly contrary to what the Cosmists want. The Terrans will be prepared to go to war against the Cosmists to ensure the survival of the human species.

--The Cyborgists (based on the word "cyborg," meaning cybernetic organism that is part machine, part human) will want to become artilect gods themselves by adding artilectual components to their own brains, thus avoiding the bitter conflict between the Cosmists and the Terrans.

The Artilect War and Gigadeath

I differ sharply with well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil on his over-optimistic prediction that the rise of the artilect this century will be a positive development for humanity. I think it will be a catastrophe. I see a war coming, the "Artilect War," not between the artilects and human beings, as in the movie Terminator, but between the Terrans, Cosmists and Cyborgists. This will be the worst, most passionate war that humanity has ever known, because the stakes--the survival of our species--have never been so high. Given the period in which this war will occur, the late 21st century, with late 21st century weapons, the scale of the killing will not be in the millions, as in the 20th century (the bloodiest in history, with 200-300 million people killed in wars, purges, holocausts and genocides) but in the billions. There will be gigadeath.

The Terrans will "First Strike"

Imagine a world in which the cyborgs become increasingly prevalent. A young mother who has just given birth may choose to add a grain of artilectual sand to her newly born baby's brain, converting it into an artilect. There is so much computing capacity in that grain of sand that she has effectively "killed" her baby. It is no longer human, but an artilect in human disguise. Imagine older parents watching their adult children becoming cyborgs, so that their children are no longer human. The parents will feel they have lost them. The rise of the artilects and the cyborgs will be profoundly disruptive to human culture, creating deep alienation and hatred.

Kurzweil claims that if ever a war occurred between the Terrans and the other groups it would be a quick no-contest battle. The vastly superior intelligence of the artilect group would quickly overcome the Terrans. Therefore I claim that the Terrans will have to strike first while they can, during the "window of opportunity," when they have comparable intelligence levels. If they wait too long, then Kurzweil's dismissive view may become valid.

The Cosmist/Terran Split

I give regular talks on the rise of the artilect and invite my audiences to vote on whether they are sympathetic more to the Cosmist view or to the Terran view. The results are always split about evenly. Individuals are torn between the awe of building artilect gods and the horror of the prospect of a gigadeath war. The evenness of the split bodes even more negatively for the future.

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Dr. Hugo de Garis is director of the Artificial Brain Lab, in the School of Information Science and Technology at Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, where he is directing the building of China's first artificial brain. He is the author of the booksThe Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machinesand Multis and Monos: What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State.