Just Finished Reading: Beyond Human – Living with Robots and Cyborgs by Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malarte

Being a technophile I could hardly resist this book, especially when it was on the Scientific American recommended reading list, and it actually wasn’t that bad. It started from the easy stages of body enhancement and fixing biological problems such as pace-makers and such like. Things basically that we all know about and don’t actually seem like we’re becoming cyborgs.

Of course, once you staring fixing things its always tempting to go further – to make things better, faster, stronger. Then of course there’s the issue of AI. Can we build it? Will they come? What actually is intelligence? Can machines be truly intelligent? The authors – wrongly I think – consider it unlikely. I’m not sure if they think it’s simply beyond us or that there is something about the combination of embodiment and emotion that makes machine intelligent unlikely. I think such attitudes are another way of saying that we’re special in some way and that ‘mere machines’ can’t be really intelligent – or in other words we are certainly not mere machines, thank you very much!

Moving on the authors discuss the possibility of immortality by either being uploaded into a machine/AI or of being physically implanted into a machine body. They think that both have serious problems – not just technical but also psychological. Again I think they exaggerate the problems and underestimate our abilities. Inevitably they discuss the possibility of robot wars – both fighting alongside us and against us. It’s actually a very hot topic at the moment – particularly the problem, in today’s urban conflicts, of simply detecting who the enemy is. Personally I think anything approaching Terminator type weapons are at least 50 years away if not a lot further.

Then there’s the whole moral and legal aspect to be considered. Would AI’s be considered persons? Would they have Rights? Could they commit crimes? Would they be responsible for their actions? Could we actually trust them to be both autonomous and safe? It’s all very interesting stuff – and is actually going to be more interesting as time goes on and we come across more robots in our daily lives. I think that this will be more of a debate for our kids but I think that even us (comparative) oldies will see the edge of things as it approaches.

I did have some issues with this book despite the level of interest it managed to maintain. It was, yet again I found, significantly angled towards the USA in its content and opinions. Personally when I think of cutting edge robotics I think of Japan – which in this volume barely got a mention. Europe was only mentioned, in mocking tones, as being resistant to an increased robotic presence and, therefore, being backward looking. The very idea of questioning the introduction of robotics or the idea of debating the issue was considered by the authors as rather bizarre. America, they said, would never do such a thing. The authors – apart from their jingoism – where, I thought, rather naïve about the social impact of this technology and at the same time dismissive of its potential power. The almost blanket dismissal of the possibility that Artificial Intelligence could exceed biological intelligence was I think deeply mistaken and simply reflected the authors prejudice. But putting these problems to one side this is still an informative book which will warm the heart of any robo-geek out there without necessarily introducing him/her to anything startlingly new. As with most books on technical subjects they are pretty much out of date as soon as they’re published. This book is no exception. Still pretty good but it could have been much, much better.