Humans Becoming Robots, Robots Becoming Human

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On March 1, 2012 the Nevada DMV issued the first license for a Google Driverless Car. The idea behind this innovation is that one day soon new technology will drive cars safer and more skillfully than humans, thus saving lives and billions of dollars in car crashes. How well this idea catches on is a bit questionable, given the powerful “romance” of driving one’s car, but it’s certainly an indicator of things to come in the daily intersection of human and artificial intelligence and mobility. There have always been those who have dreamed of stepping into a mechanical exo-skeletal-type “suit” and letting the engineering do the work, instantly increasing limited human speed, strength, endurance and accuracy.







Mech-suits like the ones that have become standard fare in sci-fi films and videogames may be getting closer to becoming a practical reality more than you might think. Already, tech innovations for leg braces helping people walk, back supports for the crippled and other futuristic light-weight prostheses have been developed as spin-off benefits of Honda’s work in building their robot “Asimo.”


Asimo is more than just a cool tribute to Isaac Asimov (the sci-fi writer who first “imagined” robot androids indistinguishable from humans in stories like “I, Robot”) – he (she?) walks and moves independently, utilizing a rudimentary “artificial intelligence.” Asimo may not be capable at this point of doing much more than carrying out a human master’s commands with programmed responses and actions, but this is definitely the very real beginning of a future portending some very fascinating, and possibly scary, questions...











At what point will our robots’ “artificial” (programmed) intelligence become all too real, arming them with “free will?”


Prometheus was punished for all eternity by the gods for giving the gift of fire to us mortals. Will we mortals be inadvertently hastening our own obsolescence and overthrow by giving the gift of “true A.I.” to the powerful machines we’ve built with our own hands?


Maybe we’ll keep innovating and strengthening our mighty mech-suits. Then if our robots, having attained free will via true A.I., choose to rebel against us, we will be ready to don our own armor for the final Battle Royale. And so it will be that the robots who have become virtually humans will fight it out with the future humans capable of transforming into virtual robots for dominion over all that’s left of “civilization.” (Or maybe by then Humans and Androids will have sufficiently evolved their intelligences to be able to live together peacefully as extensions of and helpers to one another.)




































Questions


For the Reader





1Would you prefer to have a domestic robot that does most of your mundane housework and other tasks for you? Or would you prefer to wear a personalized mech-suit that would let you “work” tirelessly on your tasks with extra-human strength and pin-point accuracy?


2Would you want a “driverless car” to drive you safely to all your destinations, freeing you to sleep or read this article or simply sight-see during the journey? Or do you think you’d prefer the visceral experience, always, of hands-on-the-wheel driving?


3Can you envision a future in which robots (androids) become so sophisticated that they become absolutely indistinguishable from humans?





4If a robot is in every way as sentient (self-aware), intelligent and emotionally wired as a human, is ownership of such a “machine” possible? Or would this be a form of slavery? Will robots eventually have to be granted the same human rights as people?


5At some evolutionary point, will robots possess a “soul” just like a human soul? Will human society evolve quickly enough socially to keep up with a technologically advanced future in which a robot and human can fall in love... and produce android-human children?












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The-Darkwolf's avatar

The aspect that makes me worried is not the idea of a robot becoming more human, but the human becoming more robotic. If we view the robot (from an old Russian sci-fi story “Robotnik”, meaning “slave”) as merely one of a series of labor-saving devices, then the level of “humanity” we invest in it would be commensurate with its duties and functions. The Geek Factor comes into play, of course, as added applications and new parameters are added to demonstrate one’s cleverness without thought to consequence or responsibility ( like the driverless cars, who have killed at least two pedestrians so far. Who bears the responsibility?)


What I wonder about is the other side of the equation. When do we begin to surrender our humanity? The justification of aids to work or to overcome disabilities can quickly transfer over to justifying unnecessary augmentations. An increasing number of people are already utilizing unneeded and dangerous chemical augmentations such as ADHD meds taken by college students to aid memory retention and concentration, viagra by healthy young people for sexual prowess and various athletic performance enhancers. What then when we synch up with performance enhancing mechanics? Downloadable memory in our brains? Take an insulin pump and convert it to dispensing combat cocktails?


Its not the augmentation that is the inherent concern. God knows various military and corporate interests would love such enhancements for practical reasons, but these are mindsets that view humans as robots anyway. It’s what happens when we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.


The “endurance armour” that was described before, for example. For specific applications (Ripley’s forklift loader suit from Aliens or the Power Combat Suits from Starship Troopers) such tech would be laudable but how long before abuse sets in? Since you can work all day how long before you are required to? Or how long before you prefer to? How long before you atrophy inside your God Suit?


in the 1970s, numerous studies were done on the effects of television watching habits on the ability to analyze and cognition that indicated that basically, TV made one dumber. Spin ahead to the 2000s and a study that asserted that Google made you stupid. When your brain is hardwired for downloadable content, how lazy does the energy-efficient obsessed human brain become?


so how long before we have to put the gods we made in control because we have surrendered our own humanity?