Author: Machines Will Take Over, Humans Will be Cyborgs by 2100

Businessinsider reports that author Louis Del Monte, who wrote a book titled The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, has some chilling words as he attempts to be prescient: that by the year 2040, machine intelligence will have surpassed mankind’s, and by the year 2100,  most of the human race will have become cyborgs.

Del Monte postulated:

Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you’re going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.

It’s not quite the frightening scenario envisioned in movies, he said, softening his verbiage a bit:

It won’t be the ‘Terminator’ scenario, not a war. In the early part of the post-singularity world, one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts. We’ll see the machines as a useful tool. Productivity in business based on automation will be increased dramatically in various countries. In China it doubled, just based on GDP per employee due to use of machines.

But it’s spooky nonetheless, he theorized:

By the end of this century, most of the human race will have become cyborgs [part human, part tech or machine]. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we’ll think we’ve never had it better. The concern I’m raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species.”

Will they coexist with us? Not likely, he avers, saying of the machines that they

might view us the same way we view harmful insects … unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses.

Not that he’s trying to sell his book, of course; he just wrote it as a “warning.”

A 2009 experiment at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, showed computers could learn to lie to each other. As Del Monte noted, “The implication is that they’re also learning self-preservation. Whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.”