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Will computers eventually surpass us in intelligence?

Will computers eventually surpass us in intelligence? Certainly, there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent that. If robots are neural networks capable of learning, and they develop to the point where they can learn faster and more efficiently than we can, then it's logical that they might eventually surpass us in reasoning. Moravec says, "[The postbiological world] is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny . . . When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition."

Some inventors, such as Ray Rurzweil, have even predicted that this time will come soon, earlier rather than later, even within the next few decades. Perhaps we are creating our evolutionary successors. Some computer scientists envision a point they call "singularity," when robots will be able to process information exponentially fast, creating new robots in the process, until their collective ability to absorb information advances almost without limit.

So in the long term some have advocated a merging of carbon and silicon technology, rather than waiting for our extinction. We humans are mainly based on carbon, but robots are based on silicon (at least for the moment). Perhaps the solution is to merge with our creations. (If we ever encounter extraterrestrials, we should not be surprised to find that they are part organic, part mechanical to withstand the rigors of space travel and to flourish in hostile environments.)

In the far future, robots or humanlike cyborgs may even grant us the gift of immortality. Marvin Minsky adds, "What if the sun dies out, or we destroy the planet? Why not make better physicists, engineers, or mathematicians? We may need to be the architects of our own future. If we don't our culture could disappear."

Moravec envisions a time in the distant future when our neural architecture will be transferred, neuron for neuron, directly into a machine, giving us, in a sense, immortality. It's a wild thought, but not beyond the realm of possibility. So, according to some scientists viewing the far future, immortality (in the form of DNA-enhanced or silicon bodies) may be the ultimate future of humanity.

The idea of creating thinking machines that are at least as smart as animals and perhaps as smart or smarter than us could become a reality if we can overcome the collapse of Moore's law and the commonsense problem, perhaps even late in this century. Although the fundamental laws of AI are still being discovered, progress in this area is happening extremely fast and is promising. Given that, I would classify robots and other thinking machines as a Class I impossibility.

(Abridged from “Physics of the Impossible” by Michio Kaku)