Will we survive the next fifty years?

Terrorism and global warming are two of the major threats to mankind that you read about in the press. But there's another threat far closer to home and it may surprise you. The humble computer in the corner of your classroom - or at least its evolution - is possibly a threat of equal magnitude. The risk isn't guaranteed and there is another, far happier, scenario. Read on and form your own opinion.

Computers have changed since their arrival in the early 1980s. Do you remember the early ones we had in school? Perhaps you had a BBC Model B or an RM 380Z? Or even a Sinclair spectrum? They could display eight colours and make a set of notes and noises. But we were impressed and people began to create wonderful software which brought learning alive for children. Outside school, in the world of business, PCs could be seen running black-and-white or blue-and-white text-only screens and the computer age seemed to have arrived.

In the intervening years we've seen the demise of Acorn and Sinclair. The ubiquitous PC and its rival, the Mac, can both now handle 16 million colours, digital photography and video, and CD-quality sound. Wherever is it all going?

Let's look at it another way. A bee has about 10,000 brain cells. Would you say that a modern computer is more powerful than a bee's brain? If you answered 'yes' you were right. In fact even the earliest computers were brighter than a bee. Almost 60 years ago in 1946, the first all purpose digital electronic computer called ENIAC, was built from 18,000 vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes, known as 'valves', were also used in radios at the time and were later replaced by transistors and silicon chips. They are the 'brain cells' of computers.

A modern computer contains about 1,000,000,000 (one billion) of these 'brain cells' so the next question you might ask is how this compares with a human brain. The answer is that a human being has 1,000,000,000,000 brain cells so computers are not even close . . . yet. But there's a big "but" coming up. Let's add another factor into the equation.

Computer power is doubling roughly every eighteen months or so. This means that computers which equal the human brain in terms of processing power will almost certainly be built in around ten to twenty years from now. Whether this means they will be as intelligent as us is less clear. They will certainly have processors equal in capacity to our brains but is that the same as intelligence? Either way, it is generally agreed that computers will have the same intelligence as human beings in about 2030 and they won't stop there. Within a year they will be more intelligent that any human being on earth.

This begs a question which is unanswerable as yet. What will be the effect of having computers of equal intelligence and more to human beings?

One theory is that there are some problems which are too difficult for the human brain to answer. A simple example is the connection between interest rates and economic growth. Many people claim to know the connection but the rallies and crashes of the past few centuries show that no-one really does. And is capitalism the best way to run human society? For much of this century Capitalism and Communism battled it out. Was either right or is there another system which would be better? And how do you feed the entire human race and resolve the problem of famine in some areas and food mountains in others? It should be a simple problem but it has defied human solution for decades.

It is argued that computers which have greater intelligence that man will be able to solve any problem which is too difficult for the human brain and this happy state is something that advocates of AI (artificial intelligence) are looking forward to.

Sadly, there's an alternative scenario which is far less attractive. Professor Kevin Warwick (left) is head of the Department of Cybernetics at Reading University and he asks the question, "why do we see cows in fields waiting to be killed and eaten by people, rather than the other way round?" The answer, he says, is nothing more that intelligence. Human beings are more intelligent than cows and so we are the ones in charge. The extension of this argument is of course that once computers have higher intelligence that man they will take control and there's nothing we can do to stop them.

Science fiction readers will recall Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics. His reassuring 'First Law of Robotics' is that no robot will ever harm any human being and in his novels the robots are indeed safe. But will reality match Asimov's stories? Professor Warwick thinks not. His solution is to explore the possibility of human beings sharing their evolution with computers. In short, he believes that unless we incorporate machine intelligence into our own bodies and become cyborgs we will not survive as a species. His first experiment was to implant a capsule into his arm which allowed him to communicate with the university computers. He is now said to be developing an even more complex implant project - he is planning to hard-wire his brain directly to his computer.