“Preparing for the robot takeover 101” was a headline in the Toronto Star’s Insight section, February 7, 2009. Robotics genius and industry leader, Ray Kurtzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”, is launching the Singularity University, which intends to bring together the technologies of the 21st century – robotics, genetics and nanotechnology – to create a “disruptive innovation” or in other words, a huge, unexpected technological breakthrough or leap into the future, designed to solve all our problems including sickness. 

Kurtzweil and other robotics leaders, like Hans Moravec, see technological and human evolution as one and the same.  Kurtzweil looks forward to the integration of artificial intelligence into human being.  In his, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers exceed Human Intelligence, he writes: ”Technological evolution moves us inexorably closer to becoming like God.  And the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of our biological form may be regarded as an essential spiritual quest.  By the close of the next [21st] century, non-biological (machine) intelligence will be ubiquitous.  There will be few humans without some form of artificial intelligence”.

Moravec, founder of one of the world’s largest robotics research programs at Carnegie Mellon University, predicts that robots will evolve into an artificial species, starting around 2030-2040, and replace humans.  He writes, ”By performing better and cheaper, robots will displace humans from essential roles.  Rather quickly, they could replace us from existence.  I’m not as alarmed as many by this possibility, since I consider these future machines our progeny, our ‘mind children’.”

My 2003 book, Ageless Wisdom Spirituality: Investing in Human Evolution squarely challenged the notion that human and technological evolution were the same. I wrote then:  “The consequences of error, terror, and abuse grow apace with the power of technology, which in the 21st century will grow exponentially.  In addition, genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology have the potential to significantly alter the evolution of many of this planet’s species, including human beings, within a matter of decades.  These innovations will be difficult to control within the present Free Market climate, since they all have ostensible ‘life enhancing’ commercial applications rather than outright military ones”.  I explained that most of our problems were the result of human conflict and greed, rather than inadequate technology. Thus the solutions would result from a change in human behaviour, rather than continuing that behaviour with more powerful weapons and technology.

Not much has changed in the meanwhile, largely because we have been preoccupied with George W’s ‘war on terror’ and now his economic disaster.  Recent history shows that if we can do something, we will, especially if we can make a dollar doing it.  However, we would be foolish to implement these technologies without a serious, planet wide discussion of their implications.