COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
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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