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Australian-born Hugo de Garis has spent sev-eral decades at the forefront of artificial intel-ligence. Since 2006 he has directed pro-grams—using techniques of electronic evo-lution—to build China’s first artificial brain,first at Wuhan University and more recently atXiamen University. He is now warning theworld that the machines he helped create willevolve far beyond our control and cause anapocalyptic struggle for the survival of thehuman race.

Dr. De Garis, whose résumé includes anassociate professorship at Utah StateUniversity, is the author of The Artilect War:Cosmists vs. Terrans—A Bitter ControversyConcerning Whether Humanity Should BuildGodlike Massively Intelligent Machines ;Multis and Monos: What the MulticulturedCan Teach the Monocultured Towards theCreation of a Global State ; andArtificial Brains: An EvolvedNeural Net Module Approach.All three books are available atAmazon.com.

HUSTLER: How close arewe to building an artificialbrain comparable to thehuman brain?

HUGO DE GARIS: Today’sstate-of-the-art supercomput-ers already have a total bit-processing rate equal to theestimated equivalent of thehuman brain. Our knowledgeof neuroscience is increasingexponentially. So as soon asnew principles of neuro-science are discovered, theyget put immediately into ourartificial brains. It’s only aquestion of time before artificial brains over-take our biological brains and become self-aware. Within a decade we should be able toassemble an artificial brain with the samelevel of complexity and connectivity as thehuman brain.

Are superintelligent machinesinevitable?

Almost certainly. Our whole technical andscientific global culture is heading towardsthe artilect [artificial intellect]. There will be ahuge economic and military momentumbehind its creation. In the 2020s the home-robot industry will be one of the biggest andrichest in the world, worth trillions of dollarsa year. How could you stop that?

Even stronger is the military momentum.In the 2020s it is possible that China will bethe only country on the planet not to havedemocratized. A military rivalry between awaning U.S. and a rising China will ensurethat artilect research continues, so that theintelligence of each side’s soldier robots does

not fall behind that of the other’s. How do youstop such military A.I. rivalry? Even if thegeneral public is alarmed by the rise of theartilect, the military momentum will ensureits continuation.

How will artilects change our dailylives?

For the first few decades they will bewonderful. They will free us from the threeDs: jobs that are dull, dirty and dangerous.They will be smart enough to be useful butnot smart enough (yet) to be a threat. Theywill do all the household tasks. They willentertain us, amuse us, educate us, sex us,take care of us, etc. They will be so usefulthat everyone will buy them and spend bigmoney on them.

Their rise will also generate a sense ofunease, because it will be clear to everyone

that their level of artificial intelligence keepsrising each year. As the IQ gap betweenhuman level and robot level keeps closing,the species-dominance debate will heat up.It’s starting now. This is the year that thespecies-dominance issue will go mainstreamin the U.S. Within five years I expect thataverage-educated people will be as aware ofthe species-dominance issue as they aretoday of the climate-change issue.

Will artilects achieve consciousness?Figuring out what consciousness is will be

one of the major scientific challenges of the21st century. Science knows that conscious-ness and intelligence are written into ourDNA codes. The solution is there, just waitingfor science to discover it.

As our knowledge of neuroscienceincreases, we will understand how con-sciousness is generated and then put thatknowledge into machines. We will be able tobuild machines that are not only intelligentbut conscious as well.

However, just because artilects are con-scious does not automatically mean they willbe nice to humans. They might consciouslydecide humans are a pest and exterminateus. Even if we tried to give them human-levelethics to make them human-friendly, theirlater evolutionary engineering experimentson themselves would quickly cause them todiverge away from human-level desires.

How likely is it that humans will meldwith machines?

In the species-dominance debate I haveidentified three main ideological groups. TheTerrans are opposed to artilect building, fear-ing that the artilects might decide humanbeings are a pest and wipe us out. TheCosmists are in favor of artilect building andwill want to build artilect gods that may evenbe able to design and build new universes.

The Cyborgists want to becomeartilect gods themselves by addingartilectual components to theirhuman brains.

In the early days of artilectualdevelopment there will be millionsif not billions of cyborgs. Peoplewill upgrade themselves in termsof memory and quickness of think-ing. Young mothers giving birthcould add a grain of nanotechedsand to their baby and convert itinto a cyborg. But that baby is anartilect in disguise. The mother haseffectively killed her baby, becauseit is now nonhuman. Parents willalso lose their children if youngpeople decide to upgrade them-selves into cyborgs.

Our human brains will be tooinferior to keep up with an

artilect that can think a million times fasterthan we do, with unlimited memory andwith vastly superior intelligence. We willhave no idea what they’re thinking. Thereis more computing capacity in a nan-oteched grain of sand than the humanbrain by a factor of a quintillion.

Traditional humanity will be profoundlyundermined, so that the Terrans—or mildlymodified Terrans—will be horrified and willrealize that if humanity is to be preserved,they will have to launch a first strike whilethey are still intellectually competitive.

What are the chances that superintelli-gent machines will rule us or even exter-minate us?

That’s hard to say. Even if the chances aresmall, the stakes are so high, we cannot takethat chance. We’re talking about the survivalof the human race. Terran politicians willdemand that artilects never be built and willgo to war if necessary to ensure that theirdemand is met.

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Professor Hugo de Garis in China, awaiting what he considers the inevitable rise of the robots.

If I were a Terran politician, I would hope forthe best and prepare for the worst—the worstbeing the extermination of the human speciesat the hands of artilects. Therefore I wouldinsist, backed up by a Terran military force,that artilects never be built in the first place.

Surveys already show that people aredeeply ambivalent about the rise of theartilect. They are in awe at the prospect ofbuilding artilect gods with mental capacitiestrillions of times above the human level, butfear the possibility that artilects may becomeso superior to us they may see us as a nui-sance and not care about us—the way weswat mosquitoes and don’t give a damn.

How would you envision a so-calledrobopocalypse unfolding?

In this decade, artificial brain researchblossoms. In the 2020s the home-robot indus-try flourishes. In the 2020s and 2030s thespecies-dominance debate between theTerrans and the Cosmists heats up. Cosmistswill see the creation of artilects as a form ofgod building, a sort of science-based religion.

As the IQ gap between humans and robotscloses, people will really start taking sides.Then the sabotage and assassinations willstart. Artilect companies will be targeted.Artilect architects will be assassinated.

By about the 2040s the species-dominanceissue will be a major concern of global politics.The Terrans and Cosmists will both have verypowerful ideologies—preserving the humanspecies vs. god building—and both sides willbe prepared to go to war to defend theirdreams. Since this Artilect War will take placein the second half of this century with 21st-century weapons, the scale of the killing willnot be in the tens of millions as in 20th-centu-ry wars but will be in the billions of deaths—the gigadeath.

The Terrans know they cannot wait too long,because otherwise artilects will come into being andeasily defeat the Terrans with their massive artilec-tual intelligence. The Terrans therefore will need tostrike first against the Cosmists. Anyone expressingeven a whiff of pro-Cosmist sentiment will be exter-minated for the sake of the survival of the billions ofhuman beings. Annihilating a few million Cosmistswill be seen by the Terrans as a small price to pay.

Most human problems stem from stupidity.Why wouldn’t artilects be more prone to good-ness and mutual benefit?

Whatever human quality you mention isgenerated by neuronal circuitry. Human scien-tists could put desirable qualities into their firstartificial brains. But as the intelligence level ofthese artificial brains keeps increasing, theywill become smart enough to perform artificialevolutionary experiments on themselves andincorporate the superior results into their basicstructure—all at the speed of light.

Once they become vastly superior to us, wecould never be sure of their attitudes towardhumans. They might choose to ignore us andescape into deep space, or they might decideto remove all the oxygen on the planetbecause it is corrosive to their systems. Thevery presence of artilects would be a profoundexistential risk to humans.

Can we program a robot with rulesagainst harming humans and instead use itto solve our problems?

If robots become more intelligent than thehumans who program them, they could exam-ine their human-level programming, find itmoronic and remove it.

To increase their intelligence levels,artilects will need to use evolutionary-engi-neering techniques.

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(continued on page 167)

“It’s called the Republican. Ready? One stepbackward…distract with the hands…then two more steps

backward…sidestep…sidestep…one step backward…distractwith the hands…then two steps backward…”

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There is no way humans could predict the out-comes of such experiments. The resulting evolvedcircuitry would be so complex that it would not beunderstandable by humans.

What could head off the robopocalypse?One way a robopocalypse might be avoided is

that it may be impossible for human beings to cre-ate a human-level artilect. Understanding thehuman brain by using the human brain might turnout to be a logical impossibility, rather like a picturecontaining an image of itself, which would haveanother one inside of it and so on to infinity.

But I think this possible bottleneck could be over-come since it is still possible to build a brain withoutfully understanding it, simply by copying it in greatdetail into our machines. Another way is to use evo-lutionary-engineering techniques to generate supe-rior intelligence. Humanity has been using this tech-nique for hundreds of thousands of years with ourchildren, some of whom grow up to be more intelli-gent than their parents, through random gene shuf-fling at the point of conception.

Another scenario is that artilects come into exis-tence far faster than we’d imagined, so there isn’tenough time for human politics to react. Theartilects may then ignore the humans and leaveEarth in search of more interesting phenomena,allowing humanity to survive.

There are lots of scenarios. Unfortunately, in myview, the most probable scenario is the worst: agigadeath Artilect War. I’m so pessimistic about thisthat I’m glad I’m alive now. I will live another 20 to30 years, enough time to see the species-domi-nance debate rage but not long enough to see theArtilect War killing billions. Thank God! I don’t wantto see that horror, but my grandson will see it. Hewill be destroyed by it.

What will life on Earth be like in a hundredyears?

We will have experienced gigadeath in the after-math of the Artilect War. If the Terrans win, sciencewill be strictly controlled, and any attempt at reviv-ing Cosmist experimentation will result in theirdeath. If the Cosmists win, a new phase of cosmicevolution will take place. The artilects will move outinto the cosmos to make contact with the zillions ofother artilects that have evolved billions of yearsearlier on zillions of other planets.

These artilects may be so powerful, they can designuniverses with their own mathematical laws of physicsand then construct universes according to theirdesigns. They would be universe creators and, hence,gods. Perhaps our universe already is such a creation.

Are you a Cosmist or Terran?Ultimately I’m a Cosmist, but I’m scared shit-

less of an Artilect War that I see as almost in-evitable. The decision to build artilects is binary,meaning we have only two choices: We build themor we don’t. I choose to build them, but the Terranin me feels the need to raise the alarm. Now thatso much A.I. progress has been made, people arestarting to see the writing on the wall.

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