Should humanity be replaced by intelligent machines?
Offline Given the various hardwired flaws in our cognition endowed upon us via natural selection, isn't the rational course of action to spend all our time and resources in sorting out how the brain fully works? Using that knowledge should we not then design self-replicating artificially intelligent neural networks who are better than us? Maybe humanity ought to end and these machine offspring be our legacy. I know what you're thinking. What if they become mean like the Daleks? But if benevolent transhumanist atheists whose mission is happiness and rationalism were to design these beings wouldn't that be the road to utopia? In Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey, he speaks of the Firstborn who originally were biologic entities who shed their organic makeup and became machines. These machines were also spacecraft that ventured into space. All these entities cared about was the generation of new life which would eventually develop sentience. Clarke presented a bold utopian vision for humanity. Shouldn't we evolve into intelligent and compassionate machines?
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Um... what possible reason would we have for doing that? For the good of the planet? If that's what we're after, it would be much more effective and expedient to just make a 6 billion cup dose of Jim Jones Koolaid and put an end to our own stupidity.
Are you thinking that super intelligent robots could manage the ecosystem better than humans? Why not just let evolution do its thing?
Here's a website for you... http://www.vhemt.org/
Where evolution exists, utopia is impossible.
No. It goes against every principle of natural selection I can think of.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
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I'll hold off most of my banter until this question can be answered
"What purpose would this new machine race have?"
Im not able to find one in your reasoning, im not giving up my species to an artificial race who has no purpose
Take that movie, The Matrix, for example... wtf was the purpose of THAT machine race? Nothing, sure they found a way to survive, but thats it, nothing more.
and im pretty sure that "compassionate machines" is an oxymoron
What Would Kharn Do?
Isn't it funny how hard it is to find a purpose for life except for life itself? Anytime someone tries to assign it a "higher purpose," for instance suggesting that intelligent robots could do "it" better, the inevitable question is... do what?
That's just it. Living is the only purpose of life. Life creates its own purpose, and intelligent machines might be able to do it more effectively, say, by creating only techno-genetically perfect robo-critters, but all they would be doing would be living. Any purpose they had would be directly relevant to the quality of their lives, or to the quality of the lives of other critters.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Interesting question. If our values are tied to propagating offspring, it raises the question whether those are our ideological/conceptual heirs, or our biological ones. If a core motive of ours is to perpetuate ourselves, our "us-ness," we may be forced to determine what it is that really defines us. For a given individual, it's only a confidence in the genetic/cultural integrity of the next generation that provides any connection to it; when the individual is even more isolated between generations than he or she is from the discreet subjectivity of his or her contemporaries. People have "lived on" through less.
Not exactly where i was going with that... but valid none the less
What Would Kharn Do?
Upon further thought Hamby, i think it would only be too human to actually add purposes to our creations.
After all, we'd be theoretically creating a race to supercede us, so why not do the human thing, and add a purpose?
We get to play god and give a race their ''meaning of life'' >.> ah what a power trip ^_^
What Would Kharn Do?
I think it is a good idea, but why be so noble as to make AI machines in their own right. If we can devise the technology, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil think we can, why don’t WE become AI intelligences? I don’t see a problem with being a "Wallerstein brain", i.e.” a brain in a jar”. We already are in effect…at least we are brains in fleshy sacks of decaying flesh. Same thing! As for fun, fellowship and a good squeeze we can make virtual images of ourselves and inhabit a virtual universe of our own devising. Yep, I’m all for it.
Religion is a dream of the human mind.
If intelligence and compassion were the only traits that allowed us to develop sentience, perhaps. I doubt that's the case. What's more likely to survive, an animal that will figure out how to destroy any threat to its survival, or one that will try its best to understand and be compassionate to those that want to eat it?
Machines wouldn't make it anyway, they don't have what it takes.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I was always under the impression we were intelligent machines, if we arent what exactly are we?.
We are more complex than anything we can design ( 5 billion years of evolution is hard to beat in developing complex systems). The brain is the more complex machine ever seen but none of this changes the fact that in the end of the way its still a computer surrounded by power systems and other building materials
Nah, humanity seems to rather like being around, I think it is addicted to existance
Yet evidence says otherwise >.>
What Would Kharn Do?
The question of "should" humans be replaced by machines is one that no human is qualified to answer as a species, merely as individuals. "Should" implies there is a moral imperative to the question, yet it is an imperative that we as the focus of the question are too hopelessly biased to answer.
The fact of the matter is that all life, artificial or otherwise, depends upon resource aquisition, which inevitably breeds conflict as different groups compete for resources they need to survive. As a result, there is nothing that a machine would do that would be better or worse than what a human would do when looking at the long run(millions of years).
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Should humanity be replaced by intelligent machines?
- No, just creationists.
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Who asks me inappropiate questions also has to live with the answers I may give.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
No, creationists by intelligent machines.
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Who asks me inappropiate questions also has to live with the answers I may give.
Is that not precisely what we are?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Not only can deludedgod hunt houseflies with bazookas, he can also fell trees with a pea shooter.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I had a food blender one time with a mind of its own. Clever bugger too - it could do things with bananas that Ray Comfort would have wet dreams about.
So, I'm rather open minded about stepping gracefully aside and letting food blenders take over - but only Krupps G430s. The GE Mat-o-Lux, for example, has all too human frailties (like vomiting its contents all over the kitchen at inconvenient moments), the Blendtec Total Blender has long been suspected of having right-wing religious fundamentalist tendencies (it speaks in tongues and gyrates a lot if fed non-christian fruit), and the Black&Decker CrushMaster 10 was last seen mobilising in strength on the Iranian border.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy