Immortality? Nanotechnology?
Speculations on Technologies Brought on by Advanced AI
Note 1: You can read an updated version of AI Revolution 101. I edited it slightly and combined each piece into one longer article.
Note 2: This is the 5th part of a short essay series aiming to condense knowledge on the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Feel free to start reading here or navigate to Part 1, ← prev|next → essay or table of contents. The project is based on the two-part essay AI Revolution by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. I recreated all images, shortened it x3 and tweaked it a bit. Read more on why/how I wrote it here.
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is a notion that comes up “in almost everything you read about the future of AI.”⁶⁷ It’s the technology that works in the nano scale — from 1 to 100 nanometers. “A nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. 1 nm–100 nm range encompasses viruses (100 nm accross), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm).”⁶⁸
To put this into perspective, imagine a very tall human standing on the earth, with a head that reaches the International Space Station (431 km/268 mi high). The giant is reaching down with his hand (30 km/19 mi across) to build “objects using materials between the size of a grain of sand [.25 mm] and an eyeball [2.5 cm].”⁶⁹
“Once we get nanotechnology down, we can use it to make tech devices, clothing, food, a variety of bio-related products — artificial blood cells, tiny virus or cancer-cell destroyers, muscle tissue, etc. — anything really. And in a world that uses nanotechnology, the cost of a material is no longer tied to its scarcity or the difficulty of its manufacturing process, but instead determined by how complicated its atomic structure is. In a nanotech world, a diamond might be cheaper than a pencil eraser.”⁷⁰
One of the proposed methods of nanotech assembly is to make “one that could self-replicate, and then let the reproduction process turn that one into two, those two then turn into four, four into eight, and in about a day, there’d be a few trillion of them ready to go.”⁷¹
But what if this process goes wrong or terrorists manage to get ahold of the technology? Let’s imagine a scenario that nanobots “would be designed to consume any carbon-based material in order to feed the replication process, and unpleasantly, all life is carbon-based. The Earth’s biomass contains about 10⁴⁵ carbon atoms. A nanobot would consist of about 10⁶ carbon atoms, so it would take 10³⁹ nanobots to consume all life on Earth, which would happen in 130 replications. ... Scientists think a nanobot could replicate in about 100 seconds, meaning this simple mistake would inconveniently end all life on Earth in 3.5 hours.”⁷²
We are not yet capable of harnessing nanotechnology — for good or for bad. “And it’s not clear if we’re underestimating, or overestimating, how hard it will be to get there. But we don’t seem to be that far away. Kurzweil [a computer scientist and AI expert] predicts that we’ll get there by the 2020s.⁷³ Governments know that nanotech could be an Earth-shaking development … The US, the EU, and Japan⁷⁴ have invested over a combined $5 billion so far”⁷⁵
Immortality
“Because everyone has always died, we live under the assumption … that death is inevitable. We think of aging like time — both keep moving and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”⁷⁶ For centuries, poets and philosophers have touched on the notion that the consciousness does not necessarily have to go the way of the body. W.B. Yeats describes us as “a soul fastened to a dying animal.”⁷⁷ Richard Feynman, Nobel awarded physicists, views death from a purely scientific standpoint:
“It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.”⁷⁸
Theory of great species attractors
When we look at the history of biological life on earth, so far 99.9% of species have gone extinct. Nick Bostrom, Oxford professor and AI specialist, “calls extinction an attractor state — a place species are … falling into and from which no species ever returns.”⁷⁹
“And while most AI scientists … acknowledge that ASI [Artificial Super Intelligence — AI that achieves a level of intelligence smarter than all of humanity combined] would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that if used beneficially, ASI’s abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state — species immortality.”⁸⁰
“Evolution had no good reason to extend our lifespans any longer than they are now … From an evolutionary point of view, the whole human species can thrive with a 30+ year lifespan” of each of its singular organisms. It’s long enough to reproduce and raise children … so there’s no reason for mutations toward unusually long life being favored in the natural selection process.”⁸¹ Though, “if you perfectly repaired or replaced a car’s parts whenever one of them began to wear down, the car would run forever. The human body isn’t any different — just far more complex … This seems absurd — but the body is just a bunch of atoms…”⁸² of organically programmed DNA , that are theoretically possible to manipulate. And something as powerful as ASI could help us embrace genetic engineering.
Ray Kurzweil believes that “artificial materials will be integrated into the body more and more … Organs could be replaced by super-advanced machine versions that would run forever and never fail.”⁸³ Red blood cells could be perfected by “red blood cell nanobots, who could power their own movement, eliminating the need for a heart at all … Nanotech theorist Robert A. Freitas has already designed blood cell replacements that, if one day implemented in the body, would allow a human to sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath … [Kurzweil] even gets to the brain and believes we’ll enhance our mental activities to the point where humans will be able to think billions of times faster”⁸⁴ by integrating electrical components and being able to access the cloud.
“Eventually, Kurzweil believes humans will reach a point when they’re entirely artificial, a time when we’ll look back at biological material and think how unbelievably primitive primitive it was that humans were ever made of that”⁸⁵ and that humans aged, suffered from cancer, allowed random factors like microbes, diseases, accidents to harm us or make us disappear.
Read Part 6: “When Will The First Machine Become Superintelligent?” — Predictions from Top AI Experts. You can also see the ← prev|next → essay, Part 1 or table of contents.. Subscribe below.
