Profile - Hugo de Garis - Part I

Humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.
— as quoted in New York Times Magazine of 1 August 1999, speaking of the 'artilects' of the future.

Part I

Dr. Hugo de Garis recently retired from his role of Director of the Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) at Xiamen University, China, where he was building China’s first artificial brain. He and his friend Prof. Dr. Ben Goertzel have just finished guest editing a special issue on artificial brains for Neurocomputing journal (December 2010), the first of its kind on the planet.

He continues to live in China, where his U.S. savings go further, given China’s much lower cost of living. He spends his afternoons in his favorite (beautiful) park, and his nights in his apartment, intensively studying PhD-level pure math and mathematical physics to be able to write books on topics such as femtometer scale technology (“femtotech”), topological quantum computing (TQC), as well as other technical and sociopolitical themes.

He is the author of two books: The Artilect War: Cosmists Vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines and Multis and Mono: What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State. Both these books are concerned with the political consequences of future technologies.  His latest book is Artificial Brains: An Evolved Neural Net Module Approach.

He has more recently been noted for his belief that a major war between the supporters and opponents of intelligent machines, resulting in billions of deaths, is almost inevitable before the end of the 21st century.  He suggests AIs may simply eliminate the human race, and humans would be powerless to stop them because of technological singularity. This prediction has attracted debate and criticism from the AI research community, and some of its more notable members, such as Kevin Warwick, Bill Joy, Ken MacLeod, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Roger Penrose, have voiced their opinions on whether or not this future is likely.

Below is an intriguing interview with De Garis in Melbourne after the Singularity Summit Australia 2010, conducted by Adam A. Ford.

The rest of the interview is available in Part II.