Imagining the Internet

A vision for the future

This is one of nearly a thousand foresight statements shared by people from around the world. To return to the Voices of the People home page, click here. To do a refined search of the Voices of the People statements, click here. To submit your ideas to this online archive, look to the upper right corner of this page, click on "Share Your Prediction" and fill in the pop-up form.

Name: L.W. Brown

From: Maryland

Bio: cybersecurity professional

Area of Expertise: Legislator/Politician/Lawyer

Topic: Controversial Issues

Headline: You will not know your master

Nutshell: If robots evolve, even enslave us, will we notice?

Vision: Assuming robots do evolve to become independent, it is likely to be so quick that we may not ever notice - certainly not until they have moved so far away from us that we can no longer understand what they are doing.

We may not even notice that they are doing anything at all - it could appear as if there was a brief burst of intelligence, then nothing, while the reality is something quite different.

So, a networked-based (hive-like) intelligence could be treating us as pets, but in a way that we would not notice. Do dogs or cats think of themselves as "pets" that "belong" to humans? Or do they think we are simply odd members of their pack or family? Do fish think of themselves as pets? Do crickets? They are kept as pets by some...

Do our cells "know" of themselves as parts of larger organisms? Why would we, if such a thing came to pass?

Date Submitted: 9/25/2006