Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Will machines subjugate and destroy humanity?






Most people believe there is a real and imminent threat within the distant future when robots and machine intelligence will take over the planet and destroy humankind. If not destroy then subjugate.

There should be no fear of machine intelligence  causing the subjugation or extinction of humans.

We are already "controlled" by machines
Humans are increasingly being supplemented with and complemented by artificial and machine intelligence. Our current situation is we are deeply dependent on machine intelligence to perform our work, than people realise. 

For example, without machine intelligence, we would not be able to
  • design modern buildings with complex stability structures, 
  • write complex business and gaming software, 
  • design and manufacture the complex ICs and computers we depend on, 
  • fly a huge jetliner
  • etc
Without machine intelligence, the world economy will collapse. Pharmaceutical, medical, engineering, manufacturing ... most of everything ... and your car will not fire-up. We will be dead in the water without machine intelligence. 

The spreadsheet for example.

Learning to control the machines like learning ABC
The days are coming where we would have attachments to our brains like a visor or membrane hat, thro which we would acquire the comprehension of calculus or quantum physics within a couple of days. And then we would not have  to remember the formulae, we just need to understand how things work. Because there will be constant communication between the auxiliary artificial brain, where it intelligently deciphers what information you need from its repository.

We will no longer go to school to perform useless memory work. Rather we would go to school to learn how to organize our thinking and how to organize the information on our artificial auxiliary brain. Not very far from people learning how to organize their facebook stuffs or their windows desktop, I suppose, for quick and easy access. Like advanced excel users customizing the whole user interface to their own convenient access.

We are already deep in the pit with machine intelligence than we would dare to realize.

The future of machine supplemented human network
And someday soon, medical technology will deploy bio-nano-robotic germs to heal us of cancer. And why would people stop there? We will borrow remnants from the HIV and Ebola to have billions of robotic-viruses to invade and modify our DNA to perform seamless and flawless plastic surgery. And to improve our intelligence.

The sport of bodybuilding would be obsolete. Rather the sport would mutate into the art and science of using HIV to sculpt your body competitively.

In the future, a new form of marriage will emerge. It will be the marriage of compatible minds by forming an intellectual cloud. It will be the copulation of the intellect. You will have to choose carefully whom you allow to share your mind with. Two conjoined intellects would be better than the individual sum of both.

And then we would be like the Portuguese man-of-war which is actually an "organism" due to the permanent conjoining of 4 or more individual jellyfish. Goodbye to the gay marriage debate.

Humans would technologically evolve into bio-genetic androids. Our livers, spleens, kidneys, various organs will be replaced, repaired and regenerated in situ using biogenetic nanobots. We will be deliberately infected with such nanobots from young, like immunization shots. Gradually, our genetic system would be modified to reproduce these nanobots naturally.

What ethics?
Impossible. People would never accept it.

Well, it used be unethical and cheating to bring calculators into the exam room. It is unethical to bring in a powerful palm-sized computer with you to take the test. Why should it be unethical? Who sets those rules and say it is unethical to have a powerful computer to help you complete your Physics o Maths exam? Why?
Outmoded thinking
It was unthinkable half a century ago that we would be so completely dependent on computer-aided design and creativity to help us design and manufacture intricate and complex systems.

It was unthinkable that people should be allowed to use calculators in our exam rooms. It is still unthinkable that students should be allowed to use computers in exams. Current education modes are ridiculously trying to test us on our memorization capability rather than our ability to creatively use facts and data presented to us.

But all that outmoded way of thinking will be extinct.

We would no longer go to school to engage in the silly activity of learning data-based information. Instead, we would be going to school learning how to interact and exploit information. Where to learn about calculus, we put on the calculus helmet. But of course, a helmet would contain more than just calculus.

Machines will never subjugate humans
There is near zero chance for machine intelligence to subjugate or extinctify the human race. We will be too far ahead with our supplementary and complementary intelligence,  and human networks.