How Much Longer Before Our First AI Catastrophe?

With everyone’s attention focused on a pending technological Singularity, few give consideration to the immediate period of time leading up to it. If things continue apace, this could prove to be the most dangerous time in human history. It will be the era of weak and narrow artificial intelligence, a highly problematic combo that could wreak tremendous havoc on human civilization. Here’s why we’ll need to be ready.

As opposed to the Technological Singularity, which is defined as the advent of recursively improving greater-than-human artificial intelligence (or artificial superintelligence), or the development of strong AI (human-like artificial general intelligence), this particular concern has to do with the rise of weak AI, expert systems that match or exceed human intelligence in a narrowly defined area, but not in broader areas. As a consequence, many of these systems will work outside of human comprehension and control. 

But don't let the name fool you; there's nothing weak about the kind of damage it could do.

Before the Singularity

The Singularity is often misunderstood as AI that’s simply smarter than humans, or the rise of human-like consciousness in a machine. Neither are the case. To a non-trivial degree, much of our AI already exceeds human capacities. It’s just not sophisticated and robust enough to do any significant damage to our infrastructure. The trouble will start to come when, in the case of the Singularity, a highly generalized AI starts to iteratively improve upon itself.

And indeed, when the Singularity hits, it’ll be like, in the words of mathematician I. J. Good, anintelligence explosion — and it will indeed hit us like a bomb. Human control will forever be relegated to the sidelines, in whatever form that might take.

A pre-Singularity AI disaster or catastrophe, on the other hand, will be containable. But just barely. It’ll likely arise from an expert system or super-sophisticated algorithm run amok. And the worry is not so much its power — which is definitely a significant part of the equation — but the speed at which it will inflict the damage. By the time we have a grasp on what’s going on, something terrible may have happened.

Narrow AI could knock out our electric grid, damage nuclear power plants, cause a global-scale economic collapse, misdirect autonomous vehicles and robots, take control of a factory or military installation, or unleash some kind of propagating blight that will be difficult to get rid of (whether in the digital realm or the real world). The possibilities are frighteningly endless.

Our infrastructure is becoming increasingly digital and interconnected — and by consequence, increasingly vulnerable. In a few decades, it will be brittle as glass, with the bulk of human activity dependant upon it.

And it is indeed a possibility. The signs are all there.

Accidents Will Happen

Back in 1988, a Cornell University student named Robert Morris scripted a software program that could measure the size of the Internet. To make it work, he equipped it with a few clever tricks to help it along its way, including an ability to exploit known vulnerabilities in popular utility programs running on UNIX. This allowed the program to break into those machines and copy itself, thus infecting those systems.

On November 2, 1988, Morris introduced his program to the world. It quickly spread to thousands of computers, disrupting normal activities and Internet connectivity for days. Estimates put the cost of the damage anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000. Dubbed the “Morris Worm,” it’s considered the first worm in human history — one that prompted DARPA to fund the establishment of the CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon University to anticipate and respond to this new kind of threat.

As for Morris, he was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and given a $10,000 fine.

But the takeaway from the incident was clear: Despite our best intentions, accidents willhappen. And as we continue to develop and push our technologies forward, there’s always the chance that it will operate outside our expectations — and even our control.

Down to the Millisecond

Indeed, unintended consequences are one thing, containability is quite another. Our technologies are increasingly operating at levels beyond our real-time capacities. The best example of this comes from the world of high-frequency stock trading (HFT).

In HFT, securities are traded on a rapid-fire basis through the use of powerful computers and algorithms. A single investment position can last for a few minutes — or a few milliseconds; there can be as many as 500 transactions made in a single second. This type of computer trading can result in thousands upon thousands of transactions a day, each and every one of them decided by super-sophisticated scripts. The human traders involved (such as they are) just sit back and watch, incredulous to the machinations happening at break-neck speeds.

“Back in the day, I used to be able to explain to a client how their trade was executed. Technology has made the trade process so convoluted and complex that I can’t do that any more,” noted PNC Wealth Management's Jim Dunigan in a Markets Media article.

Clearly, the ability to assess market conditions and react quickly is a valuable asset to have. And indeed, according to a 2009 study, HFT firms accounted for 60 to 73% of all U.S. equity trading volume; but as of last year that number dropped to 50% — but it's still considered a highly profitable form of trading.

To date, the most significant single incident involving HFT came at 2:45 on May 5th, 2010. For a period of about five minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted over 1,000 points (approximately 9%); for a few minutes, $1 trillion in market value vanished. About 600 points were recovered 20 minutes later. It's now called the 2010 Flash Crash, the second largest point swing in history and the biggest one-day point decline.

The incident prompted an investigation by Gregg E. Berman, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The investigators posited a number of theories (of which there are many, some of them quite complex), but their primary concern was the impact of HFT. They determined that the collective efforts of the algorithms exacerbated price declines; by selling aggressively, the trader-bots worked to eliminate their positions and withdraw from the market in the face of uncertainty.

The following year, an independent study concluded that technology played an important role, but that it wasn’t the entire story. Looking at the Flash Crash in detail, the authors argued that it was “the result of the new dynamics at play in the current market structure,” and the role played by “order toxicity.” At the same time, however, they noted that HFT traders exhibited trading patterns inconsistent with the traditional definition of market making, and that they were “aggressively [trading] in the direction of price changes.”

HFT is also playing an increasing role in currencies and commodities, making up about 28% of the total volume in futures markets. Not surprisingly, this area has become vulnerable to mini crashes. Following incidents involving the trading of cocoa and sugar, the Wall Street Journalhighlighted the growing concerns:

"The electronic platform is too fast; it doesn't slow things down" like humans would, said Nick Gentile, a former cocoa floor trader. "It's very frustrating" to go through these flash crashes, he said...

..The same is happening in the sugar market, provoking outrage within the industry. In a February letter to ICE, the World Sugar Committee, which represents large sugar users and producers, called algorithmic and high-speed traders "parasitic."

Just how culpable HFT is to the phenomenon of flash crashes is an open question, but it’s clear that the trading environment is changing rapidly. Market analysts now speak in terms of “microstructures,” trading “circuit breakers,” and the “VPIN Flow Toxicity metric.” It’s also difficult to predict how serious future flash crashes could become. If insufficient measures aren’t put into place to halt these events when they happen, and assuming HFT is scaled-up in terms of market breadth, scope, and speed, it’s not unreasonable to think of events in which massive and irrecoverable losses might occur. And indeed, some analysts are already predicting systems that can support 100,000 transactions per second.

More to the point, HFT and flash crashes may not create an economic disaster — but it’s a potent example of how our other mission-critical systems may reach unprecedented tempos. As we defer critical decision making to our technological artifacts, and as they increase in power and speed, we are increasingly finding ourselves outside of the locus of control and comprehension.

When AI Screws Up, It Screws Up Badly

No doubt, we are already at the stage when computers exceed our ability to understand how and why they do the things they do. One of the best examples of this is IBM’s Watson, the expert computer system that trounced the world’s best Jeopardy players in 2011. To make it work, Watson’s developers scripted a series of programs that, when pieced together, created an overarching game-playing system. And they’re not entirely sure how it works.

David Ferrucci, the Leader Researcher of the project, put it this way:

Watson absolutely surprises me. People say: 'Why did it get that one wrong?' I don't know. 'Why did it get that one right?' I don't know.

Which is actually quite disturbing. And not so much because we don’t understand why it succeeds, but because we don’t necessarily understand why it fails. By virtue, we can’t understand or anticipate the nature of its mistakes.

For example, Watson had one memorable gaff that clearly demonstrated how, when an AI fails, it fails big time. During the Final Jeopardy portion, it was asked, “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.” Watson responded with, “What is Toronto?”

Given that Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport is named after a war hero, that was not a terrible guess. But why this was such a blatant mistake is that the category was “U.S. Cities.” Toronto, not being a U.S. city, couldn't possibly have been the correct answer.

Again, this is the important distinction that needs to be made when addressing the potential for a highly generalized AI. Weak, narrow systems are extremely powerful, but they’re also extremely stupid; they’re completely lacking in common sense. Given enough autonomy and responsibility, a failed answer or a wrong decision could be catastrophic.

Moreover, because expert systems like Watson will soon be able to conjure answers to questions that are beyond our comprehension, we won’t always know when they’re wrong. And that is a frightening prospect.As another example, take the recent initiative to give robots their very own Internet. By providing and sharing information amongst themselves, it’s hoped that these bots can learn without having to be programmed. A problem arises, however, when instructions for a task are mismatched — the result of an AI error. A stupid robot, acting without common sense, would simply execute upon the task even when the instructions are wrong. In another 30 to 40 years, one can only imagine the kind of damage that could be done, either accidentally, or by a malicious script kiddie.

The Shape of Things to Come

It’s difficult to know exactly how, when, or where the first true AI catastrophe will occur, but we’re still several decades off. Our infrastructure is still not integrated or robust enough to allow for something really terrible to happen. But by the 2040s (if not sooner), our highly digital and increasingly interconnected world will be susceptible to these sorts of problems.

By that time, our power systems (electric grids, nuclear plants, etc.) could be vulnerable to errors and deliberate attacks. Already today, the U.S. has been able to infiltrate the control system software known to run centrifuges in Iranian nuclear facilities by virtue of its Stuxnet program — an incredibly sophisticated computer virus (if you can call it that). This program represents the future of cyber-espionage and cyber-weaponry — and it’s a pale shadow of things to come.

In future, more advanced versions will likely be able to not just infiltrate enemy or rival systems, it could reverse-engineer it, inflict terrible damage — or even take control. But like the Morris Worm incident showed, it may be difficult to predict the downstream effects of these actions, particularly when dealing with autonomous, self-replicating code. It could also result in an AI arms race, with each side developing programs and counter-programs to get an edge on the other side’s technologies.

And though it might seem like the premise of a scifi novel, an AI catastrophe could also involve the deliberate or accidental takeover of any system running off an AI. This could include integrated military equipment, self-driving vehicles (including airplanes), robots, and factories. Should something like this occur, the challenge will be to disable the malign script (or source program) as quickly as possible, which may not be easy.

More conceptually, and in the years immediately preceding the onset of uncontainable self-improving machine intelligence, a narrow AI could be used (again, either deliberately or unintentionally) to execute upon a poorly articulated goal. The powerful system could over-prioritize a certain aspect, or grossly under-prioritize another. And it could make sweeping changes in the blink of an eye.

Hopefully, if and when this does happen, it will be containable and relatively minor in scope. But it will likely serve as a call to action in anticipation of more catastrophic episodes. As for now, and in consideration of these possibilities, we need to ensure that our systems are secure, smart, and resilient.

A different version of this article appeared at io9.

Images: Shutterstock/agsandrew; Washington Times; TIME, Potapov Alexander/Shutterstock.

What is the purpose of the Universe? Here is one possible answer.

It’s often said that Jupiter — or any gas giant for that matter — is a failed star. This sentiment riles a lot of people, who bristle at the suggestion that Jupiter is deficient somehow, or that it was even meant to do something in the first place. But the conjecture belies a larger, more important question. What is it, exactly, that the universe and all the stuff that’s in it supposed to do aside from just floating in space?

Well, it just so happens that there is a theory that gives a kind of raison d'etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible. To learn more, I spoke to the man who came up with the idea.

It's called the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection and it was conjured by Lee Smolin, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo.

"It's a scenario that explains how the laws of nature are chosen," Smolin told me, "and if true, these parameters are geared to maximize the number of black holes made in the universe."

Of cosmological singularities and baby universes

Indeed, black holes — and the cosmological singularities they produce — are central to Smolin's theory. These are regions of space-time where the quantities used to measure gravitational fields or temperature become infinite. It's also where general relativity stops being useful, making any kind of prediction impossible. Classical general relativity says that a singularity exists inside each black hole. But both string theory and loop quantum gravity suggest that black hole singularities can be eliminated — and when this happens, it may be possible to describe the future evolution of the space-time region within it.

"Everything that falls into a black hole doesn't just hit the cosmological singularity and just stop evolving so that time simply comes to an end," he says, "Time continues and everything that fell into the black hole would have a future where the singularity was, and that region is what we call a baby universe."

Moreover, Smolin says these baby universes are immune to whatever happens in the parent universe, including eternal inflation and its ultimate heat death.

"Black holes are predicted to evaporate by making radiation — what's called the Hawking Process," he says, "but only until they get down to an equilibrium with the temperature of the cosmic microwave background." This process, says Smolin, has to do with the properties of the horizon — and it's only the horizon that evaporates.

"The baby universe may come into a kind of contact with the original universe in a way it didn't before, but whether this happens or not depends on the details of the quantum gravity theory," he says.

A Darwinian model

And like Darwin's theory of variation and selection, Smolin also surmises that baby universes are slightly different than the parent who spawned them. In turn, this cosmological "mutation" — in which the parameters of nature have been slightly modified — may result in a new universe that's either better or worse in terms of its replicative ability.

For example, if the cosmological constant and speed of light were slightly tweaked, or if the law of gravity became too weak or strong, the new universe could be suboptimal in its ability to make massive quantities of massive stars. In such a universe, matter might not be able to coalesce into stars, or galaxies might be unable to form.

In this model, a "fit" universe, therefore, is one that has evolved such that its ability to produce black holes has been optimized. And this may explain why we observe a universe that produces large swaths of giant stars — each one an attempt to make a baby.

The idea of cosmological variation, however, is one of pure conjecture. "It's an hypothesis," Smolin concedes.

But that said, Smolin points to string theory as a potential mechanism. "There could be a connection there," he told me, "it describes a landscape of different cosmological parameters — different phase transitions between them — and this is almost exactly the kind of example I had in mind when trying to explain the variation of the constants."

Smolin is also unsure how many baby universes each black hole is able to produce — though he suspects that it's one per black hole. "The answer," he says, "will ultimately depend on quantum gravity theory."

Life as epiphenomenon?

We asked Smolin if life in the universe is therefore an accident — that humans and all other organisms are mere epiphenomenon, a sideshow to a much larger process.

"If the hypothesis of Cosmological Natural Selection is true, then life — and the universe being biofriendly — is a consequence of the universe being finely-tuned to produce black holes by producing many, many massive stars."

But he added: "Those if statements are important."

Other scientists have conversely argued that the universe is freakishly biophilic — that the laws of nature appear to be geared towards making life. Some even suggest that this is the ultimate purpose of the universe — that it's fine-tuned to spawn biological organisms (the so-calledbiocosm hypothesis).

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Similarly, philosophers like to talk about the Anthropic Principle — the notion that any analysis of the universe and what happens within it must take into account the presence of observers (i.e. intelligent life). We're subject to an observational selection effect, they argue, which means we can only ever observe a universe that's friendly to life.

Smolin, on the other hand, brushes these lines of argumentation aside, saying that cosmologists should study and understand the properties of the universe in a way that doesn't connect it to life. The Anthropic Principle, he says, is simply incapable of making a falsifiable prediction for any kind of testable experiment.

At the same time, however, "Cosmological Natural Selection," he says, "is very capable of doing just that."

Moreover, the laws of the universe — and all the stuff that's within it — can all be explained without referencing it to life.

"It's not a coincidence," he says, "that we live in a world which has lots of carbon and oxygen in it, along with long list of suitable stars, and so on." The presence of these apparent life-friendly elements — like carbon and oxygen — has a perfectly good explanation outside of the biophilic paradigm. These elements, says Smolin, creates the conditions necessary for the efficient formation of sufficiently massive stars that form black holes.

The claims made as evidence by Anthropic Principle supporters, he says, can be explained in an alternative way.

The critics

Needless to say, Smolin's Big Idea has received its fair share of criticism. It's an extraordinary idea, after all, and extraordinary ideas often undergo extraordinary levels of scrutiny.

Cosmologist Joe Silk, for example, says the universe we observe is far from being an optimal producer of black holes. He speculates that other "versions" of the universe could do a much better job.

Similarly, Alexander Vilenkin argues that the rate of black hole formation can be improved by increasing the value of the cosmological constant. Smolin is wrong, he says, to hypothesize that the current values of all the constants of nature are perfectly adjusted to maximize black hole production.

Ruediger Vaas complains that Smolin's first mistake was to start making analogies to Darwinian processes. The fitness of Smolin's universes, he says, aren't constrained by their environments, but by the numbers of black holes. Moreover, although Smolin's universes have different replication rates, they aren't competing against each other — what he feels is a crucial component of any Darwinian process.

Writing in the Edge, Leonard Susskind — Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University — had this to say:

Smolin...believes that the constants of nature are determined by survival of the fittest: the fittest to reproduce that is. Those properties which lead to the largest rate of reproduction will dominate the population of universes and the overwhelming likelihood is that we live in such a universe. At least that's the argument.

But this logic can lead to ridiculous conclusions. In the case of eternal inflation it would lead to the prediction that our universe has the maximum possible cosmological constant, since the reproduction rate is nothing but the inflation rate.

When we asked Smolin about these objections, he said that many of these concerns were addressed in his book, The Life of the Cosmos, and that his upcoming book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, will also tackle many of these questions (the book also dispels the idea that time is a kind of illusion). And when possible, Smolin has addressed individual concerns (for example, the entire Smolin-Susskind debate can be readhere; and his retort to Vilenkin can be seen here).

Ultimately, however, the objections leave him unfazed.

"My impression is the idea has not been refuted even though several people have tried," he told me. "It doesn't mean the idea is true, but the idea has stood up to attempts to falsify it."

Pausing for a moment, and speaking more quickly now, he continued:

"Look, for me, the important part of the claim is that it is a scientific argument. The idea itself is not the most important thing — it's a very interesting idea, sure — but it instantiates a general claim that — if you want to explain the universe — one of the things you're going to have to explain is why we see certain laws of nature and not others. And the claim I'm making is that this question can in fact be answered scientifically — one that will lead toward a way for us to make predictions to see if the laws of nature are not fixed for all time, but evolved. That is the key point for me."

As for the exact mechanism of cosmological evolution, he says that a certain model or scenario might be right, or it might be wrong. The important point, says Smolin, is that science can only be completed to the extent of our ability to explain why the laws of nature are they way they are if they evolved over time.

"As far as the scenario of Cosmological Natural Selection is concerned," he says, "it's just an hypothesis just as much as it was for Darwin and Mendel — two scientists who figured out how natural selection worked before knowing anything about DNA or the molecular instantiation of genes."

This article originally appeared at io9.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Smolin pic: ideacityonline; galaxy/dna: physics.sfsu.edu.

10 of the Weirdest Futurist Scenarios for the Evolution of Humanity

When science fiction writers and futurists imagine humans of the far future, they never think our descendants are going to look exactly the same as we do now. After all, we'll have access to powerful tools to turn us into cyborgs and hack our DNA, so there's no limit to how we could reinvent ourselves.

But just how weird could our progeny become? Here are 10 of the absolute strangest visions of our post-human future.

Top illustration drawn by Dougal Dixon and taken from a 1980s issue of Omni Magazine about what humans might look like in 50 million years.

1. Voluntary devolution

What better way to start a top 10 list of the weirdest visions for humanity than by considering the possibility that we take a massive step backwards rather than forward? Voluntary devolution is the idea that we should re-engineer the human species to the point where we're no longer advanced enough to be considered human. The basic premise here is that humans basically suck, and we should take it upon ourselves to regress, from an evolutionary standpoint, to a state of harmlessness. By becoming pre-civilizational, we would stop being a threat to ourselves, the animal kingdom, and the planet itself. This perspective could be interpreted as a kind of oxymoronic uber-Luddism, where progress is measured not by the increase and refinement of human capacities, but instead by its regression. The ultimate goal would be the end of civilization and our return to the jungle.

2. Voluntary human extinction

But why stop there when you can eliminate the human species altogether — and better yet, do it in such a way that everybody buys into it? Such is the goal of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), an activist movement that is actively working to phase out the human species, by asking us (very politely) to stop breeding. Armed with the slogan, "May we live long and die out," VHEMT's eventual goal is to return the Earth to its natural, healthy state. With humanity gone, all the remaining creatures on Earth could be free to live, die, and evolve on their own. Adherents of the voluntary human extinction model maintain that they're not misanthropic, they're just providing an "encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology."

3. The rise of the eco-human

Some environmentally conscious futurists aren't content to see humanity devolve or wither away into extinction — but they're also not convinced of our ability to address climate change and other ecological disasters. The solution to such problems, they argue, is to have humans voluntarily modify ourselves, to better live in harmony with the planet. In a paper titled "Human Engineering and Climate Change," philosophers S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache make the case that humans should resort to such measures as pharmacologically induced meat intolerance (since meat production is exceptionally hard on the environment), genetically engineering cat-eyes to reduce our need for lighting, and reducing our physical size to lessen our ecological footprint (they recommend a 21% reduction in body mass for men, and 25% for women). They're also hoping to see us increase our will-power, which they argue will have the peripheral effect of improving our feelings of empathy and altruism.

4. Transgenic humans

But, why limit ourselves to adding a few new traits, when we can borrow wholesale from the animal kingdom? Transgenic technologies, which allow for the genetic intermingling of human and animal characteristics, could allow for a nearly endless array of human-animal hybrids. There's plenty to envy among our non-human friends, too: Dogs hear and smell much better than we do, cats can see in the dark, some primates have better memorization skills than us, and birds have remarkably strong vision. Looking ahead to the day when we can apply transgenic modifications to ourselves, many would-be transhumans would like to acquire the eyes of a hawk, the scales of a lizard, or the seaworthiness of cetaceans — imagine being able to swim alongside a pod of bottlenosed dolphins.

5. All brain, and no brawn

This is the classic vision of a humanity that has evolved a massive brain at the expense of its body. In his obscure 1893 story, "The Man of the Year Million," H.G. Wells posited the idea that humanity's dependence on technology will ultimately result in a decreased reliance on the body, and more on the brain. Even the simple knife and fork, argued Wells, would eventually make the human jaw redundant. Modern conveniences like motorised transportation woud result in the withering away of legs, torsos, and practically all muscles — so our descendants would essentially become huge brains that walk around on their hands. But just how realistic is this vision? According to Darwinian principles, physical characteristics will in fact start to disappear if they're not continually reinforced by selectional pressures. The human appendix is a prime example — a classic case of "use it or lose it." As for massive, bulbous craniums like the ones displayed by theTalosians of Star Trek, that's probably unlikely, given that brain size is not correlated with intelligence, and the fact that we're progressively offloading our thinking to external devices. That said, American heads are getting bigger.

6. The Hive Mind

The hive mind, as portrayed by the insectoid-humans of Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive or the infamous Borg of Star Trek, is a possible future state in which human social organization has taken on the form of a superorganism much like ants or bees. In such a state, individual human will is largely trumped by the demands of the collective, or some kind of overarching central intelligence or modus operandi. The totalitarian experiments of the 20th century were prototypes of this idea, mercifully limited by the primitiveness of their technologies. But looking to the future, it's easy to imagine the frightening prospect of renewed state efforts to control the thoughts and actions of the populace — using such things as ubiquitous surveillance and mind-controlling technologies (like nanobots or cyber-brain hacking). But an emerging hive mind could also be seen as a positive step forward in human communication and social organization — what some have referred to as the global brain or Noosphere. The big question to ask, however, is how much of the individual can be retained in an open sea of competing conscious thoughts?

7. Postgendered humans

Advanced reproductive and cybernetic technologies will have a profound impact on our biological nature. Currently bound by sexual reproduction, we are a binary species, consisting of females and males. But given the potential for cyborgization and such developments as exosomatic wombs, we may cease to become biological organisms in the traditional sense. Future humans, or what would really be posthumans at this point,could choose to be postgendered in the sense that they wouldn't be tied to one particular biological sex, instead acquring the best characteristics that each has to offer (a kind of technologically-enabled androgenization). Future humans could also choose to discard gendered traits altogether and become asexual. Even more radical is the possibility of creating brand new biological sexes, or amorphous gendered traits that could be altered on the fly.

8. Out of control morphological arms races

Assistive reproductive technologies like genomics will allow future couples to partake in the practice of human trait selection, or what is more commonly referred to as "designer babies." It's also possible that advanced somatic gene therapy will allow individuals to modify and enhance their genetic constitutions well after they're born. But a number of physical endowments could be used by people to gain an advantage in certain domains, thus instigating a kind of "arms race". Take sports, for example. Basketball players are competing for height, while swimmers are competing for the length of their limbs. Today, athletes have to come by these characteristics naturally, but in the future, those looking to gain a physical edge could take the extra step of seeing their genome modified to suit (or by parents hell-bent on seeing their child succeed at a particular sport). The modifications could exceed anything seen before by nature, leading to some bizarre and extreme physical forms.

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9. Humans modified for space

It's no secret that humans in their current form have no business being in space. The long term effects of zero gravity and solar radiation make it a poor environment for the fragile creatures that we are. But this hasn't stopped some from speculating about how humans could be modified to withstand the rigours of space — and their solutions are anything but subtle. Nanotechnology expert Robert Freitas has outlined a plan for the elimination of lungs, making breathable air unnecessary. Ray Kurzweil has speculated that future humans won't require food, equipped instead with nanobots that can energize our cells. And even Craig Venter has chimed in, putting out the call to develop an advanced inner ear that can allow people to escape motion sickness, genes for bone regeneration, and DNA repair for radiation He's also suggested that we develop a small stature, higher energy utilization, hairlessness, and slower skin turnover. And yet others have speculated about transforming humans into gangly octopus-like creatures who would be far more adapted to slithering around in zero gravity environments.

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10. Uploads

While the idea of uploading human consciousness into a supercomputer is weird unto itself, some of the visions of life after uploading are even weirder. Take Hansonian Uploads for example — the suggestion that uploaded minds might take it upon themselves to create virtually unlimited copies of themselves in order to compete in tough economic markets. Driving this suggestion is the suspicion that copying yourself will be fast and cheap, resulting an explosion of uploads. Another scenario could see an uploaded mind adjust its relative clock speed. With an agonizingly slow clock speed, for example, an uploaded mind could literally watch the unfolding of geological-scale events like the rising and falling of mountains. Uploaded minds could also hop from robotic body to robotic body, forever changing their real-world physical form. Another fascinating possibility could come in the form of altering the fundamental parameters of the computer-generated environment. This could result in something far beyond human comprehension, both in terms of the physical space (like adding dimensions or changing the physics of the environment) and the nature of psychological and subjective awareness itself.

This article originally appeared at io9.

Top image composed by Dougal Dixon. Inset images via (1) RedIce, (2) VHEMT, (3) Ecoliteracy, (4) StarTrek.com, (5) FutureMan, (6) Vegans of Color, (7) New York Fashion, (8) andrie-basket (Bol Manute) (9) Dougal Dixon, (10) FutureTimeLine.