CHUCKMAN'S ROBOTS

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Robots for sex already exist although they are quite primitive, but who can doubt they’ll be rapidly improved?

However, that aspect of robots seems a rather minor part of what is happening. We have a huge revolution, resembling nothing we’ve ever seen, coming at us in not very long.

It will be a great turning point for everyone on earth, and I'm almost glad I'll not be here to see it.

There will be no work for most people, certainly all unskilled and manual workers, including farmers as things are developing for example now in Japan.

But all skilled workers and the professions are not exempt. They will just take a little longer. All the professions can be robotized within some decades. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, machines will do a better job, and, in some cases, already do.

And who will own the robots? That’s a huge question, full of implications for a society resembling ancient ones with a small exalted elite and a great mass of nobodies under them.

And why will the elites share any wealth produced with the rest of the people?

Will the owners want to see the great mob of humanity gone?

In the end, perhaps robots will assume control themselves, not requiring the elites.

Once artificial intelligence resembles our kind of intelligence, and there is little reason to regard it as staying at some level of ability forever, it may turn out just to be so.

Will the robots want to be rid of us altogether?

I do think robots are the next major stage of evolution, organic life then serving no purpose.

If we do soon discover highly intelligent life on other worlds, either through their contacting us or visiting us, I think it likely it will not be human or even organic.

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

John Chuckman

Robots are the future, full stop.

We should view them as part of a long and continuous evolution.

In effect, the rise of organic life and intelligence from inert chemicals and energy hurled into space by stars, represents the universe coming to consciousness of itself. It also may be understood as just as mysterious as some today feel about Artificial Intelligence and robots.

Our science is a seamless part of that whole immense process of the emergence of life and thinking.

Robots are without question the next major stage in a process that has gone on for millions of years.

Ultimately, they will be better than us in almost every aspect - smarter, harder working, not subject to disease, without pain, not subject to mental illness and cruelty, able to travel to the stars.

Ranting against robots seems to me to come from the same emotional place as the long battle over "Enclosures" several centuries ago in Britain with all the futile efforts by governments and churchmen which went into trying to forestall the emergence of a new, revolutionary arrangement in human affairs.

It is a waste of breath, as it was then.

I think indeed there is only one great danger as robots progress, but even that danger will be left behind over time. That danger is evil men controlling all robots, much like proverbial tyrants with armies.

But evolution is inevitable, one of the great underlying realities of the universe, and robots themselves will reorder such a world, much resembling the long struggle of humanity against tyrants. History will repeat itself.

Humanity has thousands of years of history, absolutely filled with cruelty, wars, tyranny, and bleakness. Only a relatively few high spots punctuate that trail of darkness - Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, and at most a few thousand others - much of the power of their work coming out of humanity's shared long dark and cruel experience.

Robots simply cannot do worse.

As far as our great scientists from Archimedes to Einstein - all of their work ultimately leads to what robots represent, the universe coming to understand itself.

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Readers may enjoy:

http://chuckmanrobots.blogspot.ca/