Rise of Robot Brains
Copyright 2004 Nationwide News Pty Limited
By Graham Phillips
Will the human race eventually be over-run by robots? The answer is a firm yes, if you ask America’s artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.
Minsky, a professor at America’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes humans will gradually transform themselves into robots over the coming centuries. Doing a robot conversion job shouldn’t be too difficult, he says. It’d just be a matter of replacing our organs one by one.
For instance, in the future people will want to upgrade to mechanical hearts, he predicts, because these devices will be far superior to the flesh-and-blood rubbish Mother Nature’s given us. The high-tech tickers will not only be more efficient, they won’t be prone to heart attacks. And building superior replacements for our other body parts should be a cinch too, says Minsky, with future technology.
Now you might think the one thing we won’t be able to do is upgrade the brain. But the professor disagrees. That sloppy grey matter between your ears will eventually go and a computer will be installed in your head. And as bizarre as that sounds, early research that could one day make this possible has already begun.
Theodore Berger at the University of California is developing a computer chip that will replace a small section of the brain: the part called the hippocampus. So far he’s only tested the device as a replacement for brain cells in a lab dish. But the chip performed so well, the next step is to put one into a live rat. It will be done by chemically switching off the real hippocampus in the rat’s brain and then seeing if the surgically inserted computer chip can take over the functions of the missing brain part. There’s every reason to think it will.
Whether Minsky is right and entire brains can be replaced by computers, we’ll know in the coming decades.
Copyright 2004 Nationwide News Pty Limited
Copyright © 2002 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
