Urgent Warnings, Breakthrough Solutions, Second Edition

configured their PCs with tens of billions
of bits of RAM.
If one accepts the comparison of
computer bits to neurons as described
by Moravec, then the computer
’s growth in evolution expanded
each decade what it took
Mother Nature to achieve every
hundred million years. Moravec calculates
that human engineering of
artificial intelligence is occurring at
10 million times the speed of natural
evolution.
An approach to AI called embodiment,
or embodied embedded cognition,
maintains that intelligent behavior
occurs out of the interplay
among the brain, the body, and the
world. Some philosophers, cognitive
scientists, and AI researchers believe
that the type of thinking done by the
human brain is determined by certain
aspects of the human body.
Ideas, thoughts, concepts, and reasoning
are shaped by our perceptual
system—our ability to perceive,
move, and interact with our world.
Roboticists such as Moravec and
Rodney Brooks (founder of iRobot
Corp. and Heartland Robotics Inc.)
maintain that, in order to achieve
human-level intelligence, any AI-endowed
system would have to deal
with humanlike artifacts, and thus a
humanoid would be the optimal robot
to achieve this.
The new field of evolutionary robotics,
like its namesake of evoluseveral
hundred years, it is really
insignificant when compared
to the glacial pace of natural
evolution. In his 2000
paper “Robots, Re-Evolving
Mind,” Moravec compares the
evolution of intelligence in the
natural world with the progress
occurring in the field of information
technology.
Natural intelligence evolution
starts from wormlike animals
with a few hundred neurons
occurring more than 570
million years ago. Very primitive
fish that appeared 470 million
years ago had about 100,000 neurons.
One hundred million years
later, amphibians with a few million
neurons emerged from the swamps.
One hundred fifty million years
later, the first small mammals appeared
and had brain capacities with
several hundred million neurons.
The bigger co-inhabitants at the
time, the dinosaurs, had brains with
several billion neurons.
After the extinction of the dinosaurs
65 million years ago, mammalian
brains also reached sizes of several
billion neurons. The first
hominids of about 30 million years
ago had brains of 20 billion neurons.
You and I, and our contemporary
human colleagues, have brains operating
with approximately 100 billion
neurons.
Compare this to the artificial intelligence
evolutionary track beginning
with the first electromechanical computers
built around 1940, which had
a few hundred bits of telephone relay
storage. By 1955, computers had
acquired 100,000 bits of rotating
magnetic memory. Ten years later,
computers had millions of bits of
magnetic core memory. By 1975,
many computer core memories had
exceeded 10 million bits, and by
1985, 100 million bits. By 1995, larger
computer systems had reached several
billion bits. By the year 2000, a
few personal computer owners had
“[Hans] Moravec
calculates that human
engineering of artificial
intelligence is
occurring at
10 million times the
speed of natural
evolution.”
tionary biology, relies on the
Darwinian principle of the reproduction
of the fittest. This
view posits that autonomous
robots will develop and evolve
from interaction with the environment.
The fittest robots will
reproduce by observing their
interactions with the environment
and incorporating mutations
that increase their survivability.
Humans will be unable to
match the rapid evolutionary
jumps afforded to completely
artificial beings, even with advances
in cybernetics and genetic engineering.
Robotic humanoids will only be
limited by the laws of physics and
not by those of biology, which even
genetic engineering can’t alter.
Hopefully, the sort of destructive
competition that eliminated the rivals
to Homo sapiens in the past—including
such competitors as Homo
erectus and the Neanderthals—will
not be repeated in the next evolutionary
stage.
In the best possible future, non-altered
humans, humans with cybernetic
implants, and robotic humanoids
will learn from each other,
borrow and share technology, and
engage in friendly collaboration, cooperation,
and competition to benefit
all. In considering which robotic
designs to support or, on the national
level, to fund, that seems a
good ideal to aim for.
❑
About the Author
Steven M. Shaker is an executive
in a market research
and training firm. He is an
authority on technology assessments,
forecasting, and
competitive intelligence. He
is co-author, with Alan Wise,
of War Without Men: Robots on the Future
Battlefield (Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988)
and, with Mark Gembicki, of The WarRoom
Guide to Competitive Intelligence (McGraw-
Hill, 1998). E-mail steve.shaker@cox.net.
Urgent Warnings, Breakthrough Solutions 21