The robots will be a continuation of us, and they won’t mean our extinction any more than a new generation of children spells the extinction of the previous generation of adults. In any case, in the long term, the robots are much more likely to resurrect us than our biological children are.
We have a Stone Age brain, but we don’t live in the Stone Age anymore. We were fitted by evolution to live in tribal villages of up to 200 relatives and friends, finding and hunting our food. We now live in cities of millions of strangers, supporting ourselves with unnatural tasks we have to be trained to accomplish, like animals who have been forced to learn circus tricks … We can change ourselves, and we can also build new children who are properly suited for the new conditions. Robot children.
Machine intelligences of the far future will … be able to reconstruct human society in every detail by tracing atomic events backward in time … By this logic, our current “reality” could be nothing more than a simulation produced by information entities … “The robots will re-create us any number of times, whereas the original version of our world exists, at most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking, it’s much more likely we’re living in a vast simulation than in the original version. To me, the whole concept of reality is rather absurd. But while you’re inside the scenario, you can’t help but play by the rules. So we might as well pretend this is real – even though the chance things are as they seem is essentially negligible.”
You end up with [robots] forming a cyberspace where entities try to outsmart each other by causing their way of thinking to be more pervasive. Here’s an ecology where all the dead-matter activity has been squeezed out and almost everything that happens is meaningful. You have this sphere of cyberspace with a robot shell, expanding outward toward Earth … It will look like a region of space glowing warmly, with hardly anything visible on a human scale. The competitive pressure toward miniaturization will result in activity on the subatomic level. They’ll transform matter in some way; it will no longer be matter as we know it … I don’t think humanity will last long under these conditions.
Robot factories located in space would be able to manufacture products with maximum efficiency … they could conduct hazardous research and radio the encrypted results back to their parent corporation on Earth. Only a small “seed colony” of robots would be needed to set up an off-world operation … “Now suppose a company goes out of business, leaving its research division in space, where there’s no supervision. The result is self-sustaining, superintelligent wildlife.” This marks the point where the genie finally gets out of the bottle and Earth’s retirement community of pampered humans finds itself faced with a big problem … All the local materials will be plundered and converted into machines.
“Everything will depend on the way in which we create it. Crafting these machines and the corporate laws that control them is going to be the most important thing humanity ever does. You know, each age has an activity in which the best minds get involved. Crafting the laws, and their implementation, will be the thing to do in the 21st century.” If the job is done right, he predicts a world of comfort, health, and boundless plenty – at least for a while. Human beings will be like slave owners whose servants never complain, need no supervision, and are constantly eager to please.
When robots are doing all the work [by the year 2040], … industry becomes more efficient, there will be more wealth, allowing people to retire earlier. When industry is totally automated and hyper-efficient, it will create so much wealth that retirement can begin at birth.
By 2030 … each time a robot learns a fact or masters a skill, it will be able to pass its knowledge to other robots as quickly and easily as sending a program over the Net. This way, the task of understanding the world can be divided among thousands or millions of robot minds. As a result, the machines will soon develop a deeper knowledge base than any single person can hope to possess. Within a short space of time, robots that are linked in this way will no longer need our help to show them how to do anything … there’s no doubt that systems that can analyze their world, deduce generalizations, and modify their behavior will have a major impact on society … By around 2040, there will be no job that people can do better than robots.
By 2040, we can have robots that are as smart as we are. Eventually, these machines will begin their own process of evolution and render us extinct in our present form … It’s the best thing we could hope for, the ultimate form of human transcendence.
It seems likely that in a year, anybody is going to be able to buy a machine that with a minimum of configuring will give them absolute protection against wiretaps. And, no doubt, governments from Syria to Singapore will react poorly to this idea. Inevitably, though, nothing can be done: given good speech recognition and voice-synthesis algorithms running on either end of a connection, the bandwidth required by a phone conversation can be shrunk to a few hundred baud or less, and the signal carrying the communication can be hidden in the faintest trickle of line noise … “What can they do? Maybe they’ll have to make peace.”