Just had my latest fix of sci-fi. Last night I finished the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and despite the meaningful glances, clichéd dialogue, cheesy acting and the decidedly annoying voiceover, I enjoyed it. Following the themes set out by the Arnie movies, we see 15 year old John and his mother, Sarah, on the run from cyborg Terminators…
Pouty John’s sulky teenager moods and boyish rebellions grate at times - especially when you consider that we’re talking about the future leader of mankind. But we have to bear in mind that he’s been raised by a paranoid (doesn't mean they're not out to get you) control freak mother. He also lives with a kick-arse Terminator protector, Cameron, who's hotter than most real girls - no doubt the producers realised early on the need to appeal to the teenage boy demographic.
Watching Cameron adapt to the challenges of the mission is fascinating and bloody funny too. In Cameron’s time period (the future) everything is focused on defeating SKYNET, an artificially intelligent system that has developed a consciousness and is bent on exterminating its creator humankind. Protecting John at all costs means there are few social interactions that don’t involve a battle for survival. This puts her in awkward positions in the present day, not understanding how to relate in a human manner. She grows to understand by watching television and reading, and there is a defining scene where John tells her not to act like a nerd, and she quickly replies with a definition of nerd. John asks her how she knows that, and she tells him she has been reading the dictionary at night. She doesn’t sleep.
Pouty John’s sulky teenager moods and boyish rebellions grate at times - especially when you consider that we’re talking about the future leader of mankind. But we have to bear in mind that he’s been raised by a paranoid (doesn't mean they're not out to get you) control freak mother. He also lives with a kick-arse Terminator protector, Cameron, who's hotter than most real girls - no doubt the producers realised early on the need to appeal to the teenage boy demographic.
Watching Cameron adapt to the challenges of the mission is fascinating and bloody funny too. In Cameron’s time period (the future) everything is focused on defeating SKYNET, an artificially intelligent system that has developed a consciousness and is bent on exterminating its creator humankind. Protecting John at all costs means there are few social interactions that don’t involve a battle for survival. This puts her in awkward positions in the present day, not understanding how to relate in a human manner. She grows to understand by watching television and reading, and there is a defining scene where John tells her not to act like a nerd, and she quickly replies with a definition of nerd. John asks her how she knows that, and she tells him she has been reading the dictionary at night. She doesn’t sleep.
Ray Kurzweil has written a number of books on non-biological intelligence and biotechnology. His latest work, The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology, is an awesome/terrifying text on life in the near future, when nanobots become self-designing and self-replicating members of our society and help us out with everything from hair loss to taking out the rubbish. ‘Within a quarter century, non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtly of human intelligence,’ says Kurzweil. ‘It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like Being John Malkovich) and enhancing human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.’
If Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, by the mid-2020s, we will be on the verge of a nanotechnology revolution. The soldiers of this revolution are the nanobots, blood cell sized robots that can travel through our bloodstream destroying pathogens, removing debris, correcting DNA errors and reversing the aging processes.
Plans are currently underway to create medical nanobots that will use our own metabolic energy as a source of power. That means these devices could remain operational as long as we are alive – or longer if they manage to get into human egg or sperm. Any nanobot that develops the ability to propagate in this or any other manner across even one human generation has fulfilled the definition of a non-biological lifeform. A true alien.
There is, of course, opposition from the Church and environmentalists. The virtual worlds of Second Life and World of Warcraft have been attacked multiple times by self-replicating worms called Grey Goo, which clutter the environments and in some cases destroy players’ avatars. The name Grey Goo is itself a reference to the threat of nanotechnology: hypothetically, a self-replicating nanobot could consume the Earth’s resources, transforming our planet into a giant blob of grey goo.
So will the future look like Terminator? The Matrix? Blade Runner? It’s inevitable that machines will become ever more powerful. Our interneural connections compute at about 200 transactions per second, at least a million times slower than electronics. With their ability to share their knowledge at lightening speed and ‘think’ in groups, machines will be able to leverage their collective intelligence at a far greater rate than humankind. Then the genie really will be out of the bottle - see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/11/skynet_takes_control/
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