Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University is engaged in fascinating research and development in the field of artificial intelligence. He told me it's only a matter of a very short time before either he or his rivals in Japan or the States create robots that are as intelligent as humans. In fact he said this some time ago, I haven't spoken to him for a few years and so this may already've been achieved. He's also developing new ways of integrating human and artificial intelligence. If you are drunk, for example, this registers as a pattern of pulses in your nervous system.Kevin has developed chips that can be inserted in the nervous system by surgery, chips that can read and store these patterns. If you then want to get drunk without drinking, you press a button so that the chip replays the pattern into your nervous system. Your consciousness is then in a sense robotic...
I was reminded of all this by being asked by this blog to read fuzzy letters as a way of confirming I am who I say I am and not a robotic intruder unable to interpret the fuzz. Wouldn't it be weird -in a Dick kind of way - if it was in the course of carrying out this blog instruction, that you discovered that you are in fact a robot?
Another application of Kevin's technology is direct mind-to-mind communication. He has experimented with communication between a chip inserted in one body with another inserted in another body. If he feels love in Tokyo, his partner can be made to feel the same pattern of pulses in Reading. The last i heard the technology was only sophisticated enough to communicate fairly basic sensations. But what happens when it's possible to communicate words or images?
One of the themes in my book is the mysterious relationship between spirituality and science. I've tried to show that rather than the simple opposition that fundamentalists in both camps propose, the two intertwine in interesting ways. There is a subtle interplay. Something predicted by esoteric philosophers is that the sensation we all have currently, that we are each shut off in a private mental space, will gradually be eroded. We are returning to a great shared mental space in which we will realize that we have all thoughts in common.
The net is playing a part in this too. People sometimes ask why there are no great novels nowadays- or at least no novels that have the impact of a Wuthering Heights or a War and Peace. As I've tried to suggest in my book, the very greatest art - the epoch-making art - forges new forms of consciousness. The great novels of the nineteenth, early twentieth century had a vital role in forming the sense we now all have of an interior narrative.
People in print media routinely dismiss internet culture as unregulated and lawless, but i believe that this is where the great new art from will evolve. When we're plugged into the net we're in a sense plugged into one great communal brain, and the form of this resonates with the newly evolving consciousness. If you look at a site like Graham Hancock's, you will see an intellectual risk-taking, a range, a ferment of ideas and a passion quite unlike any print media. The language that teenagers use msn-ing is inventive in a way that recalls use of language before there was the attempt to regulate it via a universal grammar.
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