Yes, says physicist Michio Kaku. As can human-friendly artificial intelligence
Think of a day in the year 2100. The walls of your room light up like screens and your chosen software program, a familiar face named, say, Molly, wakes you up in the morning and lays out the day’s plan. As you enter the bathroom, DNA and protein sensors in the mirror, toilet, and sink swing into action, looking for any unhealthy signs. Then, you wrap some wires around your head and telepathically control the temperature in the house, a robotic cook in the kitchen, a magnetic car in the garage, instructions to your assistant. You put on your contact lenses (or glasses, if you wish), blink, and connect to the Internet. You scan the news, emails, or plunge into workspace meetings.
If it sounds futuristic, then that’s what it is — a peek into the next century by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. In his new book Physics of the Future, Kaku talks about technologies that will change humanity. Despite Hollywood movies and doomsday sayers, Kaku portrays an optimistic picture. The underlying message is: Machines will come; we will have to embrace them, not resist their supremacy. Artificial intelligence will get smarter, but we will co-exist with it by ‘enhancing’ or upgrading ourselves and by making it human-friendly.
As a scientist who regularly presents TV shows and hosts a radio programme, Kaku, a professor at the City University of New York, says he gets a ringside view of what scientists are inventing. A lot of what he predicts about the near (present to 2030) and mid-century (2030 to 2070) future is similar to what other futurists, including Ray Kurzweil, have said — augmented reality (where information is fed directly to our retina), or robots (robolawyers or robosurgeons), or molecular medicines (nano rods that move in the bloodstream using magnetism). It is while talking about the far future — 2070 to 2100 — that he takes us on a provocative and freewheeling adventure.
(This story appears in the 09 September, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)