Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

The one problem was that they consistently underestimated the rate of progress of science.

The key to understanding the future is to grasp the fundamental laws of nature and then apply them to the inventions, machines, and therapies that will redefine our civilization far into the future.

Rodney Brooks writes, “Over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a cultural shift, in which we will adopt robotic technology, silicon, and steel into our bodies to improve what we can do and understand the world.”

He writes, “My prediction is that by the year 2100 we will have very intelligent robots everywhere in our everyday lives. But we will not be apart from them—rather, we will be part robot and connected with the robots.”

If you follow the evolutionary scale, you learn that insects and mice did not have the rules of logic programmed into their brains. It was through trial and error that they engaged the world and mastered the art of survival.

For example, he recalls, “When I was a kid, I had a book that described the brain as a telephone-switching network. Earlier books described it as a hydrodynamic system or a steam engine.

Rodney Brooks, former director of the famed MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The term “friendly AI” was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a founder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Friendly AI is a bit different from Asimov’s laws, which are forced upon robots, perhaps against their will. (Asimov’s laws, imposed from the outside, could actually invite the robots to devise clever ways to circumvent them.)

To prevent a robot from enslaving us in order to save us, some have advocated that we must add the zeroth law of robotics: Robots cannot harm or enslave the human race.)

Kurzweil himself believes, “It’s not going to be an invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizon. We’re going to merge with this technology …. We’re going to put these intelligent devices in our bodies and brains to make us live longer and healthier.”