Convergence: Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing

CHAPTER 16A Critical Crossroad

Joseph N. Pelton, Dean Emeritus, International Space University, and Founder, Arthur C. Clarke Foundation

“There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness … Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?”

—Samuel Butler, 1871

The long-term natural biological evolutionary process that proceeded via random genetic enhancement took hundreds of millions of years to evolve. The progression from alga to the brain power of a rat took hundreds of millions of years. It then took additional tens of millions of years to evolve from the capabilities of a rat’s brain to that of a modern human. Indeed, the evolutionary journey from Lucy, the primitive Australopithecus being, to today’s modern human intelligence apparently took more than three million years. But what are the consequences of a future driven by rapidly evolving “machine-driven” evolution?

The same speed of technological improvement does not require similar time constraints. Samuel Butler 150 years ago speculated on the power of what Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns (LOAR) or the speed of compound accelerated growth. Today growth in technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biological engineering, and more give rise ...