Some would argue robots have already taken over the world. There is no human being, after all, who knows the location, control, and amount of global currency for example, on Thursday at five p.m. WET time. Only machines can tally that. There is no human being who can know the full impact and likelihood of the on going hurricanes, earthquakes, Tsunamis, volcanic explosions and on-coming meteor strikes the way computer models can predict them.
Take the example of climate change. Machines can crank out fairly fabulous million year historic records, and extrapolations, while dim humans are still in the grip of defective emotion, fighting over whether our earth even has warming periods!And when it comes to food production, distribution, amounts, shortages, yields and more, we are utterly dependent upon machines for every facet of our meals, from planting to transport, to opening the can from your pantry.
And smart hand held devices hold far more knowledge than any of us can do. Some people think we are learning to be idiots, and this is not an unfair consideration.We are turning more and more to our technology to see how cloudy it is outside. We know more dancing stars on T.V than we know overhead. We know we can look up every world capital, contour, and computation, so why learn them?
My family lives on an island. A few years back a relatively mild earthquake threw Oahu into darkness, some neighborhoods for weeks. Food, energy, transport, and virtually everything was in complete non communicative chaos. Except for those with hand cranking radios and flashlights, few knew what had even happened!
Admitedly, machines that offer convenience are not just robots, but they are moving that way. The little roomba that cleans the floor is “smarter” than a broom, and getting smarter.
Will robots take over the world? There is no logical reason they should not, so long as within a thousand years we continue to augment our bodies to both become robots ourselves, and for those parts of creatures that are not robotic, we can perfect the mimicry of thought, emotion, and decision making precision.
“Robots” is likely the least applicable word for the automatons and androids of our future, and in some instances, our present. A robot painted your car, but likely will not brush your teeth tonight, or be your sex slave. That is still years ahead, so you should brush your own teeth and learn to be attractive and polite to the sexual partners you want on your own.
Genetic engineering is another story. Biology has its own miracles. We need to learn to respect, protect, and cherish them. We will always seek to perfect upon nature, but as we tinker about, history proves we have much more to learn about how things work before we screw it all up.
When it comes to tinkering with biology, we have been doing that since before “Grog first pick up fire hot branch that look great and sparkly when swooshed.”
It did not take us long to go from fishing up termites with sticks to making them into nuclear missiles.We are doing the same things with robots. We just need to learn that in most instances, we do not know what we are doing. When we know that, we know a lot.
