“Because humans are the actual witnesses and knowers of what the One Machine does and thinks, the function of the OM will very likely be to serve and amplify humans, rather than to replace them. It will be a system that is comprised of humans and machines working together, for human benefit, not for machine benefit. This is a very different future outlook than that of people who predict a kind of “Terminator-esque” future in which machines get smart enough to exterminate the human race. It won’t happen that way. Machines will very likely not get that smart for a long time, if ever, because they are not going to be conscious. I think we should be much more afraid of humans exterminating humanity than of machines doing it.”

The above citation is from a brilliant contribution by Nova Spivack, which is a counter-argument to the transhumanist hypothesis that ‘AI machines will take over’. The reason they can’t, is that consciousness is a irreducible founding characteristic of the universe, which cannot be synthetized or ‘created’ artificially.

The key argument is this:

If consciousness is a property of the substrate, then it may be impossible to synthesize. For example, we never synthesize space, time or energy — no matter what we do, we are simply using the space, time and energy of the substrate that is this universe.

Nova Spivack:

“Today, humans still make up the majority of processors in the OM. Each human nervous system comprises billions of processors, and there are billions of humans. That’s a lot of processors.

However, Ray Kurzweil posits that the balance of processors is rapidly moving towards favoring machines — and that sometime in the latter half of this century, machine processors will outnumber or at least outcompute all the human processors combined, perhaps many times over.

While agree with Ray’s point that machine intelligence will soon outnumber human intelligence, I’m skeptical of Kurzweil’s timeline, especially in light of recent research that shows evidence of quantum level computation within microtubules inside neurons. If in fact the brain computes at the tubulin level then it may have many orders of magnitude more processors than currently though. This remains to be determined. Those who argue against this claim that the brain can be modelled on a Classical level and that quantum computing need not be invoked. To be clear, I am not claiming that the brain is a quantum computer, I am claiming that there seems to be evidence that computation in the brain takes place at the quantum level, or near it. Whether quantum effects have any measurable effect on what the brain does is not the question, the question is simply whether microtubules are the lowest level processing elements of the brain. If they are, then there are a whole lot more processors in the brain than previously thought.

Another point worth considering is that much of the brain’s computation is not taking place within the neurons but rather in the gaps between synapses, and this computation happens chemically rather than electrically. There are vastly more synapses than neurons, and computation within the synapses happens at a much faster and more granular level than neuronal firings. It is definitely the case that chemical-level computations take place with elements that are many orders of magnitude smaller than neurons. This is another case for the brain computing at a much lower level than is currently thought.

In other words the resolution of computation in the human brain is still unknown. We have several competing approximations but no final answer on this. I do think however that evidence points to computation being much more granular than we currently think.

In any case, I do agree with Kurzweil that at least it is definitely the case that artificial computers will outnumber naturally occurring human computers on this planet — it’s just a question of when. In my view it will take a little longer than he thinks: it is likely to happen after 100 to 200 years at the most.

There is another aspect of my thinking on this subject which I think may throw a wrench in the works. I don’t think that what we call “consciousness” is something that can be synthesized. Humans appear to be conscious, but we have no idea what that means yet. It is undeniable that we all have an experience of being conscious, and this experience is mysterious. It is also the case that at least so far, nobody has bult a software program or hardware device that seems to be having this experience. We don’t even know how to test for consciousness in fact. For example, the much touted Turing Test does not test consciousness, it tests humanlike intelligence. There really isn’t a test for consciousness yet. Devising one is an interesting an important goal that we should perhaps be working on.

In my own view, consciousness is probably fundamental to the substrate of the universe, like space, time and energy. We really don’t know what space, time and energy really are. We cannot actually measure them directly either. All our measurements of space, time and energy are indirect — we measure other things that imply that space, time and energy exist. Space, time and energy are inferred by effects we observe on material things that we can measure. I think the same may be true of consciousness. So the question is, what are the measureable effects of consciousness? Well one candidate seems to be the Double Slit experiment, which shows that the act of observation causes the quantum wave function to collapse. Are there other effects we can cite as evidence of consciousness?

I have recently been wondering how connected consciousness is to the substrate of the universe we are in. If consciousness is a property of the substrate, then it may be impossible to synthesize. For example, we never synthesize space, time or energy — no matter what we do, we are simply using the space, time and energy of the substrate that is this universe.

If this is the case, then creating consciousness is impossible. The best we can do is somehow channel the consciousness that is already there in the substrate of the universe. In fact, that may be what the human nervous system does: it channels consciousness, much in the way that an electrical circuit channels electricity. The reason that software programs will probably not become conscious is that they are too many levels removed from the substrate.”