Welcome to the future: Bill Bain is your guide to tomorrow's world

Sex, death, love – everything that is the very essence of humanity is being altered by the tsunami of technological and scientific change sweeping across the planet at an unprecedented pace.

Perhaps only our harnessing of fire changed humanity as radically as the internet, the unravelling of the genome and, soon, the ubiquitous dominance of AI systems. Change is happening so quickly we can barely perceive it – and in that lack of understanding lies danger. In the world of 24-7 mass media, it is becoming increasingly impossible to differentiate between truth and fiction when it comes to futurology – what is wild optimism or what is simply doomsaying nonsense.

To help bring clarity, the Sunday Herald tracked me down to my underground Arctic bunker and dragged me to Glasgow, where I am now charged with taking you by the hand and leading you into the future.

When Dante descended into Hell, he had the poet Virgil as his companion. All you have is me. Over the coming weeks and months, we will explore plausibility and possibility together, attempt to sift fact from fiction, and try to work out whether we should be cowering in terror or brimful of joy at a future which is already upon us.

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ARE FRIENDS ELECTRIC?

PICTURE the scene: it is February 17, 2021 and Earth is in darkness. Electrical grids across the globe are down. Societal structures and governmental authority have crumbled. Anarchy and chaos reign across each of the seven continents.

An experimental Artificial Intelligence program based in California’s Silicon Valley had decided the human race’s fate in its first nanosecond of self-awareness, taking out most of the planet’s essential infrastructure with an unstoppable virus. In an irony even President Schwarzenegger appreciated, humanity’s only hope now lay with North Korea - the isolationist state’s online systems immune to the global attack.

Arnold wept as the lights above him flickered back to life. The machines’ reign was over. Kim Jong-un’s spit-and-sawdust nukes had traversed the Pacific and hit their target, turning Silicon Valley into the planet’s largest graveyard. The Greater Korean People’s Republic was born.

Of course, this is a highly unlikely scenario. But so is one of Facebook robots plotting a similar downfall for our species, a reality proposed by many recent headlines. “AI robots shut down after developing own language” and “Engineers panic, pull plug on AI” are just two examples from mainstream tabloids.

It’s true we can allow ourselves a wee shudder at recent progress made by Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research Division, which along with Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft seems to be turning its attention towards finding a solution to that eternal human malady – loneliness.

Programmed to engage in everyday conversation, today’s robots, or “chatbot” programs are highly impressive – reacting and responding to inflections, hesitations, hums and haws like a real flesh-and-blood acquaintance. All this and they will never ask you for a loan of a tenner.

But it’s when these machines talk to each other, rather than us, that something very interesting takes place. We discover that they develop their own language – and it is one no human knows. As the dust settles on tabloid depictions of a profound advancement in digital self-awareness, a more prosaic – yet still fascinating – truth reveals itself. The Facebook AIs in question – cutely named Bob and Alice – were simply attempting to find the easiest way to talk to something similar to itself.

Frantically searching their code for buzzwords the other would recognise, their garbled conversation raises questions not of machine self-awareness, but on how humans developed language.

The chatbot discovery took place during an experiment to investigate how well the AIs could negotiate the ownership of some balls. Bob and Alice dismissed with any pleasantries and got straight down to business. Who cares about the weather if you’re a flash of electricity soldered onto a board of silicon?

A somewhat dysfunctional couple, their poignant final conversation before respective plugs were pulled follows thus: Bob: “you i i i everything else . . .”  Alice: “balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”

I’ve heard worse chat-up lines, but it does seem Bob and Alice lacked a certain chemistry. Vivid descriptions of panicking programmers “shutting down” a mysterious conversation are certainly evocative, but the truth is unworthy of such dramatic hyperbole. Facebook switched the machines off as their mutual “language” was simply incomprehensible.

It was an interesting exercise in how chatbots react to non-human interaction, a quirk of programming, but that’s all. No need to cower underneath the bed just yet.

What the apocalypse-baiting headlines do achieve, however, is allowing an insight into current ambitions in Silicon Valley to monetise loneliness. The question of why chatbots are necessary – or if their mass-adoption will be beneficial in combating depression and isolation – would have made for a truly credible news story, no hyperbole necessary.

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FUTURE OF HACKING IS IN THE BLOOD

TRAILBLAZERS in countless ways, the ancient Greeks would certainly approve of tactics being employed by researchers at Ohio State University. Working on a new way to treat drug-resistant cancers, they recently enabled a Trojan horse “virus” hidden within the patient’s own DNA to act against the disease. In this instance, the Trojan Horse was a common cancer drug.

In lab tests, leukemia cells that had become resistant to the medication now absorbed it and died when it was hidden in a capsule of folded-up genes – a cutting-edge technique known as “DNA origami”.

It’s a little known fact that just a single gram of DNA can store one billion terabytes of data – the equivalent of 10,000 billion songs, which very nearly covers everything Prince released in his lifetime. And in March this year, a team of researchers from computing giant IBM successfully managed to store digital information – an entire operating system, a movie and an Amazon gift card – inside a strand of DNA. The infinite-data hard drives of the future might be made from your own blood, it seems.

But when one hand giveth, another taketh away – and a similar technique has now been used to load a malicious program into human DNA and hijack computers that attempt to read it.

A team of coders from the University of Washington last week revealed the first successful biological exploitation of a computer system, using human DNA to transmit a virus from the organic world to the digital realm.

Following the hack, they gained full control over a computer that had tried to process the data. The results show that it is now technically feasible to use the human body as a way to transfer malware and attack PCs, but the researchers stress there is no immediate cause for alarm – that their work only highlights the need to look at DNA security in a future where such “attacks” are commonplace.

As you can assume, the hack itself was an extremely complex undertaking and requires a computer connected to a genetic sequencing machine, which most of us don’t have at home.

But the research, funded with the commercial aim of turning DNA into an infinite digital storage medium, paints a disturbing vision of a near future where anything can be hacked – even our own bodies.

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NOT SO HUMAN RACE

SO farewell to wee Mo and big Usain, both managing to bow out on top as the dominant forces of their respective disciplines. An athlete’s shelflife is short, even if they make it to the point where retiring is their own decision. Always lurking are the risks of injury, lurid tabloid exposure or even losing the “eye of the tiger” like Rocky.

Training montages set to histrionic guitar solos do not gift superhuman prowess in real life, however, so it does beg the question – why bother with fallible, fragile flesh sacks at all when it comes to the boorish societal blood-letting of competitive sport?

I’m not suggesting the replacement of athletes with machines. That dystopian nightmare scenario already exists – it’s called Robot Wars and is on the telly after River City. For the uninitiated, both are TV programmes populated by knee-high drones wielding buzzsaws and guns, prophetic visions hinting at a future Earth carpeted with human skulls, tattooed by burned shadows.

For me, the clear solution to decrepitude in the athletic arena is to introduce competing human-animal chimeras. Let me explain. I’m a great believer that anything we can visualise is possible – and it seems some bright young things at the renowned Salk Institute in San Diego believe so too.

Earlier this year, scientists there created an organism from the cells of two entirely different species. In the simplest terms, a pig embryo was injected with human DNA and grown for four weeks before it was destroyed – obeying current laws on chimera creation. They say human flesh tastes like pork and in this instance that would most certainly have been true.

Traditionally, chimeras have been a scientific impossibility for various reasons, with such gene manipulation ineligible for public grants in most countries. The Salk team, funded by private donors hoping they’ll one day become the ruling half-man, half-tyrannosaur elite, are among a few silos scattered around the world with the courage and cash to go boldly forth with the endeavour.

You’ll agree the possibilities for athletics are endless. A giraffe-human amalgamation would have a great advantage in a 100m photo finish – and could also use its own neck to pole-vault.

A new golden age of competitive Olympic spirit would also be ushered in if countries could only put forward nationalistic chimeras, animals borne of their own homeland.

Canadian runners would have your eye out, moose antlers decapitating the competition on both sides of the track. Australians’ kangaroo pouches would be filled with loose change and keys to make the triple jump fairer. And French athletes, well … if France has a national animal it’s a lit cigarette with four matchsticks stuck in it. The creation of that embryo will always be illegal.

And, as always, Scottish sprinters would view the finals at home on TV. Only able to transmorph into Highland cows, vision obscured by luxuriant fringes, we blindly stampede en masse onto the first bus home.

It’d be truly tragic if the only limitation of genome manipulation – in a future where transport doesn’t exist as we soar above the clouds with eagle wings – is Scottish track and field success.

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BATTLE OF THE TECH TITANS

IT’S clear to me that the eventual evolutionary outcome of all today’s technological advances is planet-sized robots made from pure energy in gladiatorial combat on the glimmering edges of black holes, fleeting in and out of space/time to recuperate between photon blasts.

Theoretically, these immortal superbeings could rest for a billion years in a trans-dimensional fold then pop back to continue the fight without a single spectator noticing.

And by spectators I mean countless distilled human consciousnesses floating in a neural network, exchanging Googlecoin on a fight sweepstake powered by thought alone.

Billionaire engineer Elon Musk has similar dystopian visions of the future - and his concerns have brought about a bit of a public rammy with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.

Both tech giants accept that self-aware machines are coming - the difference is that Musk believes they could potentially destroy the human race while Zuckerberg envisions us all clasping hands together under rainbows.

That’s the official story. The truth is that both are just protecting their commercial interests and brand identities – attempting to shape public perceptions of the technology which stands to make them both billions in the coming years.

When people of such eminent status use the term “Artificial Intelligence” publicly, it’s always with a high degree of conceit. They know that AI is a near-meaningless catch-all for intelligent computer systems and that the public attaches their own meaning to the phrase. Whether dark visions from Hollywood’s febrile imagination or the type of hyperbolic “AIs are talking!” headlines mentioned in the first part of this week’s column, mindsets are being moulded.

So why are Musk and Zuckerberg trying to make their influence felt? Heralding the advent of AI as an alarming existential threat to humanity is certainly consistent with Musk’s future investments and plans. He’s an engineer who attempts to bring solid, mechanical, tangible creations – electric cars, space rockets – to a world that was unaware there was ever a problem that needed a solution to begin with. Zuckerberg, not a creator of anything physical or, indeed, real – is an idealist, a dreamer. With billions of Facebook users and countless advertisers who ache to reach them with their digital tentacles, he realises spreading terror about killer robots only alienates ordinary people from the Walt Disney future he hopes will transpire. Computers are your friends, he is saying. Watch Short Circuit, not the Terminator movie that Musk seems to love.

It’s all business and nothing personal. The war for the public’s hearts and minds – and cash – is just beginning and with AI taking astounding leaps forward, the debate is going to get very frothy indeed.