WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER MACHINES THINK?

GEORGE CHURCH

Professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School; director, Harvard University’s Personal Genome Project; coauthor (with Ed Regis), Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

I am a machine that thinks, made of atoms—a perfect quantum simulation of a many-body problem—a 1029-body problem. I, robot, am dangerously capable of self-reprogramming and preventing others from cutting off my power supply. We human machines extend our abilities via symbiosis with other machines—expanding our vision to span wavelengths beyond the mere few nanometers visible to our ancestors, out to the full electromagnetic range, from picometer to megameter. We hurl 370 kg hunks of our hive past the sun at 252,792 km/hr. We extend our memory and math by a billionfold with our silicon prostheses. Yet our biobrains are a thousandfold more energy efficient than our inorganic brains at tasks where we have common ground (like facial recognition and language translation) and infinitely better for tasks of as yet unknown difficulty, like Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers or out-of-the-box inventions affecting future centuries. As Moore’s Law heads from 20 nm transistor lithography down to 0.1 nm atomic precision and from 2-D to 3-D circuits, we may downplay reinventing and simulating our biomolecular brains and switch to engineering them.

We can back up petabytes of sili-brains perfectly in seconds, but transfer of information between carbo-brains takes decades, and the similarity between the copies is barely recognizable. Some speculate that we could translate from carbo to sili, and even get the sili version to behave like the original. However, such a task requires much deeper understanding than merely making a copy. We harnessed the immune system via vaccines in tenth-century China and eighteenth-century Europe, long before we understood cytokines and T-cell receptors. We don’t yet have a medical nanorobot of comparable agility or utility. It may turn out that making a molecularly adequate copy of a 1.2 kg brain (or 100 kg body) is easier than understanding how it works (or than copying my brain to a room of students “multitasking” with smartphone cat videos and e-mails). This is far more radical than human cloning, yet doesn’t involve embryos.

What civil rights issues arise with such hybrid machines? A biobrain of yesteryear with nearly perfect memory, which could reconstruct a scene with vivid prose, paintings, or animation, was permissible, often revered. But we hybrids (mutts) today, with better memory talents, are banned from courtrooms, situation rooms, bathrooms, and “private” conversations. License plates and faces are blurred in Google Street View—intentionally inflicting prosopagnosia. Should we disable or kill Harrison Bergeron? What about votes? We’re currently far from universal suffrage. We discriminate based on maturity and sanity. If I copy my brain/body, does it have a right to vote or is it redundant? Consider that the copies begin to diverge immediately, or that the copy could be intentionally different. In addition to passing the maturity/sanity/humanity test, perhaps the copy needs to pass a reverse Turing Test (a Church-Turing Test?). Rather than demonstrating behavior indistinguishable from that of a human, the goal would be to show behavior distinct from human individuals. (Would the current U.S. two-party system pass such a test?) Perhaps the day of corporate personhood (Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819) has finally arrived. We already vote with our wallets. Shifts in purchasing trends result in differential wealth, lobbying, R&D priorities, etc. Perhaps more copies of specific memes, minds, and brains will come to represent the will of We the (hybrid) People of the world. Would such future Darwinian selection lead to disaster or to higher emphasis on humane empathy; aesthetics; elimination of poverty, war, and disease; long-term planning—evading existential threats on even millennial time frames? Perhaps the hybrid-brain route is not only more likely but also safer than either a leap to unprecedented, unevolved, purely silicon-based brains or sticking to our ancient cognitive biases with fear-based, fact-resistant voting.