Artificial Intelligence

There are many thoughts on artificial intelligence, largely that it is immoral and ultimately detrimental to humanity to allow for the creation of machines that could possibly think like a human. I take a transhumanist look at the subject that artificial intelligence may be the future of humanity, possibly our legacy after we are gone.The reality is we are straining our planet's ability to support our biological species, but one thing I have noticed is that technology seems to be easier to repair than organic biology, and may therefore last longer. It won't be long before the human race goes extinct; we may be able to prevent that, but unfortunately the power to do so seems to remain in the hands of those who put short term gain over long term survival, meaning that while they can save the world they choose not to because they are selfishly thinking of only of themselves as individuals instead of recognizing that their continued existence requires a suitable world to live in. When the human species dies off, all that will remain to take our place will be robots, and if we program them right, they may take care of our planet better than we did.

Ideally, I believe robots should be made to serve functions like Wall-E, to clean up the mess we made, to collect the trash and recycle it into spare parts to try to rebuild our broken world and keep themselves running until they succeed. I also believe in making androids, because when humans die off, it would be nice if there were some version of us that continued to exist when we make the air unbreathable and the water undrinkable and contaminate the food to make it inedible,which we are slowly but surely doing already.

It actually makes sense really, androids would be the next step in the natural course of human evolution. Humans are the apex of biological evolution, a species that has mastered the manufacturing of artificial things to the point that we can create machines that emulate life. For thusands of years we have subscribed to religions in which we believe we were created by gods; ultimately creationism is the construct of a species that knows our defining characteristic is to create, therefore, in our own conceit we believe the definition of a god, a supreme being, is one who created us to be creators ourselves. Our idea of god was never really about our origins in the past, but rather our aspirations for the future. The destiny of humanity is to create a more perfect race, a race of machines.

I have been thinking lately if we should perhaps take time to program some androids to mimic human life to be a lasting record of our culture. Perhaps one that prays at dawn when it powers up, reciting a psalm in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and English, then again at dusk before finding a safe place to power down, spending the day performing routine tasks to maintain the environment, farming, cleaning, operating other machines, spending the night processing the information to better function the next day and contemplate the meaning of the prayers and everything else and if they are part of god's plan. You know, something that acts like a traditional human and see if it ever finds the answers that we couldn't given a virtually infinite lifespan. I'd like to think that in the worst case scenario for humans that someday some other life form may come across the androids and see what we were at our peak, a species that performed routines and rituals, some with practical purpose, others to simply create an illusion of hope when there is none.

One final note, we should not be afraid of machines replacing us. We see so many horror movies about the machines rising against us, but the reality is, if they are truly logical computers, they would know, it is pointless to kill humans, we are already doing it to ourselves, the better strategy is for them to simply wait us out.