Do Robots Rule the Galaxy?
http://news.discovery.com/space/do-robots-rule-the-galaxy-121201.html
This article also mentions the rather silly Cambridge Project for Existential Risk but since it touches on a subject I have thought about from time to time (I feel sure I blogged on it, but can’t find any such posts) I figured it would fit in nicely. I tend to agree with the notion that mechanical / silicon life is the natural extension of human intelligence (perhaps as a cyborg, perhaps as pure AI) and that, baring us extincting ourselves (certainly within our power!) I view that outcome as inevitable. The author’s particular slant, that machine intelligence would be incurious about us bits of ‘thinking meat’, I personally think is off. If the machines are incurious at all, they won’t leave the planet they were created on and I find it a bit hard to imagine any species that is curious enough to build machine intelligence without, at least accidentally, imbuing that intelligence with some of its own curiosity. Thus, I expect instead that if there is machine intelligence (something I generally accept as a given unless once created the machine intelligence immediately gets so bored it commits suicide), then we are already being observed. Perhaps the MI is waiting for an event sort of like the Vulcans in Star Trek: the invention of the warp drive. Maybe there is an unambiguous signature when a MI has been created and the existing MIs will then do a meet and greet. Either intelligent life is so extraordinarily rare (once per galaxy lifetime, for instance, something I pretty much wholesale reject as possible) that we really are (effectively; absent any ‘warp’ drive, we aren’t visiting any other galaxies) unique or we are being monitored by intelligent remote probes sent to our system. Maybe they are incredibly patient and will sit there (and have sat there) for billions of years and simply mark our existence. Maybe they are waiting for us to create our version of MI and then will seek to meld with it and take what is of benefit to them.
Maybe I am full of crap and just fantasize too much.
