(no subject)
[Kevin Warwick] will attempt to develop new senses, design electronic drugs and begin exploring the outer limits of his newly created man-machine consciousness. . . . In a few months he hopes to turn his wife into a cyborg. Then he will wire up his lab-mates and, he claims, mankind will take the long-dreamt-of leap into the far future, where man and machine are one and the same. It's William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer brought to life and, Warwick believes, the next evolutionary step for humankind. . . . In a few months he hopes to turn his wife into a cyborg. Then he will wire up his lab-mates and, he claims, mankind will take the long-dreamt-of leap into the far future, where man and machine are one and the same. It's William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer brought to life and, Warwick believes, the next evolutionary step for humankind. . . . "I hope my work is a wake-up call for the human race. The military use of this type of technology is terrifying. They will create machines that protect and sustain themselves. You will not be able to switch them off. Where will we humans would fit in? We could become their pets, their slaves or just an irrelevance. I cannot see any future for humans in such a world." . . . But Warwick has a solution. "If you can't beat computers and robots, then join 'em," he says. "We should harness the best of machine intelligence for ourselves. We should build it into our own bodies. The worst thing to do is to ignore this technology and hope it goes away. The future is screaming towards us, whether we like it or not." . . . "When we are all connected, it will no longer be an 'I', but a 'we'. We may all pool our intelligence and consciousness. It would be a kind of meta-consciousness." . . . Warwick claims that as we come to rely more and more on machine intelligence, we will lessen our ability to survive independently. Eventually, the world will be dominated by companies and authorities that are controlled entirely by artificial intelligence. . . . Once this domination is complete, anyone wishing to switch off the machines would effectively be committing suicide. And besides, many machines will be designed to withstand even the most determined assault, so it would not be possible to shut them down. In this scenario, Warwick believes that only cyborgs could compete with intelligent machines. Humans wouldn't stand a chance.