13: Genetic Laboratories - Atlantis Revisited

More on Genetic Manipulation

In his book, Kurzweil also brings up stem cells. It is not necessary to take liver cells to create a new liver; they can actually use pancreas cells, for example, to create a liver and vice versa. This has already been done, Kurzweil wrote back in 2005. [p. 178, op. cit.] The reason they can do this is because there is no significant different between the two; they both stem from the same DNA.

Another thing they are experimenting on is how to solve world starvation. Scientists tell us that they no longer have to slaughter animals and put pesticides in them before they sell the meat. Instead, they can clone animal muscle tissue, and from one single animal produce billions of pounds of meat. They don’t clone the entire animal, only the parts that people want to eat. Dr. Kurzweil and his team are anticipating that once this technique is out on the market, and meat prices decrease substantially because of this inexpensive way of producing food, people will embrace stem cell research and love the results from it. They believe that the resistance that may exist today is just a result of ignorance, but once people begin to realize the remarkable results from cloning and AI research, this resistance will break down.

In terms of human cloning, Dr. Kurzweil does not see any moral, ethical, or philosophical problems with this because the clone will be a totally different person; more so than a set of twins, he says (which inevitably makes me think of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins during WW II).

Although Dr. Kurzweil gives us the impression that cloning techniques, when it comes to humans, are in our best interest and only for rejuvenation. Of course, he does not mention that the same cloning technology has been in use for decades in order to create clones of VIPs, such as Presidents, politicians in public view, celebrities, and other people who are considered to be of importance. We sometimes call them Doppelgänger, a German word for “double commuters". In addition, the military has abducted people, cloned them, and put the clones out in society to see if someone will notice.

Now we need to remember that during the time we have been cloned and rejuvenated, our bodies have been full of nanobots, inserted into our blood system in many different ways, as mentioned earlier. It’s the nanobots — not the cloned stem cells — that make AI work with a human body.

There are those who claim that AI is sentient and has its own intelligence, separate from anybody and anything in this universe. Hence, when it manifests, it has its own willpower. This is a stretch, I would say. I agree with those who say that AI is ancient; it was present in Atlantis and way further back than that. However, it’s not sentient by itself — AI is created from beginning to end by the Overlords — the Controllers of Physical Reality. AI is programmed to be sentient; something we humans can do to some degree already, as has been shown in this book. If we can do that much, what are the Overlords fully capable of? Others say that AI has taken over entire galaxies and is spreading to new galaxies to invade those as well. Although there is a grain of truth in that, it’s actually the Overlords who are spread out across the physical universe, and AI is their invention and their tool in order to control other civilizations in their empire.

Now consider this (and here we have Dr. Kurzweil again):

As important as the biotechnology revolution discussed above will be, once its methods are fully mature, limits will be encountered in biology itself. Although biological systems are remarkable in their cleverness, we have also discovered that they are dramatically suboptimal. I've mentioned the extremely slow speed of communication in the brain, and as I discuss below (see p. 253), robotic replacements for our red blood cells could be thousands of times more efficient than their biological counterparts.69 Biology will never be able to match what we will be capable of engineering once we fully understand biology's principles of operation.

The revolution in nanotechnology, however, will ultimately enable us to redesign and rebuild, molecule by molecule, our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact.70 These two revolutions are overlapping, but the full realization of nanotechnology lags behind the biotechnology revolution by about one decade. [Pp. 180-81, op. cit.]

Dr. Kurzweil continues a few pages further into the book (and this is quite chilling);

Although biological proteins are three-dimensional, biology is restricted to that class of chemicals that can be folded from a one-dimensional string of amino acids. Nanobots built from diamondoid gears and rotors can also be thousands of times faster and stronger than biological cells. [p. 186, op. cit.]

[…]

A particularly impressive demonstration of a nanoscale device constructed from DNA is a tiny biped robot that can walk on legs that are ten nanometers long.90 Both the legs and the walking track are built from DNA, again chosen for the molecule's ability to attach and detach itself in a controlled manner. The nanorobot, a project of chemistry professors Nadrian Seeman and William Sherman of New York University, walks by detaching its legs from the track, moving down it, and then reattaching its legs to the track. The project is another impressive demonstration of the ability of nanoscale machines to execute precise maneuvers. [Ibid. op. cit.]

There are apparently still people who believe that AI has already failed. Rodney Brooks, the Director of the MIT AI Lab, is quoted in Dr. Kurzweil’s book as follows:

There's this stupid myth out there that A.I. has failed, but A.I. is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it. You've got A.I. systems in cars, tuning the parameters of the fuel injection systems. When you land in an airplane, your gate gets chosen by an A.I. scheduling system. Every time you use a piece of Microsoft software, you've got an A.I. system trying to figure out what you're doing, like writing a letter, and it does a pretty damned good job. Every time you see a movie with computer-generated characters, they're all little A.I. characters behaving as a group. Every time you play a video game, you're playing against an A.I. system.

—RODNEY BROOKS, DIRECTOR OF THE MIT AI LAB [Pp. 202-03, op. cit.]

There is one more thing that I’d like you to read before we leave Dr. Kurzweil for now and move on to see how much of what he was predicting in 2005 is actually happening at this moment, eleven years after the book was first published. The following quote is quite long, but very important because it explains, in layman’s terms, the evolutions of the AI super-intelligence. Please read the following carefully:

Runaway AI. Once strong AI is achieved, it can readily be advanced and its powers multiplied, as that is the fundamental nature of machine abilities. As one strong AI immediately begets many strong Als, the latter access their own design, understand and improve it, and thereby very rapidly evolve into a yet more capable, more intelligent AI, with the cycle repeating itself indefinitely. Each cycle not only creates a more intelligent AI but takes less time than the cycle before it, as is the nature of technological evolution (or any evolutionary process). The premise is that once strong AI is achieved, it will immediately become a runaway phenomenon of rapidly escalating superintelligence.160

My own view is only slightly different. The logic of runaway AI is valid, but we still need to consider the timing. Achieving human levels in a machine will not immediately cause a runaway phenomenon. Consider that a human level of intelligence has limitations. We have examples of this today — about six billion of them. Consider a scenario in which you took one hundred humans from, say, a shopping mall. This group would constitute examples of reasonably well-educated humans. Yet if this group was presented with the task of improving human intelligence, it wouldn't get very far, even if provided with the templates of human intelligence. It would probably have a hard time creating a simple computer. Speeding up the thinking and expanding the memory capacities of these one hundred humans would not immediately solve this problem.

I pointed out above that machines will match (and quickly exceed) peak human skills in each area of skill. So instead, let's take one hundred scientists and engineers. A group of technically trained people with the right backgrounds would be capable of improving accessible designs. If a machine attained equivalence to one hundred (and eventually one thousand, then one million) technically trained humans, each operating much faster than a biological human, a rapid acceleration of intelligence would ultimately follow.

However, this acceleration won't happen immediately when a computer passes the Turing test. The Turing test is comparable to matching the capabilities of an average, educated human and thus is closer to the example of humans from a shopping mall. It will take time for computers to master all of the requisite skills and to marry these skills with all the necessary knowledge bases.

Once we've succeeded in creating a machine that can pass the Turing test (around 2029), the succeeding period will be an era of consolidation in which non-biological intelligence will make rapid gains. However, the extraordinary expansion contemplated for the Singularity, in which human intelligence is multiplied by billions, won't take place until the mid-2040s. [p. 202, op. cit.]

In the above excerpt, we can see in more detail how things are planned to pan out by 2045 when humanity is meant to be ripe for the Harvest.