Art imitating life: the science of humans and robots has come a long way since the Seventies
(Picture: Getty Images)It’s a sunny September afternoon in present day London and I’m talking to a woman who thinks I’m ‘an ape-brained meatsack’. To be fair, Dr Elise Bohan, 32, who is really very nice, believes everyone — herself included — is an ape-brained meatsack. A senior research scholar at Oxford’s vaunted Future of Humanity Institute, she has spent half her life thinking about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, the limits of human ‘wetware’ (your brains, bodies and all the mushy bits in between), and how we avoid getting ‘steamrollered’ by the ‘smarter-than-human’ machines lurking at the edge of tomorrow. As the author of Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-or-break Century, she is trying to do something about it.
Being told that my flabby, pasty body is illequipped to keep pace with a world of ‘robot workers’, ‘lethal autonomous machines’ and ‘smart AI systems that know us better than we know ourselves’ isn’t surprising. Although we rarely recognise it, says Bohan, the 21st century is already a transhuman era: think smartphones, the cloud and our ‘digital second skins’, algorithms that know how we want to work out and what we want to google. Our biological bits are struggling to keep up. AI helped Moderna design and manufacture a Covid vaccine in 42 days flat. I, meanwhile, can’t remember where I left my iPhone charger 10 minutes ago.
