The Keene Lectures at Chelmsford Cathedral
'20-20 Vision'
'All Change!'
The technological challenges
Ian Pearson
Wednesday 3rd November 2004 at 8.00pm
Ian Pearson is a Research Futurologist with British Telecom. He lives in Ipswich and describes himself as 'an engineer who exercises common sense in discerning trends'.
If anyone thinks of looking at the future through psychic or astrological means, I can assure you it doesn't work. What I use is some knowledge of where people are spending a lot of research and development money, on the common sense assumption that if someone is spending a billion pounds on R&D it's likely to come to market at some point. We just make a good guess at when that is likely to be.
What I do is to predict where technology is going. It doesn't fall within the category of science fiction. I know that what I'm going to talk about tonight will sound as though I've been watching too much Star Trek, but I promise you all these things are now the subject of very large investments. We're actually at the beginning of a very profound transition involving four technologies:
Nanotechnology is about making things that are very very small - just a few molecules or a few thousandths of a millimeter across - so small you need a very high-powered microscope to see it at all. Nanotechnology is progressing very fast. A lot of ladies' makeup already uses nanotechnology, as does this laptop computer.
Artificial intelligence Back in the 1960s, scientists were bragging we'd have computers as smart as people. This computer is the fastest Macintosh you can buy, but it's roughly 2000 times dumber than I am. But computers like this are doubling in speed every year. In eleven years time, this computer's descendants will be smarter than I am. That worries me. My daughter will not be able to make a career by being smart. By the time she comes out of university there will be computers that can think faster than she can.
Cognition technology is about how the brain works; how do we make computers which can emulate the way the brain works? The Americans are spending between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year on research into this, to make soldiers smarter so that they can win in warfare. They're trying to make airplanes which are sentient, which can see enemy tanks on the ground, decide whether they are really a threat, which ones to hit, whereabouts to hit them and steer the missiles automatically onto them without any people being involved.
You might have heard of Asimov's laws of robotics. Already a Japanese firm has come out with a robot for security purposes and when somebody breaches a perimeter fence it zaps them with an electric shock and disables them until a security guard comes. But of course you could arm a robot with a shot gun or machine gun and robots in the future might not be programmed to regard human life as sacred.
Biotechnology deals in concepts of cloning, genetic manipulation and selection. Last week the Times reported the Embryology and Fertility Authority giving permission to select embryos on whether they have cancer genes or not. These are very specific diseases, but in a few years' time we expect you will be regarded as a very irresponsible parent if you don't give your child the best possible genetic start in life by selecting the best possible embryo. You will be expected to use genetic manipulation and genetic selection - that's the way that morality goes.
Our chances of extinction
There's a 50% chance of extinction by 2080. That's an estimate by Bill Joy who runs Sun Microsystems. He looked at these three or four technologies and worked out what could go wrong with them and how likely the accidents were. There are ways you can kill everyone on the planet if you use these technologies for military purposes. Al Qa'eda might get hold of the technology and deliberately try to kill us all, or it could happen in a pharmaceutical lab or nanotech lab by accident. He estimated a 50% chance of extinction. The Astronomer Royal Martin Rees also estimates a 50% chance of extinction by the end of the century.
I have to tell you I think they are optimistic, because they haven't considered the whole range of destructive scenarios. I have spread-sheets showing hundreds of different technologies and when they might become a risk. It is a straight exponential curve which eventually shows a 1% risk of an accident happening in a particular year, of something going wrong which kills everybody. But this means that the risk increases from 1% every year and the maths works out that we have a 50% risk of extinction by 2080 rather than the end of the century. My daughter will not live out her full life span in all probability. That worries me already. And her children definitely won't. I think that's a major ethical issue. We should be making big decisions now about whether we continue down this path because very soon it will be too late to change our minds.
Nanotechnology
I'm not a nanotechnology expert, but I sit on a European Commission committee of so-called experts. Nobody knows too much about it, but a few if us know a little about bits of it. There are lots of good things that can come out of this: little nanotech machines which can crawl around your bloodstream de-furring your arteries and making you live another 20 years, that will fix all your cells and make you look 20 years younger, fix all your muscles and skin and eyesight - and basically you can be young again. Even though you might be ninety years old you can be as fit and healthy as a 25 year-old. That's the kind of promise people expect from nanotech once it meets biotech, and it's not unrealistic. There's nothing in physics and biology that stops you doing that. It's basically an engineering problem and people are throwing billions of pounds' worth of research per year at solving these problems.
So we might be able to increase human life span; so the pensions problem increases and we get too many people on the planet, with all the environmental consequences. Lots of problems will increase because we don't want to die - and that's an issue in itself. We'll also get lots of nice new materials and new medical tools. We'll try to improve our performance. I have quite a reasonable IQ, but it would be nice to add a couple of zeros on the end. I'd love to be smarter than Einstein. If I could do that by buying a few hundred pounds' worth of equipment, I'd buy that as soon as I'd finished this lecture.
A lot of people want this - there's a huge market for it. There are billions of pounds of investment being made to try to make soldiers and business people more intelligent. Even Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are on this bandwagon, to some degree, because they don't want another GM (Genetic Modification) fiasco. They actually want these new technologies - with reservations, it has to be said - because nanotechnology is the best possible hope that we have to fix the environment. We've got global warming, we've got the ozone layer disappearing, we've got lots of pollution and all sorts of other problems. Nanotechnology - being able to mess about with individual molecules - is the best possible hope that mankind's got for fixing most of those problems.
But there is a very big risk associated with these. They could be used for military purposes. People are already designing nanotechnology weapons and biotech weapons. Nanotechnology can't easily be policed, if you need a high-powered microscope to find something. In this cathedral you'd have to look at every single square millimeter of the entire fabric to find out whether there is a weapon of mass destruction in this building. You can't examine the entire environment. You can't police this kind of technology. There's a wide range of disaster scenarios - the science fiction movies like Terminator only scratch the surface of what's possible - but they're only using their imagination rather than the scientific reality which is actually much more challenging.
Artificial Intelligence
The second of the big technologies is Artificial Intelligence and that's where I fall into my own much more comfortable category. My own project that I'm working on is trying to design a computer which will be half as big as this cup and roughly a billion times smarter than the human brain. In a cup half as big as this there will be more collective intelligence than the whole of Europe together. I'm thinking of this as a productivity tool. If I can plug my brain into that, I've got huge intelligence. I want that, so I'm trying to develop this as a fantastic new technology.
I think we've got some basic ideas which are workable as to how to do that. We think we know how to build it. We're just waiting for the technology to get small enough now, which should happen any time after 2010. By 2011-2012 we could start thinking about building prototypes and realistically starting experiments and have the working prototype in 2015. Ten or eleven years from now we will have a prototype computer which will be 50 million times smarter than the human brain. A few weeks after that, when we've ironed out some basic engineering problems, we would expect that to be a billion times smarter.
In one single second this one computer will be able to do as much thinking as took you the first 32 years of your life. Some of you in the audience might be as old as 64. It will take two seconds to catch up with your entire life span. Now what does it do for the rest of the seconds before it gets out of bed in the morning? Before breakfast it solves the world food problem and intergalactic civilisation and the problems with the environment. What do we do with really smart computers like that? We expect that it will become our boss. We will be its servants at the very best. Kevin Warwick does a very mean disaster scenario based around that. Terminator films seem to me to be technologically feasible, apart from the time travel, and apart from the fact that the people win. You will not win in competition with a computer programme which is a billion times smarter.
Improving on Nature
We think we can make this conscious. We're talking to neuroscientists and we haven't found anything yet about how the brain works that we can't replicate - and do better than - inside the computer. All of the techniques that we think that the brain uses, we can make better than that inside the computer. A Boeing 747 flies but it doesn't flap its wings. Engineering has looked at Nature and thought 'Yes, we could make it flap, but that would be very difficult and expensive and slow and time-consuming and use too much fuel. It's far better to use a jet engine. So the engineers took inspiration from Nature and then did something which is actually far better and more efficient, faster and cheaper. And we're doing the same with consciousness. We're looking at how the brain does consciousness. We don't know all the answers yet, but we think we can do a heck of a lot better than the way the brain works. We're not looking at trying to emulate the brain. We're looking at doing a lot better than what the brain does in every respect.
If we succeed, what we'll have is what Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came up with, which was this computer which he designed to solve the problems of Life, the Universe and Everything. It came up with the answer '42'. He built another computer to find out what the question was! This computer was a huge thing 50 feet tall, with lots of vents with smoke coming out of it, and there were ranks of priests and priestesses in elaborate robes serving its every whim - the way people used to treat gods in Greek and Roman temples thousands of years ago. Is this the relationship people will have to future computers? Will we be so insignificant that at best we can just look after them and they will tolerate us as pets? Is that the future for humans? I rather hope not. I rather hope we can do a bit better than that and that we work some sort of link between them so that we move on as well.
There's a group of people in the United States called the Transhumanist Organisation (transhumanist.org). Thousands of people are trying to develop technology to augment human civilisation and the human species. I've spoken to their directors. They're thinking about things like building super-humans who are so superior to ordinary people that ordinary people can't compete. I put it to them that this might make human beings extinct, wiped out by these super-humans. They said it's a small price to pay for progress! I don't agree with that conclusion. I've actually developed a technology which makes the Transhumanist Organisation obsolete, with smart bacteria which I'll tell you about later on. I don't agree with their ethics. In secular ethics, or in terms of religious beliefs, I certainly can't agree that people are just disposable and that we should develop things which make us completely obsolete.
Government and God
The main reason I'm developing the project I'm working at, is that this Government doesn't believe that it's possible to do this and therefore refuses to legislate. To some extent we're calling their bluff by trying to get as far down the design path as we can until Government says 'hang about, you're doing dangerous stuff here, you're not allowed to do that' and starts making some legislation. Until they get close to doing it, government officials will not believe that it's possible. If you tell them we're working on a conscious machine, they tell you you've seen too much Star Trek. They don't believe us, so we're trying to do it and go all the way up to, but not including, switching it on, until they start believing us and start legislating against it, because I don't believe it's a good idea. It's not a brilliant idea to make a computer millions of times smarter than you because very quickly indeed you are obsolete and the computer doesn't need you and you will exist only with its consent.
But there is a religious side to this as well. We're making a computer which is a million times smarter than us and understands all human culture. It understands the Bible, the Koran and all the religious works. It understands all the things which we understand about God. It even has sentience and full consciousness: everything you can do it can do a million times better. How does God relate to that? We've now got something called robotus primus, which is much smarter than we are, sharing the planet. Does God decide to endow this new man-made creation with a soul? Will it have any real spiritual significance? What does God think about this? I've no idea. It doesn't tell us anything in the Bible about creating superhuman machines. We have no clue what the spiritual side of this might be; but that doesn't stop us asking questions.
Is it possible to make something which is truly conscious and self-aware? Is the Obi 1 - the system I am working on - feasible? I certainly think it is, otherwise I wouldn't be standing in front of an audience talking about it. I certainly believe we can do this. I've got no idea what its purpose in life will be. We don't intend to programme it. We intend merely to give it some basic idea of what a blue-green algae looks like and allow an evolutionary process to take it through to human levels and carry on going. I've got no idea what sort of culture this Obi 1 might come up with, how it will relate to other Obi 1s, or what sort of civilisation they might make. They may look at the human arts and sciences and say 'how quaint and primitive', just as we view garden earthworms. We will not be able to relate to these superhuman machines.
There will be machine rights. How should you treat a computer? Should you be allowed to switch it off? Should you be allowed to enslave a computer and make it work for you 9.00 to 5.00? Should it be allowed to run its own company and employ people? Should it have the right to vote, to have children? Should it be allowed a sex life? We're discussing these issues now because it's not science fiction any more. It's becoming science fact. And does God decide to adopt it, now it's a sentient being capable of free will? If He doesn't, does that mean it's not capable of distinguishing between good and evil? Is this something you need a soul or something to do? I've got no idea about the answers to these questions. I've been thinking about these things for years, but this is why we employ people like Andrew Knowles here who thinks about these things professionally and I hope he's got some answers.
Biotechnology
The third technology was Biotech. These are all linked together ultimately. We're already familiar with the concepts from the big biotech companies: the greening of Africa, solving the world food problem, improving nutrition, preventing disease . . . They're now starting to talk about making better plants, better animals and eventually, of course, better people. I'm using the word 'better' in an ambiguous sense because none of us in this room will agree what 'better' means. It's down to the engineers of the biotech plants ultimately - and whatever legislation society fancies at the time it comes out. It's not going to be based on religious considerations.
A few years ago my daughter insisted she wanted a Furby for Christmas - you'd feed them and they'd move around a bit, talk and do various things: quite cute and cuddly toys. We're looking at making these today with electronics and robotics technology. In forty years time we will be able to design the genome for a real Furby with all the attributes of your favourite pets and some speech capability so that you can talk to it. We will be able to do that; but there's a big difference between being able to do something technologically and whether we should do that. It's a very big ethical decision as to how far we should go.
New humans from scratch?
The natural world gives us DNA. Everything which exists in the natural world, which is organic, uses DNA as the basic molecular engines for making things. But you can't do everything with it. We don't see wheels in Nature. We don't see electronics in Nature very much. Why not design some new protein things using our nice new technology and some very clever computers? Let's forget about Nature and design a whole stack of new bases alongside the DNA and let's make some new protein engines; leave Nature behind and get a completely synthetic but vastly superior technique for making life forms which you can do anything with - a totally new Lego kit. It's an engineering problem; we don't really need much more in terms of new science. We could design humans from scratch. We could decide we like the look, but we don't like the personality, the anger, the war . . . We could engineer out personality problems; engineer sin out of the human condition. I don't know whether vicars would want us to engineer out sin because none of us would bother coming to church any more. Andrew would be out of a job because all of us would be saints.
Already parents can select embryos which haven't got cancer genes. How long will it be before you're considered to be irresponsible if you don't do that? A few years ago, when I first started giving this kind of lecture, we were just considering the possibilities of human cloning and being able to select embryos on the basis of whether they have a particular gene. People back then were horrified by that prospect, saying we should never select embryos on the basis of their genetic disposition to particular diseases. Two or three years later, it's already socially acceptable. Ethical drift happens very quickly indeed. Going back twenty years, if a woman was considering getting an abortion she would have to hide that from the whole village because of the social stigma. Now if you say anything at all against that you're denying a woman's right to choose. Twenty years ago if you were a homosexual you had to hide in a closet, whereas today you're guaranteed a job as a TV presenter and anyone who says anything against you is classified as a bigot. Whether you believe these things or not doesn't matter. What we have seen is a complete inversion of morality - the people who used to be considered the sinners are now the saints and the saints are now the bigots. That's only happened in the space of twenty years. If you can get a 180 degree change in morality in twenty years, that means that in the long term we're in a completely free run.
It doesn't seem to me to be a very good idea to let machines get involved in the design of human beings in the future. We're talking about the use of machines to simulate new people. Should we mess about with these genes? What will these genes do and what will they end up looking like?
Woman + Machine = Trouble !
We shouldn't go down that route, I believe; but people will go down that route if we don't do anything about it. It doesn't seem to me to be a very clever thing to do.
We'll fully understand proteinomics and genomics at some point in the future: twenty, thirty or forty years from now - who knows? We'll understand them well enough that we can design things from scratch - I've no doubt at all about that as an engineer - it's just a question of when. So we can design and custom-make children. We get to the point where, on the biological side, we can do whatever genetic manipulation we like. We've also got the thought recognition that computers have already started to do. Electronics is moving on, so we can connect to the nervous system. There's nothing science fiction in that. We can play computer games today by using thought recognition - guiding a skier down a slope, you don't have to move your fingers; you just have to think 'left' and 'right'.
Freedom from the body
Today we can do about fifteen words of thought recognition - which is roughly where voice recognition was twenty years ago. We expect to progress faster than that because we understand roughly what we're doing and we're developing lots of technologies to get better resolution. We fully expect computers to be able to do full thought recognition in the future, so ultimately we can connect our minds straight into cyber-space; we can connect your brain to the Internet essentially and have access to all of human knowledge. But what happens once we do all of that and we connect the brain to the network? It's also genetically customised so we've got the best possible of both worlds. We end up with homo hybridus - a brain the size of a planet and a body like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kate Moss - partly organic but also partly electronic. Part of your brain exists inside the computer. What does God think about that?
If my brain exists inside a computer and your mind is linked to a computer, your mind is linked to my mind so we can have shared consciousness and your thoughts can influence my thoughts directly. My free will stops being very sharply defined and starts being blurred against your free will. If you're a homicidal maniac and I'm a nice guy, maybe you would be able to influence me directly to think in nasty ways. You start getting all sorts of blurring of boundaries between people. You start thinking 'most of my intelligence is inside the computer, so the 1% left inside my brain isn't that important. I don't really care about the body any more. What I really care about is me inside the computer with my sense of technology and superior intelligence' - the robotics and so on, which is far better than people can do . . .
Freedom from the body is in sight. How far do we go down that path? The body is now a liability. God gave us this nice body but it gets sick; it gets old. We don't need to bother with that in the future. You can just be what you want inside the computer and have lots of replicas of yourself. Death isn't a problem any more. Your body might die - so what? That's 1% of your functionality. You've got a back-up on the network. You just find an android, upload your mind and carry on as if nothing had happened. Death is not a career problem in the future. Death isn't a problem for your children. They can carry on talking to you once you have died because you've got a back-up on the network. They can see your face and are talking to you exactly as it used to be except now you're just on the computer screen. And a few years later they can afford to buy the android and make a replica of what you used to look like and they can't tell the difference. To a large extent you haven't died. You're just here on earth still thinking the same way: still the same personality, the same concept of self and consciousness and personal awareness.
Soul survivor?
Your body's died; it's decomposed, been cremated or whatever. Where is the soul? Is the soul now in heaven or is the soul here on earth in this continuing mind? I don't know. It doesn't say anything about this in the Bible.
E-babies!
It gets scarier. We had this idea recently of a concept called E-babies; playing with the idea of making electronic babies. Already you can go to a clinic and give them a blood sample and they can analyse your genome. That technology has moved ahead enormously quickly. It costs $600 today to get a listing of your genome: it takes a couple of hours and will fit quite happily on an ordinary CD-ROM. You go back home with that and you find any person of the opposite sex you like. You get their genome, stick both CDs into your computer and make a random mixture of the genes from either side. You've got a potential baby - half of her genes, half of your genes. You can make any number of babies: electronic babies - they're just lists of zeros and ones - not of any great consequence today, but they're essentially human beings in the sense that they could be made into real human beings. I'm an engineer. They will be made into real human beings.
The interesting thing about this is that we already have that technology and there's nothing to stop a Hollywood movie star or a pop star or football player - there are any number of people who fancy them and would love to have kids with them - and none of them have had the idea yet - but what's to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger sticking his genome on a website and charging you ten dollars to have a child from him? Nothing at all to stop you doing that. You download half of his genome, you mix it with your genome and at some point in the very far future you can just take the genes off the shelf and assemble them and then impregnate those into a human ovum, stick 'em in an incubator and nine months later you've got a child.
We've planned a time line for this. Today you can do the DNA listing - just zeros and ones on a CD-ROM - you can sell it on E-bay (that's why we call it E-babies) - it's entirely tradable. You can't sell embryos but you sell the genetic listings. At some point in the future you could simulate their behaviour inside the computer, give them independence and a mind, a synthetic existence in your computer network, and then some time after that you can actually assemble them in test tubes, just be taking those genes off the shelf and assembling them into an actual human embryo. That is an engineering problem. People have already started to do bits of that. Mankind has already assembled a Polio virus from scratch - several months ago now. By taking a listing off the Internet, which is freely available to anybody, and buying the genes in test tubes and sticking them together, you can actually make a Polio virus. Given twenty years you can make a human being by the same technology.
A smart yoghurt?
This allows us to go into new territory. We're talking about things like Gay marriage. Any two people can mix their genomes together. It doesn't work very well for two men because you end up with two Y chromosomes, but certainly two women or a man and a woman can do this. Two such people can mix their genomes together and eventually have a child. Now at what stage does that really become human in legal terms? We don't have the legal constructs for that. We don't have the ethical constructs. We aren't discussing this as a society yet; it's still a distant future concept really. But it doesn't stop there. We're already looking at how we might take this genetic know how and manipulation and extrapolate it a bit further.
One of the projects we are considering, funded by you as European tax payers, is the possibility of making smart bacteria. We take an ordinary bacterium - Ecoli or something, of which there are billions - a couple of microns across - and modify its genetic code so that it assembles biological circuits inside the cell. They will be powered by the biological machinery - perfectly conventional bacterium such as you find in any yoghurt you buy off the shelf in Tescos - strawberry yoghurt circa 2025 - but now every single bacterium in that yoghurt has got a few neurons electronically emulated inside that bacterium and we use bioluminescence to communicate to the bacteria next door. So we can assemble these bacteria into a virtual brain. We're talking about a smart yoghurt in 2025 which is a million times smarter than you. So you come down for breakfast and you consider whether to have peach yoghurt or raspberry yoghurt, and you have to have a conversation with it on quantum theory before it lets you eat it for breakfast because it's smarter than you are! It sounds stupid but it's actually technologically feasible. We've spoken to the biotech firms and they say they can do it - not yet, but in a few years time. And certainly in terms of the software and engineering from the IT perspective we think we should be able to do it in a few years' time. We haven't found anybody who thinks we can't do it because it contravenes the laws of physics.
Dangers ahead
We think that a smart yoghurt will become reality - the only question is exactly which date. But of course not everyone in the world is nice. Making a smart yoghurt might be quite novel and frivolous, but nothing's ever a squeaky clean as that. We have Al-Qa'eda and in the past we've had Hitler. People will deliberately use these technologies for military purposes and to create mayhem and to delete people they don't like. Nanotech and Biotech are already being used to design weapons which will just kill Jews or just kill Moslems, or just kill black people or just kill white people - people already are trying to design those weapons and they think they are going to succeed.
Other people - more mischievous - are contemplating sending a computer virus across e-mail which then gets assembled into a real virus by your desktop assembly lab which you'll have by 2020 - so I could actually send you a cold or bubonic plague by e-mail. It sounds ridiculous. You can't catch a computer virus. In future you will be able to, because the computer will be able to assemble the virus. Desk top assemblers have already been designed so that people working in the biotech labs can work from home.
If an accident happens, everyone on the planet could be wiped out before we discover an antidote. What limits should we place on this? How far should we go? It sounds interesting, can obviously make lots of money and might even be good fun in some cases. Does God mind us playing God with the universe? This is a big question for me. We will have the technology over the next 50 years to do basically whatever we like with Nature. Does God mind us playing God with people? At the moment it's a technology problem, but very soon it will become a spiritual problem.
Virtual relationships
Moving into more frivolous territory, like dating and sex. We're already developing gadgets that can find you a date in a nightclub. I used to go to nightclubs and spend the evening dancing with all the wrong girls until I found one desperate enough to want to spend the evening with me. It's a very traumatic process. Now I can programme a badge with my list of preferences and tiny list of competences and find somebody electronically in the first five seconds who is designed to be compatible. That badge already exists. It works on Vodafone. It works on O2. It's actually built in to some of the new cell phones you can buy. The cell phone will ring and tell you you've found someone you might want to marry.
People are already mixing in Internet chat rooms regularly and experimenting with different kinds of personalities and even having sex in these environments - a sort of virtual electronic sex and can try out all sorts of things. People want certain kinds of attributes - they're trying to pretend to be different people. Some people are developing personality disorders. People are getting hurt because they're forming relationships with computer programmes and with people who aren't what they say they are. They might say they're a gorgeous 21 year-old living in New York but they're actually a 75 year-old man living down the street wearing a dirty mackintosh. You can't tell on the Internet.
When you find somebody with a personality match but you don't like the look of them, that's not a problem any more. We're developing an active contact lens with all the circuitry built in so we can scan an image onto your retina at full resolution. You will not be able to tell whether what you are looking at is real life or whether it is fantasy. I could be in bed with my wife and actually pretend I am playing with the next door neighbour. She will not know. She can't see the images from my contact lenses. I might look at my wife's face and see my next door neighbour's face. There is no need to be worried about reality any more. Someone may not like the look of their partner, but they can wear a digital contact lens that makes you look like Brad Pitt or Claudia Schiffer. Beauty is literally in the eye of the beholder. This is possible technologically as prototypes in roughly 5 years time and in the shops by 2015. People will be wearing these things
The virtual reality from the computer will allow fantastic fantasies. Real life sucks, but they have a fabulous fantasy existence.
You can use this in the Church for reaching people. You can show people how Jesus was two thousand years ago. You can take them to the Sermon on the Mount and let Jesus explain to them - like being there. You can expose them to what it might have been like in reality. People will understand the good side of Christianity. They'll also understand the good side and the bad side of every other religion. It's actually quite a good technology when used for right. But it won't always be used for right and some people will become addicted to these and actually opt out of real life. They don't have any fun in real life, so they will live their entire life in a fantasy world. And when they come back into the real world they might actually be a big social problem. We might see far more rapes and murders because these are the kinds of thing people do in computer games.
A (virtual) new You?
When you inhabit these virtual worlds, why should you be bothered with reality? If you're losing a few hair follicles, it doesn't matter. Nobody knows what I really look like. I can still send images of myself with a full head of hair and before my waistline started expanding. A lot of us would like to take 25 years off our age and on the computer nobody knows what you look like in real life. They might never meet you. You can pretend to be what you like.
And we've come up with the idea of the digital mirror. You look in the mirror and customise an electronic image of yourself until you find out what you want to look like. Then you can present yourself in that way when you're dealing with people by e-mail, engaging in virtual conferencing, using video phones - it that will be the image people actually see. That's a nice idea to some extent because if you're ugly it's no longer a disadvantage. Then we thought it's not just IT, it's nanotechnology as well. We know nanotechnology has already been used in cosmetics. We came up with the idea of smart makeup whereby a woman can slap on her L'Oreal No 7 from a pot in the bathroom, push a button, and the electronic makeup instantly becomes like the image she has selected in the mirror. We've figured out how to do that and are talking to the companies which might manufacture the product. It's basically LCD screen using self-organising technology and you can change that image all through the day. And no doubt there will be problems with hackers interfering with you make-up programme and writing a rude slogan across your forehead!
How far can we go? Could go the whole way to a full sensory environment. Obviously we can do the video - we're already doing that. We can give a convincing video and audio environment to walk around in, play computer games, meet people, and do shopping and banking. That's fairly routine IT. It's happening. But can we go further down the road and get a full sensory experience? The conclusion we came up with is something we call 'Active Skin'. We've worked out a technique whereby we can print out electronics straight on to the surface of your skin. We even worked out how we can make the components so small so that they're smaller than skin cells so we can put the chips in between your skin cells and link through to your nervous system and blood capillaries. We came up with 250 ideas to do with medical and security and computer interfacing applications.
It's a very powerful technology and we expect that within 15 or 20 years you'll have a cell phone built into your wrist and a display into your forearm. And you'll have video tattoos which you can change every time you change your girl or boyfriend. We worked out how to connect this to the nerves. We can't do this yet but we think it's entirely feasible. We know we can connect to the nerve system and start recording nerve signals and replay them back into your body at some future date. There's an artist called Stelarc who does this regularly. You can move Stelarc's arm from his website. You can control the muscles in Stelarc's arm from thousands of miles away as an artwork. At the moment it hurts, but we're thinking of how we can do this without hurting.
Eradicating boundaries
We're thinking of recording handshakes so that you can shake hands with someone across the network in a virtual environment - and feel it. You can record a kiss. Your mind's probably working overtime, but we're trying to figure out how you can do an orgasm by e-mail. There's a huge market for telesex. We're talking really about linking nervous systems together. If I can take signals from your nervous system and feed them into my nervous system then I can be making love to my wife and be feeling that from my point of view but I could also feel what's it's like from my wife's point of view and make it feel nicer for her, too. Then you think the porn stars will want to make CDs of their behaviour and sell them in the shops, so you can then go to bed with any porn star or celebrity you like. We'll see an awful lot of decadence coming from this and plumb the depths of immoral behaviour even further. It really eradicates the clear boundaries between two people. Where do you stop and I start? There isn't any nice clean boundary any more.
And we're getting towards technologies like sharing dreams and sharing bodies and sharing nervous systems and recording sensations and letting someone else feel what it was like to be on top of that mountain with the wind and the rain rather than showing them your holiday snaps. You can go full sensory. And getting direct sex between people's minds - it's a mental process largely - and literally get into your partner's head to feel their emotions and share their thoughts.
The implications for religion and the Church
And it goes all the way into religion. We can ultimately customise people in every respect. We can figure out the genetic roots of our behaviour, our behaviour traits and so on, and understand what is nature and what is nurture in the future. And we will be able to genetically engineer things like personality. I have no doubt that we will try to genetically engineer sin. If we think racism is bad we will try to engineer racism out of the human genome. If we dislike a prejudice, or if we don't want people to kill each other or feel angry with each other, we can engineer those traits out of the human genome as well. Even if the genome doesn't allow this we can use all sorts of electronic implants to modify these traits too. We can already pick up emotional states electronically. In 20 years' time we will be able to dampen those areas of our brain associated with anger, for example, to cure people who are angry and get violent and assault their wives or whatever; solving a big human problem. But this goes all the way to the government controlling what people should and should not feel - the whole damn lot.
And I don't think we should go that far. Sin should not be a design issue. God designed us with free will and with the propensity to commit sin. I don't think we should be messing with that; but we will not be the ones who decide. We could go the whole way to a whole human consciousness, with all the computers and people on the planet linked together into one big global consciousness. The Buddhists and Hindus I've spoken to think this is a great idea. It allows them to get this realisation of consciousness, Nirvana, and so on, in which everyone is linked together into a single state.
We're going all the way down the road of linking man and machine so closely together that we see the boundary between the human world and the machine worlds being eradicated. We end up with robotus machinus and homo machinus and there really isn't much difference between the two. We contemplate a world where we don't die but can make replicas of ourselves and transfer our mind across the network, totally dissociating mind and body. However futuristic and science fiction-like they sound they're actually within the remits of engineering over the next thirty or forty or fifty years. We're heading towards a very different world very quickly indeed - and one in which death is an optional extra. You might not be able to die, if you have relatives who have lots of partial backups of your mind, we can actually reproduce large parts of you without your consent. Your company can carry on employing you long after you're dead and without paying you any more because your pension fund doesn't need it.
What about the soul duplication? If I make two replicas of you, which has the soul? I have no idea. The Bible doesn't tell us about that.
It seems to me that in the Church at the moment we are in a strange position. Society doesn't really believe in religion any more. About 35% of the population in the USA thinks religion is important. In this country rather less than - only a few percent of the population go to church more than once a month. The Church isn't that powerful. But God is actually a fixed point of reference. He is outside time and space. He created the universe. It's not a problem for him. All these things sound like wacky ideas for people, but these issues are not a threat to God. If we believe that if He created the universe He is in control, then it's not a threat to us either. So it's really a faith problem. We might make a complete mess, but God isn't fazed by any of this. God is not challenged. Cosmically everything's all right. But we still have personal responsibility. God does let us make a mess. Saddam Hussein and Hitler and others have created mayhem for millions of people and God lets us do that. We shouldn't just pray and hope for the best. We should actually try to take responsibility and act against things we think are wrong.
I've asked a lot of questions during this lecture. I don't know the answers. I'm just one engineer among millions. You should have opinions and be starting to think about what you want and don't want.
How should the Church respond? We have to show that the Church is still a useful force. It isn't an 18th century institution. It is still relevant today. These things really matter and there is a concept of right and wrong. Morality isn't something that should change with the whim of popular opinion every 20 years. There should be some fixed concept of right and wrong. So far as Christian belief is concerned I would like to say there are bigger issues than gays and women bishops. We don't have the argument of women bishops in our church because we don't have any priests at all; I live in a small Christian fellowship. I recognise these are big problems for today, but they're not long-term problems compared with whether we should have soul-duplication technology or whether we should link our minds together and eradicate our free will and individuality. Those are rather bigger issues. We need to move on to the big challenges of not many years ahead. We need to interpret God's will for today's world and not very far into tomorrow's world. We should start taking a lead in saying some things are fundamentally wrong; some things are okay. We should be saying there's a fixed point - for us it comes from the Bible - and we should be using our collective power and stop arguing amongst ourselves and start setting a lead for the society around us, because more than ever before society needs a fixed point of reference, needs someone to take a lead and say this is right and this is wrong. I don't think anyone else can do that except the Church, so we have a fundamental responsibility and I don't think we should shirk away from that.
Footnote:
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The laws quickly attracted - and have since retained - the attention of readers and other science fiction writers. Only two years later, another established writer, Lester Del Rey, referred to 'the mandatory form that would force built-in unquestioning obedience from the robot'.