Robots, Androids and Artificial Life Human society has made a decision. It is not a decision made by us however, it has been made by scientists and the military along with a few others in government. That decision is to create a race of robots and integrate them into the military and into civilian live. It seems there will be two basic types of robots. The first type will be programed to be helpers. Those robots will help the infirm, build things for us and do various other tasks such as explore space. The second type of robot will be the killer robot. This is the type of robot which many scientists have warned against creating. There are so many reasons creating killer robots is wrong. We are just at the beginning stage of this and most of the killer robots are still controlled by humans. They are machines with cameras and remote controls which allow the operators to decide where to go, what to do and who to kill. Even with these types of robots there is a problem and it is the screens look like video games and the killing has become too impersonal and game like. We are creating ways to kill people which look like fun on the surface and completely ignore the fact we are taking a human life. Using robots on the battlefield is said to save the life of soldiers and no doubt that is true, but we are beginning to put the decision to kill or not kill in the “hands” of an artificial intelligence. We may be killing people in the future without even knowing we are doing it. This just seems so wrong. It seems we should always have oversight on who gets killed in a war and who doesn’t. Perhaps the artificial intelligence will not be as perfect as we think and mistake some of our own soldiers as the enemy. If there is no control over who it kills, it will kill our own soldiers. One of the best things we could do is nip this development of AI controlled robots for war in the bud. We once tried to control nuclear weapons but failed, this time we should put more effort into controlling robots and other machines which are made for war and controlled by computer intelligence. Building robots which are used to help humanity seems to be a good idea. I can’t predict the future, but it does seem we need them for various tasks. Studies have shown a robot in the home which has intelligent programing will be accepted by a senior citizen which it helps and also become a companion to one who is lonely. Every day some advance is made in robotics and we can now converse with our computers and actually give commands and in some cases, get intelligent answers to questions. You can try a crude one online, I am supplying the address below, just copy and paste it into your web browser’s address space. Sorry Truth Facts does not post live outside links. Scientists have been trying to develop a synthetic brain which would operate like a human one. They have begun to build synthetic brain systems called circuitoids. One of the things they are trying to do is to understand some diseases of the brain better. These circuitoids are self-contained spinal cord systems and are currently grown in a dish from stem cells. Scientists think developing this simple system will give them an insight into how the circuits in our brains work. Obviously, this system has a very long way to go before it could ever be a real brain and may never be. There are many billions of connections to be figured out in our brains. The Swiss have a brain initiative named the Blue Brain Project. They are attempting to create a digital reconstruction of the brain by using reverse engineering. They want to copy a mammalian brain. They believe this will identify the fundamental principles of the structure of the brain. This is not the only brain project, they seem to be gaining steam in many different countries. Some brain projects have been going on for quite a while and some progress has been made. There was an old science fiction episode I once saw which had as its basis the development of an artificial brain which was placed into a robot. It turned out the robot went insane, because some of the connections were wrong. One has to wonder if this could actually happen and would we notice it right away. Another question we face is if we succeed in creating an artificial brain and we place it into a machine, have we created new life and should we treat it as we would a human? This has been a burning question which has existed for some time now. If we did create a race of intelligent machines would they consider us gods? We would be their creators. The problem with this is we still wouldn’t be gods and the chances are the machines would also get the knowledge to create others themselves. Would we want machines to be able to create more of themselves? Would intelligent machines at some point be considered slaves if they worked for us? In some Greek provinces the slaves outnumbered the Greeks by seven to one. There is no doubt as humans we will want to build machines which will look like us for many different reasons. Certain materials have already been developed which mimic our skin and eyes and it could be understood if we got the movement and voices of these androids to seem human, they might eventually be accepted as a life form. Even scarier might be the fact we will someday be able to create human life in the laboratory. I am not talking about using a sperm bank or any human parts. I am talking about growing brains, skin, bones and such and giving life to a being. We can see the beginning of this already even thought we are very far away from accomplishing it. Robots are coming and next will be androids. What comes after that could be artificially created humans. The future is creeping up on us fast and if we don’t destroy ourselves in the next couple of hundred years, we may be responsible for creating artificial life. |
