“Superhumanism: According to Hans Moravec § On the Inevitability & Desirability of Human Extinction”, 1995-10-01 ():
According to Hans Moravec, by 2040 robots will become as smart as we are. And then they’ll displace us as the dominant form of life on Earth. But he isn’t worried—the robots will love us.
…Hans Moravec reclines in his chair and places his palms against his chest. “Consider the human form”, he says. “It clearly isn’t designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work—and for that reason, it’s hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die.”
He leans forward, and his eyes widen with enthusiasm. “But wouldn’t it be great”, he says, “if you could enhance your abilities via artificial intelligence, and extend your lifespan, and improve on the human condition?” Since his earliest childhood, Moravec has been obsessed with artificial life. When he was 4 years old, his father helped him use a wooden erector set to build a model of a little man who would dance and wave his arms and legs when a crank was turned. “It excited me”, says Moravec, “because at that moment, I saw you could assemble a few parts and end up with something more—it could seem to have a life of its own.”
…Not everyone thinks this is such a wonderful idea. Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science at MIT, complains that Moravec’s book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence is as dangerous as Mein Kampf. Respected mathematician Roger Penrose has written a long essay for The New York Review of Books in which he twice uses the word “horrific” to describe some of Moravec’s concepts. Book reviewer Poovan Murugesan denounces Moravec as “a loose cannon of fast ideas” who suffers from “irresponsible optimism.” Even Moravec’s fans seem a little ambivalent. “He comes off as a cross between Mister Rogers and Dr. Faustus”, says writer Richard Kadrey. And in the words of award-winning science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who is also an associate professor of mathematical sciences at San Diego State University, “Moravec puts the rest of the technological optimists to shame. He is beyond their wildest extremes.” But, Vinge adds hastily, “I mean this as praise!”
…his enthusiasm gives him a childlike charm—even when he talks lyrically about human extinction.
…But this [contracts and laws regulating AIs] would be a second set of rules to solve a problem created by robots breaking the first set of rules. The system still seems fundamentally unstable. “It is unstable”, he agrees. “Everything will depend on the way in which we create it. Crafting these machines and the corporate laws that control them is going to be the most important thing humanity ever does. You know, each age has an activity in which the best minds get involved. Crafting the laws, and their implementation, will be the thing to do in the 21st century.”…This marks the point where the genie finally gets out of the bottle and Earth’s retirement community of pampered humans finds itself faced with a big problem. Out in space, the preprogrammed drive to compete and be efficient will result in the runaway evolution of machine capabilities…Since space-based machine intelligences will be free to develop at their own pace, they will quickly outstrip their cousins on Earth and eventually will be tempted to use the planet for their own purposes. “I don’t think humanity will last long under these conditions”, Moravec says. But, ever the optimist, he believes that “the takeover will be swift and painless.”
Why? Because machine intelligence will be so far advanced, so incomprehensible to human beings, that we literally won’t know what hit us. Moravec foresees a kind of happy ending, though, because the cyberspace entities should find human activity interesting from a historical perspective. We will be remembered as their ancestors, the creators who enabled them to exist. As Moravec puts it, “We are their past, and they will be interested in us for the same reason that today we are interested in the origins of our own life on Earth.”
He seems very sincere as he says this, almost as if it’s an article of faith for him…I’ve been sitting opposite Moravec in his office, typing on my laptop computer, following his exposition step by step. The vision he has described exists for him as a unified whole; it takes him only about an hour to describe it clearly and fluently from beginning to end. For him it seems entirely pleasurable: a destiny that grows out of his own work and affirms his own values.
His critics, of course, disagree. They complain that his vision is inhuman, lacking attributes such as culture and art that seem central to our identity…In which case, what’s the answer? Moravec adamantly believes that reversing the evolution of technology would create an even bigger disaster. “Most of us would starve”, he says. He suggests the opposite approach: that we try to catch up with technology by accelerating our own evolution. “We can change ourselves”, he says, “and we can also build new children who are properly suited for the new conditions. Robot children.”
Inevitably, I ask whether he has any normal, flesh-and-blood children. “No. In fact, I am biologically incapable of it. I contracted testicular cancer as I was finishing my PhD; it didn’t affect me very much, it didn’t really hurt, I noticed a growth, but I still had my thesis to write and my orals to do, and the whole thing seemed very unreal. There were two surgeries, one minor, one major—with my intestines out in a bag to get at the lymph nodes. I came through it in sparkling condition, aged around 30. But a side effect is that I’m basically infertile.”
Does this mean that his love of robots is nothing more than a displaced desire for the biological children he can’t have? “Not at all. Long before the cancer, I was already obsessively committed to robots for whatever neurotic reason. That was where I wanted to spend my energy. I met my wife in the hospital when I was getting chemotherapy in 1980. She already had two children, so I inherited them as stepchildren.”
…But how does all this fit in with Moravec’s obvious personal love for machines?…Growing up in Montreal, learning English and adjusting to a strange new culture, Hans Moravec was a solitary child who found solace in building models and gadgets. “I remember the thrill I got when I put together something and made it work. I could admire it for hours. And these things also made other people proud of me. I guess I actually thought that they would get me a wife! I knew I didn’t have any social skills, but maybe if I could build these machine things really, really well, it would make me more attractive to women.” He laughs at his own childhood naïveté.
…“But I don’t consider it a demise”, Moravec retorts, still insisting that his vision is wholly positive. “The robots will be a continuation of us, and they won’t mean our extinction any more than a new generation of children spells the extinction of the previous generation of adults. In any case, in the long term, the robots are much more likely to resurrect us than our biological children are.”
…Personally, I suspect he likes the idea of radical change because he’s an intensely intelligent man who is easily bored by the everyday world. He finds it impossible to believe that it makes sense to continue, as human beings, in our exact same form. “Do we really want more of what we have now?” he asks, sounding incredulous. “More millennia of the same old human soap opera? Surely we have played out most of the interesting scenarios already in terms of human relationships in a trivial framework. What I’m talking about transcends all that. There’ll be far more interesting stories. And what is life but a set of stories?”
Ultimately, Moravec comes back again to the power and grandeur of a destiny that exceeds all limits. “This universe is so big”, he says. “The possibilities must be infinitely greater than anything we can imagine for ourselves. Pushing things in the direction of expanded possibilities seems to be by far the most productive use of my time. And that, here, is my purpose.”