"But one day your pajamas will wake you up in the morning with a gentle massage and temperature change as they discuss with your coffee maker which sort of blend is most appropriate given your night's sleep, the day's weather, and the angry email from your boss waiting in your in-box."
-- That's a great quote! Really made me laugh and then wonder ...
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This lack of understanding is reflected in the slow pace of research on so-called neural prostheses, which replace or supplement capacities lost because of damage to the nervous system. The only truly successful neural prosthesis is the artificial cochlea. More than 100,000 hearing-impaired people have been equipped with those devices, which restore hearing by feeding signals from an external microphone to the auditory nerve.
Artificial retinas, light-sensitive chips that mimic the eye's signal-processing ability and stimulate the optical nerve or visual cortex, have been tested in a handful of blind subjects, but most have been able to see nothing more than phosphenes, or bright spots. A few paralyzed patients have learned to control a computer cursor "merely by thinking," as the media invariably put it, via implanted electrodes that pick up the patients' neural signals—but communicating that way remains slow and unreliable.
Kurzweil has excessive faith not only in artificial intelligence and neuroscience but also in biotechnology. In his book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, co-written with a physician, he claims that the Human Genome Project and related advances will soon yield cures both for specific diseases and even aging itself. The identification of specific genes underpinning inherited disease—such as Huntington's disease and immune-deficiency syndrome—has inspired researchers to devise therapies to correct the genetic malformations. So far, scientists have carried out hundreds of clinical trials of gene therapy, and not one has been an unqualified success. The treatments have sickened some patients and even killed them.
The record of cancer treatment is also dismal. Since 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a "war on cancer," the United States has spent more than $70 billion on research, and the annual budget for the National Cancer Institute has increased by a factor of 20, from $250 million to $5 billion. Scientists have gained a much better understanding of the molecular and genetic underpinnings of cancer, but this knowledge has not yielded significant improvements in treatments. Overall cancer mortality rates in the U.S. actually rose from 1971 until the early 1990s before declining slightly over the last decade or so—largely because of a decrease in the number of male smokers. Given the track record of treatments for inherited diseases and cancer, proclamations about the imminence of immortality are absurd.
Part of me—the part that thrilled at prospects for artificial intelligence almost 30 years ago—finds Kurzweil's prophesies highly entertaining. He raises lots of provocative questions: What would be like to be immortal? To have an IQ of 1,000? To exist not as a doomed, flesh-and-blood creature but as a piece of software that can keep redesigning itself and merging with other programs? But another part of me—the grown-up, responsible part—worries that so many people, smart people, are taking Kurzweil's sci-fi fantasies seriously. The last thing humanity needs right now is an apocalyptic cult masquerading as science.
Horgan is a science journalist and director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.
© 2009
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