UK Govt. Report: AI implants injected into bodies; Humans 'melded' with machines...significant job displacement
AI implants will allow us to control our homes with our
thoughts within 20 years, government report claims
Augmented bodies and machines that heal us from within
may be on the horizon
By Sarah Knapton, science inventor 15 OCTOBER 2017 •
12:01AM
Artificially intelligent nano-machines will be injected
into humans within 20 years to repair and enhance muscles, cells and bone, a
senior inventor at IBM has forecast.
John McNamara, who works at IBM Hursley Innovation
Centre, in Hampshire, submitted evidence to the House of Lords Artificial
Intelligence Committee, which is considering the economic, ethical and social
implications of AI.
Mr McNamara said that within just two decades, technology
may have advanced so much that humans and machines are effectively ‘melded’
together, allowing for huge leaps forward in human consciousness and cognition.
“We may see AI nano-machines being injected into our
bodies,” he told Peers. “These will provide huge medical benefits, such as
being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones – perhaps even augment
them.
“Beyond this, utilising technology which is already being
explored today we see the creation of
technology that can meld the biological with the technological, and so be able
to enhance human cognitive capability directly, potentially offering greatly
improved mental, as well as being able to utilise vast quantities of computing
power to augment our own thought processes.
“Using this technology, embedded in ourselves and in our
surroundings, we will begin to be able to control our environment with thought
and gestures alone.”
Scientists at companies including Microscoft are already
developing a computer made from DNA which could live inside cells and look for
faults in bodily networks, like cancer. If it spotted cancerous chances it
would reboot the system and clear out the diseased cells.
Mr McNamara also predicted ‘Political Avatars’ which will
scour all available data from news sites and government debates to provide
people with a recommendation on who to vote for and why, based on their world
view.
However he also
warned that the rise of AI could bring ‘huge disruption’ to those working in
the retail and service sectors and spark widespread unemployment.
“Whereas today, being poor means being unable to afford
the latest smart phone, tomorrow this could mean the difference between one
group of people potentially having an extraordinary uplift in physical ability,
cognitive ability, health, life span and another much wider group that do not,”
said Mr McNamara.
In separate evidence to the committee, Noel Sharkey,
Emeritus Professor of AI and Robotics, University of Sheffield, who is now
director at the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, said artificial
intelligence comes with a cost.
“The immediate concern is that by ceding decisions or
control to machines, the humans start accepting their decisions as correct or
better than their own and stop paying attention,” he said.
“There is a growing body of evidence that the learning
machine decision makers are inheriting many invisible biases among their
correlations.”
Dr Jochen Leidner, Director of Research at Thomson
Reuters, also warned that older people, or those with accents could struggle in
a future where voice recognition became widely used.
“Minorities could be unfairly disadvantaged by being
excluded from access to essential services,” he said.
“Imagine a voice recognition system to do your banking
over the phone, as banks are reducing physical branches. Such a system would
likely be trained with British voices available in London if the company
developing the system is London-based.
“Said system likely will result in misrecognitions, or
may not work at all, for an elderly citizen in Uddingston, Scotland, and
lacking alternatives access to cash will depend on trusted friends or family
members, if available.”
Miles Brundage and Allan Dafoe, from The Future of
Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, also warned that jobs were at
risk from artificial intelligence.
“We recommend the UK government prepare for the
possibility of significant job displacement, as well as creation, as a result
of the deployment of AI in the coming decades,” they told the Lords.
“AI is likely to exceed human performance in most
cognitive domains. This poses substantial safety risks.”
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