The next 10 years or so will determine the critical relationship between Carbon and Silicon. These tetravalent elements belong to the same family on the periodic table.  Carbon is the main versatile constituent of life, basis of organic chemistry,  while Silicon is the main elemental component in computational devices. Many of our most brilliant and talented thinkers, who write  for a popular audience, Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku among them, seem to have little doubt that Silicon computational devices, will function as humans and soon surpass humans.  Computers and computer controlled robotic devices may transition from servants to our masters. There is nothing to prevent Silicon devices from being every bit as human as biological Carbon based devices and eventually overtaking them according to some expert engineers and mathematicians.  I would say the next 10 years, maybe 20 at the most, will determine the very critical relationship between the humans and machines.

What about that?  Will computational devices become human? Computers definitely have the wow factor and  everyone knows computers have overtaken us in many ways.  Robots are far more precise and productive than human workers in automotive  factories, and computational printing machines create 3 dimensional objects.  Computation is the guts behind MRI scanners made possible by rapid calculation. It is now about 17 years since IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a chess tournament and in 2011 Watson was able to defeat Jeopardy champions. Well before then, the simplest of computer programs, Eliza, which acted as a psychiatrist, was able to fool some “patients” into thinking that they were being treated by a real psychiatrist.  Eliza did so as a simulated couch situation in which the  invisible psychoanalyst  program merely turned a phrase into interrogatory allowing the analysand to come to their own conclusions. Though the computer had no understanding of anything at all and merely rearranged words according to a primitive algorithm, that was more than enough to convince people they were talking to a real psychiatrist.

For a while I was interested in forensic medicine and testified in court or at depositions.  I was having a terrible time with this until one day it dawned on me how lawyers think. In court whatever you convince judge or jury of is true. Truth is a matter of persuasion which can have little to do with objective truth. You don’t find out what’s what, you merely want to persuade  a decision maker of something. One of the main techniques of argument is incessant repetition with slight alteration of meaning until one side breaks down.  I couldn’t get my mind around this and eventually stopped working with lawyers unless I was made to. The  famous Turing test is something like that.  The Turing test helps determine if a computer can actually think.  Since no one can precisely define thought, a computer is said to think, if humans can be persuaded that the computer thinks. Some programs can out human humans with slick simulated sophisticated pseudo artistic or emotional responses. There are Turing tournaments where humans are pitted against computer programs. The computers are often felt to be more human, to panels of judges.   But programs like Eliza are able to do that with clever manipulation of words  Modern highly sophisticated language and translation programs that are capable of learning, altering their response when exposed to new situations, do the same thing but with absolutely no internal understanding.  They simply apply rules.   Computers that play chess almost always  beat humans but they don’t strategize, only either utilize successful responses from past games, or work via brute force mechanisms that take advantage of lightening speed computational ability to examine consequences thousands of alternative moves. Humans get exasperated or distracted and make mistake placing us at greater disadvantage.

I am a little afraid to disagree with brilliant people the likes of  Ray Kurzweil who maintains that computers and robots are close to becoming fully human. I don’t see it. The computer to me is a screwdriver, just another tool.  I would never be able to drive a screw or remove it without a screwdriver. But the reason why it is such a useful tool is another human invention, the screw.  The same holds for the computer which is super at working with language and math,  artificial constructs.  Computers, it is true, are learning to perform tasks in the real world as the brains or control devices in robots.  That doesn’t alter the fact that computers are mere tools which aid in manipulation of ideas created by humans. I don’t see that computers, despite their high speed calculating and storage abilities ,will be anything close to human for a very long time to come. Computers don’t have personal experiences or free will.

Silicon based life exists on other planets or in the minds on science fiction writers.  The idea of uploading the contents of your mind onto a Silicon device is also very popular as a means of life extension.  Perhaps on another world, there is Silicon based biology and organic chemistry but that is implausible to me.  By the same  logic we will one day discover Tin Men as Tin also hails from the same family of the periodic table.  Will robots of the near future seem so human that we will think twice about decommissioning them? I really don’t think so. How long will it be before we are able to upload ourselves into Silicon devices in order to extend our thought emotions and experience and prevent death? Not soon. Maybe never.

The great project of the twenty first century is the intimate relation between Carbon based living,  and Silicon devices, what may be termed the marriage of Carbon and Silicon. In the last  few decades humans and computers are working ever more directly. We used punch instructions on cards, and for a long while relations between humans and computers was typing and reading. Now people and computers chat directly with each other and more and more we using interfaces such as eye movements and EEG brainwaves.  Wafers and other devices ranging form electrical stimulators and pumps and sensors and cochlear hearing devices are implanted in the body, brain and brain environs. Seeing, hearing, stimulating devices will be implanted in ever more variety creating nightmare visions of cyborgs.  To my own way of thinking then, the Carbon-Silicon relation is less one of master and slave,  where slave eventually overtakes the master, than of true intimacy. While we will continue to work closely, computers will enhance human capacities but are a long way from becoming human.

Alternatively some of us may long for the old days when we were fully human. One grave danger, hardly mentioned, is that humans will mechanize, rather than mechanical devices becoming human. Personally I am seeing a creeping mechanization of the human form more than a humanization of the mechanical. I will cite some examples later, but to whet your appetite, I have certainly seen over my career, the practice of medicine becoming ever more wooden or robotic and less human.