HERE COMES TOMORROW

John Stossel


Ray Kurzweil -- inventor of things like
machines that turn text into speech -- has
popularized the idea that we are rapidly
approaching "the singularity," the point at
which machines not only think for themselves
but develop intellectually faster than we.
At that point, maybe we no longer talk about
"human history." It will be "machine
progress," with us along for the ride -- if
machines keep us around. Maybe they'll keep
us in a zoo, like we do with our monkey
ancestors.
Scientists and ethicists are beginning to
wrestle with the question of how to make sure
artificial intelligence, when it arrives, is nice
to us.
Make sure the robots are strict libertarians?
That way, they'll be forbidden to commit
assault, theft or fraud -- the three legal
restrictions in which libertarians believe.
Unfortunately, computer programmers won't
listen to my suggestion. Those who work for
video-game companies and the military make
machines that kill people.
All this is scary because scientists say that
soon machines will be too smart and self-
motivated for us to predict.
"Robots absolutely can become much more
dangerous," says Patrick Tucker, of The
Futurist magazine. "And they become more
dangerous as we ask them to do more."
Our best hope may be a future where instead
of trying to control intelligent machines, we
blend with them.
In some ways, that's already happening.
Erik Brynjolfsson, author of "The Second
Machine Age," says today's machines augment
our minds the way that the industrial
revolution's machines augmented muscles.
This creates progress that government
statistics don't measure.
"It used to be you could just count physical
objects -- tons of steel, bushels of wheat," says
Brynjolfsson on my TV show this week. "As
we have more of an idea economy, it's harder
to measure the value of those ideas.
"Wikipedia created enormous value," he adds,
"but it's free, and that means that it doesn't
show up in GDP statistics, which measure the
value of goods and services."
Outsourcing parts of our thinking with tools
like Wikipedia and Google may be how we'll
keep improving our lives -- cooperating with
machines instead of fighting them. In science-
fiction terms, the future may be "cyborg":
part machine, part human.
Instead of parents deciding where to send
their kids to school, they may puzzle over
which machine enhancements to give them.
Already clinics offer "designer babies" by
selecting embryos based on genetic quality.
Soon parents will select by height,
intelligence, beauty and so on.
This future sounds unsettling, but it's not
much use just hoping machines stay dumber
than we. The IBM computer "Watson" lost to
humans on "Jeopardy" but beat the quiz
show's champion a few years later.
Leftists tell us that such computers will take
our jobs, requiring welfare programs for
unemployable humans. President Barack
Obama expressed this static thinking when he
told an interviewer that ATMs and airport
ticket kiosks kill jobs.
But this is childish thinking. In the 1800s,
nearly all Americans worked on farms. Now
1 percent do. Farm workers found other jobs,
often better jobs. So did horseshoers, phone
operators and secretaries. (Today's high
unemployment is caused by suffocating
regulation, not computerization.)
James Miller, author of "Singularity Rising,"
says that a future with little hard work left
for humans sounds like "an economic utopia."
He says that trying to prevent progress by
machines would be as destructive as if we'd
outlawed the rise of cars, buses and modern
trains. But Miller does fear the computer
revolution will be different: "The analogy
would be: 100 years ago, we breed super
intelligent horses. That would have
permanently destroyed a lot of jobs."
I'm more optimistic. As with so many
innovations in the past, I'll bet that handing
off tasks to machines will make our lives
better by freeing us up to focus on activities
that we enjoy more. Robots will make our
future better.
If they don't kill us.