Just how smart are our smart phones?  In the not too distant future, according to computer researcher Arlindo Oliveira, that question may launch an unprecedented intellectual and social revolution. For Oliveira, what makes us human, what makes us persons with minds, is how we process information. But the physical substrate that supports this data processing need not be biological. To the contrary, human brains, biological cells and computer transistors all work analogously: They execute algorithms, series of instructions which permit them to perform their functions. How they perform these tasks is Oliveira’s paramount interest. The first nine chapters of his eminently readable book include detailed, often fascinating accounts of how neurons and whole brains work, and how digital transistors and neural networks might emulate brain functions. These burgeoning veins of research, “where biology meets computation,” he predicts, will soon permit the creation of “neuromorphic intelligent systems,” synthetic digital intelligences capable of whole brain emulation.

          To qualify as digital minds or — more strikingly — as persons potentially warranting moral rights, such intelligences would need to prove, in the parlance of artificial intelligence researchers, Turing Equivalent: In their interactions with us, we would need to be broadly unable to distinguish their information processing from human thought processes. At the same time, the author notes, traditional formulations of the Turing Test are notably anthropocentric. For Oliveira, nothing about the human brain’s biological function in principle precludes researchers’ ability to replicate its information processing capacities in silica. Indeed, studies of how electrochemical activity in the brain encodes thoughts suggest that two of the three primary challenges to developing digital minds — the raw computer processing power and the energy resources such whole brain emulators would require — are entirely technical. The author does not downplay those challenges; even with “exponential technological growth,” adequate computer processing power may still be several decades in the making.  

            The third challenge in developing such minds — how poorly researchers currently understand human brain function — may prove a stronger constraint. How might researchers develop “whole brain emulators” when so much of how we think is still opaque to us?  Oliveira considers this vital question at length in the book’s last few chapters, yet raises an even more intriguing point.  The digital minds he envisions will likely admit subjective experiences radically different from their human counterparts. Moreover, as such minds become increasingly self-teaching, the information processing techniques they develop may prove as mysterious as our own. Will we then say that they, too, exhibit consciousness, intelligence, personality, or even agency? Conversely, if we deny such alien minds personhood, will we radically re-define what we mean by that term and the rights that attend it?  The book’s consideration of these questions is well detailed and well resourced; written clearly, concisely, and accessibly for a general audience, it offers a tantalizing and informative over-view of what the future may hold should our smart phones come to out think us. Highly recommended.

© 2017 Lisa Bellantoni

Lisa Bellantoni, Ph.D., Albright College