We hear all the time Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that “The Singularity is Near.” Well, maybe it’s not so very near, since Kurzweil firmly predicts the singularity as occurring around 2045 – when “humans transcend biology”.
Now I will point out that in 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus“ warned against the arrogance of that kind of statement.
“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
But, the bottom line is that we cannot, nor should we want, to control the pace of technological development. We must embrace it, and we must develop the means of establishing ethical boundaries and controls on the use of this technology. The ethical dilemma here is similar to that of controlling the use of atomic energy, and the jury is not in yet.
It remains irrevocably the case that the singularity is an exciting concept that in many ways will alleviate, or at least reduce, human suffering and improve the world. Therein, lies the second part of the ethical dilemma. How will we make sure that’s its benefits are universally distributed?
While it is still, perhaps, twenty-nine years away, if you look closely, increasingly there are signs of it: Jeopardy winning computers, cochlear implants, and bionic limbs to name a few. A lot of what we think about as “singularity worthy” are indeed machines or machine parts incorporated into humans.
However, there is the other side to this, biological tissue incorporated into machines. A stunning example of such “biohybrid devices” was described last week in an article in Science Magazine by Harvard scientist, Kevin Kit Parker, and his collaborators, entitled ” Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray”
What the group has done is create a miniaturized aquatic ray about 1.6 cm long. The ray has a flexible skeletal structure overlain with ~ 200,000 rat embryonic heart muscle cells. The cells have been modified so that they can be triggered by light, thus creating a propagating wave. This optogenetic approach involves the incorporation of genes that code for light-sensitive calcium channels. In general, biological motor systems do not follow the man-made approach of rotating screws and motors because these require a separated surface-on-surface contact that enables continuous rotation. Rather organisms tend to utilize approaches like flagellar beating or, as in the ray, bilateral flapping. By triggering preferential beating on one side of the miniaturized ray, it can be made to turn.
If there is any doubt that this miniaturized robotic ray is anything but an incremental step towards the singularity, one has only to read the concluding statement of the paper,
“Our study is but a first step in engineering multilevel systems that link neurodynamics, mechanics, and complex controllable gaits—coupling sensory information to motor coordination and movement that leads to behavior. This work paves the way for the development of autonomous and adaptive artificial creatures able to process multiple sensory inputs and produce complex behaviors in distributed systems and may represent a path toward soft-robotic “embodied cognition”.”
(c) DE Wolf 2016