With all the rapid advances in computer technology, are we humans moving toward a day when we will be able to “turbo-charge” the mind? Will we soon develop machine-enhanced super-human intelligence? I’m not sure if the prospect of us becoming prodigiously smart cyborgs is exciting or terrifying, but I’m also not sure it’s realistic.

Take our so-called “smart technology.” It was not so long ago that you needed separate devices for taking photos, listening to music, surfing the web, checking email, and talking on the phone. These days, you can do all that and more on one attractively designed, lightweight device. We maycallthat a “smart phone” but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to being genuinely smart, not in the way humans are. It does lots of things and it’s not very big, but that’s not enough to make it smart in any significant sense. What manufacturers call “smart technology” is not really smart, so we shouldn’t let the labeling mislead us.

Granted, we have developedsome在某些方面超越人类智力的技术。以“深蓝”(Deep Blue)为例，这台国际象棋机器在90年代击败了特级大师卡斯帕罗夫(Garry Kasparov)。虽然卡斯帕罗夫是一个非常聪明的人，但他不是“深蓝”的超级“脑力”的对手。但这种力量究竟意味着什么?当然，在计算国际象棋走法方面，深蓝甚至比最聪明的人类都要好，也更快。That’s a very limited capacity—not something that, by itself, deserves to be calledintelligence. If you asked Deep Blue to do something that any five-year-old could do, like get milk from the fridge, it would be stumped! How’sthatintelligence?

You might think that although Deep Blue doesn’t have the kind of intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in all or even most domains, the fact that we can create machines that are superior to us, even in this limited capacity, suggests that we are moving in the direction of having genuinely smart technology, and that someday soon we will develop machines that truly deserve to be called “intelligent.” Indeed, Deep Blue is old news by now. Today we have platforms like Siri, that apparently “understand” natural language, which definitely seems like technological progress. But can we really say we’re moving any closer to something like human intelligence in machines?

Let’s return to the example of the five-year-old getting milk from the fridge, a pretty basic task by human standards. As simple as it is, it does involve a lot of very different capacities. First, the child has to be able tounderstandthe request, which requires knowing English (or some other natural language). Then she has to be able tonavigateher environment—she has to be able to get to the fridge without bumping into other objects, figure out how to open the door, and so on. On top of that, she has to be able torecognizemilk among the many objects in the fridge. As far as I know, there’s no machine that can successfully accomplish basic tasks like that, never mind more complicated tasks.

What’s the point here? The point is that intelligence is not simply a matter of computing power. Deep Blue may be faster at retrieving information and calculating possibilities than humans, and if that’s all we mean by “intelligence” then sure, we’ve already built intelligent machines. But it’s nothing likehumanintelligence, so it’s not especially interesting in this context. Certainly, human intelligence is partly explained by computational speed and capacity, but that can’t be the full story or robots would already be fetching milk from the fridge, making tea, and asking if we’d like cookies with it.

The upshot is thatifwe are to build genuinely intelligent machines, we first need to figure out exactly what intelligence is, and what kinds of systems are capable of being intelligent. Only then can we realistically talk about “turbo-charging” the mind by incorporating intelligent technology into our bodies.

Of course, we already are incorporatingtechnology我们的身体里有起搏器，人造髋关节，人工耳蜗植入等等。你可以在手上植入植入医疗信息的皮下芯片，如果这是你的专长的话。谷歌护目镜已经被发明出来了，它能让我们看到非虚拟世界中各种信息的叠加，也许很快就会有隐形眼镜的版本。也许纳米技术手机或远程控制植入物的问世只是时间问题。无论我们是否能造出智能机器，这种情况都会发生。所以，技术进步越多，不管它是不是真正的智能，我们将越来越多地与机器融合。对于人类来说，半机械人的未来肯定是有可能的。

接下来的问题是，越来越多的技术融合会让我们变得超级聪明，还是会让我们变得超级愚蠢?我们已经把大量的认知工作转移到了环境中的物体上，这让我们变得高效，但也可能会让我们变得愚蠢和懒惰。例如，自从我有了手机，我就记不住任何人的电话号码。我也变成了一个非常糟糕的拼写者，因为我不需要记住怎么拼写了。如果我足够接近，拼写检查器将为我完成其余的认知工作。我甚至用GPS设备从办公室到走廊上的洗手间。好吧，没那么糟。然而。

但真正的危险是，我们会成为技术的奴隶，越来越没有能力为自己做事。因此，我们需要问，所有这些技术进步最终是会提高还是降低我们的智力。And if it turns out they really can increase our intelligence, is that a goal we evenoughtto have? I mean, what’s the ultimate point here? Are we going to become wiser or happier as a result of becoming smarter? Will merging with the machine make us kinder to one another? Or is there a danger that we will lose our essential humanity the more we incorporate technology into our lives and into our bodies?

Photo byGertrūda ValasevičiūtėonUnsplash