Can science make man immortal?
By Binu Paul, SiliconIndia   |   Wednesday, 23 February 2011, 13:46 IST   |    4 Comments
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Can science make man immortal?
Bangalore: It is an undisputable fact that computers are getting faster day-by-day and so it is so obvious that they will reach to a point which is comparable to human intelligence. And with all such powers or the artificial intelligence, they can create the consciousness which can emulate whatever the human brain does and can manage drive, write books, take ethical decisions, etc. IBM's super computer Watson, named after its founder Thomas J. Watson, has won the IBM Jeopardy Challenge defeating Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter which represents a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. The supercomputer is one of the most advanced systems on earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years. The creators scanned some 200 million pages of content that is equivalent of about one million books into the system. The system is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops, which is about 80 trillion operations per second. There is no reason that computers will cease to get more powerful. They will keep growing until they are far more intelligent than the humans. Their rate of development and growth is much faster than that of ours. As these people predict, in such a scenario, we will have to share the planet with this smarter than human intelligence things and we cannot predict their behaviors now. The one possibility is that we might merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs or maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. There is a lot of attention drawn towards the concept of singularity now a days. Singularity University that is hosted by NASA and Google being a founding sponsor offers many inter-disciplinary courses on this and Google's former CEO and Co-Founder Larry Page had spoken there last year. Prominent writers like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil propagate singularity where with the technological creation of super-intelligence, world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of super-intelligent entities. According to Kurzweil, by the mid-2020s the human brain will be successfully reverse-engineered and computers will be capable of human-level intelligence by the end of that decade. And thus he firmly says that the end of human civilization is not beyond 2045, which is just 35 years away. The argument is very strong and there are many buyers for this idea now. They think that the tussle between God and science will come to an end when man reaches the state of singularity which will allow them to be effectively immortal, which is of course not to be complicated with religious immortality.

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