Topic: Community/Culture

People were very self-confident … They put forward a goal that was ambitious, and that I believe we may never achieve: to build agents that are very intelligent, have common-sense knowledge, and understand why people do things. AI researchers have been trying to do this for 15 or 20 years, and haven’t seen significant results.

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.