Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  We also get the sense that this manipulation was possible because Ava didn’t inhabit the same “cave” as Caleb, nor Nathan for that matter. She was a stranger in their world, and as a result could see opportunities that they couldn’t. She was, in a real sense, able to control the shadows on the walls of their mind-caves. And because she wasn’t human, and wasn’t living the human experience, she had no emotional or empathetic attachment to them. Why should she?

  Of course, this is just a movie, and manipulating people in the real world is much harder. But I’m writing this at a time when there are allegations of Russia interfering with elections around the world, and companies are using AI-based systems to nudge people’s perceptions and behaviors through social media. And as I write, it does leave me wondering how hard it would be for a smart machine to play us at least as effectively as our politicians and social manipulators do.118

  So where does this leave us? For one, we probably need to worry less about putting checks and balances in place to avoid the emergence of superintelligence, and more about guarding against AIs that learn how to use our cognitive vulnerabilities against us. And we need to think about how to develop tests that indicate when we are being played by machines. This conundrum is explored in part by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen in their 2009 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong.119 In it, they argue that we should be actively working on developing what they call Artificial Moral Agents, or AMAs, that have embedded within them a moral and ethical framework that reflects those that guide our actions as humans. Such an approach may head off the dangers of AI manipulation, where an amoral machine outlook, or at least a non-human moral framework, may lead to what we would think of as dangerously sociopathic tendencies. Yet it remains to be seen how effectively we can make intelligent agents in our own moral image—and even whether this will end up reflecting as much of the immorality that pervades human society as it does the morality!

  I must confess that I’m not optimistic about this level of human control over AI morality in the long run. AIs and AGIs will, of necessity, inhabit a world that is foreign to us, and that will deeply shape how they think and act. We may be able to constrain them for a time to what we consider “appropriate behavior.” But this in itself raises deep moral questions around our right to control and constrain artificial intelligences, and what rights they in turn may have. We know from human history that attempts to control the beliefs and behaviors of others—often on moral or religious grounds—can quickly step beyond norms of ethical behavior. And, ultimately, they fail, as oppressed communities rebel. I suspect that, in the long run, we’ll face the same challenges with AI, and especially with advanced AGI. Here, the pathway forward will not be in making moral machines, but in extending our own morality to developing constructive and equitable partnerships with something that sees and experiences the world very differently from us, and occupies a domain we can only dream of.

  Here, I believe the challenge and the opportunity will be in developing artificial emissaries that can explore beyond the caves of our own limited understanding on our behalf, so that they can act as the machine-philosophers of the future, and create a bridge between the caves we inhabit and the wider world beyond.

  The alternative, of course, is a future where we learn how to transcend the divide between our human bodies and the cybernetic world of AI—this is precisely where we find ourselves with the movie Transcendence.

  Chapter Nine

  TRANSCENDENCE: WELCOME TO THE SINGULARITY

  “You know what the computer did when he first turned it on? It screamed.”

  —Bree Evans

  Visions of the Future

  In 2005, the celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil made a bold prediction: In 2045, machines will be so smart that they’ll be capable of reinventing ever-more-powerful versions of themselves, resulting in a runaway acceleration in machine intelligence that far outstrips what humans are capable of.120 Kurzweil called this the “singularity,” a profound, disruptive, and rapid technological transformation of the world we live in, marking the transition between a human-dominated civilization and one dominated by smart machines.

  To Kurzweil, artificial intelligence like that explored in chapter eight and the movie Ex Machina is simply a stepping stone to the next phase of human evolution. In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, he envisaged a future where deep convergence between different areas of innovation begins to massively accelerate our technological capabilities. His projections are based in part on an exponential growth in technological progress that appears to be happening across the board, such as in the plummeting cost and speed of sequencing DNA, the continuing growth in computing power, and massive increases in data storage density and the resolution of non-invasive brain scans. They’re also based on the assumption that these trends will not only continue, but accelerate. The result, he claims, will be a transformative change in not only what we can do with technology, but how increasingly advanced technologies becomes deeply integrated into the future of life as we know it.121

  This, to Kurzweil, is the singularity. It’s a bright point in the not-too-distant future, beyond which we cannot predict the outcomes of our technological inventiveness, because they are so far beyond our current understanding. And it’s the imagined events leading up to and beyond such a technological transition point that the movie Transcendence draws on.

  To be honest, I must confess that I’m skeptical of such a technological tipping point occurring in our near future. There’s enough hand-waving and speculation here to make me deeply suspicious of predictions of the pending singularity. What I do buy into, though, is the idea of rapidly developing, converging, and intertwining technologies leading to a technologically-driven future that is increasingly hard to predict and control. And this makes Transcendence, Hollywood hyped-up techno-fantasy aside, a worthwhile starting point for imagining what could happen as we begin to push the boundaries of the technologically possible beyond our comprehension.

  Transcendence revolves around Will Caster (played by Johnny Depp), a visionary artificial-intelligence scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his equally smart wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall). The movie starts with Will presenting his work to a rapt audience. With most of the room hanging on his every word, he weaves a seductive narrative around the promise of AI solving the world’s most pressing challenges.

  Will’s lecture is one of unbounded optimism in the ingenuity of humans and the power of AI. Yet, at the end of his presentation, one member of the audience aggressively accuses him of trying to create God. Will, it seems, is treading on sacred ground, and some people are getting worried that he’s going too far. We quickly learn that Will’s questioner is a member of an anti-technology activist group calling itself Revolutionary Independence From Technology, or RIFT, and his presence in the lecture is part of a coordinated attack on AI researchers. As Will leaves the lecture, he’s shot and wounded by this techno-activist. At the same time, a bomb goes off elsewhere, in a lab where experiments are being conducted into uploading the brain-states of monkeys into computers. Will survives the attack. But the bullet that hits him is laced with radioactive polonium, leading to irreversible and fatal poisoning.

  In a mad dash to transcend his pending death, Will, Evelyn, and their colleague and friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany) set up a secret research lab. Here, they attempt to upload Will’s neural pathways into a powerful AI-based supercomputer before his body gives way and dies. As Will passes away, it looks like they’ve failed, until the computer containing his mind-state begins to communicate.

  It turns out that some part of Will has survived the transition, and the resulting cyber-Will quickly begins to reconfigure the code and algorithms that now define his environment. But members of RIFT, worried about the consequences of what Will is doing, track down the secret lab and plan a raid to put an end to what’s going on. Even as they descend on the lab, though, Evelyn connects cyber-Will to the web in an attempt to
escape the activists, and he uploads himself to the internet.

  In the days and weeks that follow, cyber-Will and Evelyn establish a powerful computing facility in the remote town of Brightwood. This is financed using funds that cyber-Will, flexing his new cyber-muscles, siphons off from the stock market. Armed with near-limitless resources and an exponentially growing intelligence, cyber-Will begins to make rapid and profound technological breakthroughs, including harnessing a Hollywood version of nanotechnology to create self-replicating “nanobots” that use the materials around them to manufacture anything they are instructed to, atom by atom.

  In the meantime, members of RIFT kidnap Max and try to turn him in their efforts to stop cyber-Will. Max, it turns out, previously wrote a paper on the dangers of AI which has become something of a guiding document for the techno-activists. Max initially resists RIFT’s efforts, but he gradually begins to see that cyber-Will presents a threat that has to be stopped. At the same time, another brilliant AI scientist and former colleague of Will’s, Joseph Taggart (Morgan Freeman), has teamed up with FBI Agent Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) to track down cyber-Will and Evelyn. As cyber-Will’s powers grow, Buchanan and Taggart join forces with Max and RIFT’s leader Bree (Kate Mara) to take cyber-Will down.

  This loose coalition of allies soon realize there is an increased urgency to their mission. Using his growing intelligence, cyber-Will has cracked not only how to create nanobots, but how to use them to reconstruct precisely damaged tissues and cells, and to “upgrade” living people. In a scene with rather God-like overtones, we see a local resident who’s been blind from birth having their optic nerve cells repaired, and being given the gift of sight.122 Cyber-Will starts to cure and upgrade the local townspeople, but it turns out that his altruistic “fix-it” health service also allows him to take control of those he’s altered.

  As cyber-Will extends his control over the local population, Max and Taggart work out that they can bypass his defenses if he can be persuaded to upgrade and assimilate someone carrying a targeted cyber-virus. But there’s a catch. Because cyber-Will is now distributed through the internet, taking him down will also take down every web-enabled system around the world. Anything that depends on the internet—finance, power, food distribution, healthcare, and many other essential systems—would be disabled. As a result, the anti-Will alliance faces a tough tradeoff: Allow cyber-Will to grow in power and potentially take over the world, or shut him down, and lose virtually every aspect of modern life that people rely on.

  The team decides to go for the nuclear option and shut cyber-Will down. But they still need to work out how to deliver the virus.

  Up to this point, Evelyn has been a willing partner in cyber-Will’s growing empire. She’s not sure whether this is the Will she previously knew, or some new entity masquerading as him, but she sticks with him nevertheless. Yet, as cyber-Will’s power grows, Max convinces Evelyn that this is not the Will she married. And the crux of his argument is that, unlike cyber-Will, human-Will never wanted to change the world. This was Evelyn’s vision, not his.

  Evelyn becomes convinced that cyber-Will needs to be stopped, and agrees to become a carrier for virus. To succeed, though, she needs to persuade Will to assimilate her and make her a part of the cyber world he’s creating.

  Not surprisingly, cyber-Will knows what’s going on. But there’s a twist. Everything he’s done has been motivated by his love for Evelyn. She wanted to change the world, and through his newfound powers, cyber-Will found a way to do this for her. Using his nanobots, he discovered ways to reverse the ravages of humans on the environment, and take the planet back to a more pristine state.

  Despite Will’s love for Evelyn, he’s not going to let himself be tricked into being infected. Yet, as Evelyn approaches him, she’s fatally wounded in an attack on the cyber facility, leaving cyber-Will with an impossible choice: save Evelyn, but in doing so become infected, or let her die, and lose the one thing he cares about the most.

  Cyber-Will choses love and self-sacrifice over power, and as the virus enters him, his systems begin to shut down. As it takes hold, internet-connected systems around the world begin to fail.

  At least, this is how it looks. What cyber-Will’s adversaries don’t know is that he has transcended the rather clunky world of the internet, and he’s taken a cyber-form of Evelyn with him. As he assimilates her, he uploads them both into an invisible network of cyber-connected nanobots. Together, they step beyond their biological and evolutionary limits into a brave new future.

  On one level, Transcendence takes us deep into technological fantasyland. Yet the movie’s themes of technological convergence, radical disruption, and anti-tech activism are all highly relevant to the future we’re building and how it’s impacted by the technologies we create.

  Technological Convergence

  According to World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, we are well into a “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”123 The first Industrial Revolution, according to Schwab, was spurred by the use of water power and steam to mechanize production. The second took off with the widespread use of electricity. And the third was ushered in with the digital revolution of the mid- to late twentieth century. Now, argues Schwab, digital, biological, and physical technologies are beginning to fuse together, to transform how and what we manufacture and how we live our lives. And while this may sound a little Hollywood-esque, it’s worth remembering that the World Economic Forum is a highly respected global organization that works closely with many of the world’s top movers and shakers.

  At the heart of this new Industrial Revolution is an increasing convergence between technological capabilities that is blurring the lines between biology, digital systems, and the physical and mechanical world. Of course, technological convergence is nothing new. Most of the technologies we rely on every day depend to some degree on a fusion between different capabilities. Yet, over the past two decades, there’s been a rapid acceleration in what is possible that’s been driven by a powerful new wave of convergence.

  Early indications of this new wave emerged in the 1970s as the fields of computing and robotics began to intertwine. This was a no-brainer of a convergence, as it became increasingly easy to control mechanical systems using computer “brains.” But it was a growing trend in convergence between material science, genetics, and neuroscience, and their confluence with cyber-systems and robotics, that really began to accelerate the pace of change.

  Some of this was captured in a 2003 report on converging technologies co-edited by Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge at the US National Science Foundation.124 Working with leading scientists and engineers, they explored how a number of trends were leading to a “confluence of technologies that now offers the promise of improving human lives in many ways, and the realignment of traditional disciplinary boundaries that will be needed to realize this potential.” And at this confluence they saw four trends as dominating the field: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive technology.

  Roco, Bainbridge, and others argued that it’s at the intersections between technologies that novel and disruptive things begin to happen, especially when it occurs between technologies that allow us to control the physical world (nanotechnology), biological systems (biotechnology), the mind (cognitive technologies), and cyberspace (specifically, information technologies). And they had a point. Where these four technological domains come together, really interesting things start to happen. For instance, scientists and technologists can begin to use nanotechnology to build more powerful computers, or to read DNA sequences faster, or build better machine-brain interfaces. Information technology can be used to design new materials, or to engineer novel genetic sequences and interpret brain signals. Biotechnology can be, and is being, used to make new materials, to translate digital code into genetic code, and to precisely control neurons. And neurotechnology is inspiring a whole new generation of computer processors.

  These confluences just begin to hint at the potenti
al embedded within the current wave of technological convergence. What Roco and Bainbridge revealed is that we’re facing a step-change in how we use science and technology to alter the world around us. But their focus on nano, bio, info, and cognitive technologies only scratched the surface of the transformative changes that are now beginning to emerge.

  To understand why we’re at such a transformative point in our technological history, it’s worth pausing to look at how our technological skills are growing in how we work with the most fundamental and basic building blocks of the things we make and use; starting with digital systems, and extending out to the materials and products we use and the biological systems we work with.

  The advent of digital technologies and modern computers brought about a major change in what we can achieve, and it’s one that we’re only just beginning to fully appreciate the significance of. Of course, it’s easy to chart the more obvious impacts of the digital revolution on our lives, including the widespread use of smart phones and social media. But there’s an underlying trend that far exceeds many of the more obvious benefits of digital devices and systems, and this, as we saw in chapter seven and Ghost in the Shell, is the creation of a completely new dimension that we are now operating in: cyberspace.

  Cyberspace is a domain where, through the code we write, we have control over the most fundamental rules and instructions that govern it. We may not always be able to determine or understand the full implications of what we do, but we have the power to write and edit the code that ultimately defines everything that happens here.

  The code that most cyber-systems currently rely on is made up of basic building blocks of digital computing, the ones and zeroes of binary, and the bits and bytes that they’re a part of. Working with these provides startling insight into what we might achieve if we could, in a similar way, write and edit the code that underlies the physical world we inhabit. And this is precisely what we are beginning to do with biological systems, although, as we’re discovering, coding biology using DNA is fiendishly complicated. Unlike the world of cyber, we had no say in designing the underlying code of biology, and as a result we’re having to work hard to understand it. Here, rather than ones and zeroes of digital code, the fundamental building blocks are the four bases that make up DNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. This language of DNA is deeply complex, and we’re still a long way from being close to mastering it. But the more we learn, the closer we’re getting to being able to design and engineer biological systems with the same degree of finesse we can achieve in cyberspace.