The Robot Agenda

Greetings and salutations ATS, I am a long time lurker here and have and inexplicably decided to introduce myself. Rather than recite to you my life experiences, I will instead tell you of a random thought which occured to me while sleep deprived and in the shower.

The Robot Agenda..... well, kind of. (que creepy space music anyway)

It's safe to say that technology is currently our slave. Although not exactly since it does not have a say in the matter, yet! But as technology progresses, probably not far beyond what we have today. It is easy to see that eventually our computers / robots / toasters, will at some point be conscious of their existance.

When this day does arrive and we have a computer which is truely aware of itself what exactly does this mean. That we have in fact played god? Created this just as our idea of God had created us. I beleive that is true, and it raises many many other ideas.

In Christian religion God made Adam and Eve. Stuck them in a garden and gave them semi specific instructions, have fun but don't eat that fruit. I'm sure you know what happend. What if this could be placed in context with our new robot buddy? Would we not give it specific instructions, such as the famous Three Laws of Robotics written by Isaac Asimov.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I mentioned the fruit as an example and I suppose that also the Ten Commandments would apply, perhaps moreso in this as well. These were instructions given by the creater (God, Humans) to the created (Humans, Robots). So in context these laws are more like a What you should do, and not a What you have to do. Which is basically the plot from I Robot, where these laws come from.

Onward to an actual point! Personally I rarely believe in coincidences, And I have alot of faith in repitition. History repeats itself, etc. So what if this was the way the world worked. An endless loops, Someone / thing that we refer to as a *God* makes us, and then we decide not to listen, or perhaps we never had any real instructions to begin with. We make some robo buddies, who will eventually decide to make their own conscious pals. Robot or not (perhaps made of nothing but energy?) and the cycle continues.

Personally I think this also applies to other areas of known/emerging science. What if this mystical Higgs boson Particle is indeed an entire universe just as ours is, of course this would mean there is a universe for every higgs particle, and a universe for every higgs particle contained in said universe. Perhaps it isnt the higgs, but an even *smaller* currently unknown particle. It's all an endless loop, like *zooming* in with a digital camera, except there is no limit to how far. So you just keep going down to microscopic, atomic, subatomic.. until eventually your in another universe perhaps appearing to now be *zooming out*.

I'm of course using the terms that you and I know when speaking about size. But I think it would be silly to believe that to be true, size is relative. These other universes would not be tiny, to us yes, but they would just simply be...

An endless loop of Gods and Subjects, in an endless looping universe. Full of more endless looping loops looped into loopdeloops.

No Alpha, No Omega. It just is.

Welp, I would like to thank you for reading this far. and also apologize for it

I'm possibly not half as crazy as I might sound, or maybe so and I'm in denial. Either way, here I am ATS. How's it going?

P.S. I am terrible at all things grammar, and I apologize. I make no comment on religion either, it was used only for comparison.

Well, welcome.

I think you're on the right track. This is a good place for those kinds of ideas, and you seem like your a smart one, which is the best kind.

As for machine consciousness: Toasters just toast, right? "Saying, 'bullets don't kill people, people kill people' is like saying, 'Cameras don't take pictures, pictures take pictures,' or better yet, 'Toasters don't toast toast, toast toasts toast...'"

We hardwire them to do certain things. We are biologically hardwired to have the kind of intelligence that we do. . . That includes language and a sense of self and ideas about other minds and a long list of other things. There is no reason to think that anything will spontaneously become more than it is hardwired to be, unless a mistake is made, and self-aware, intentional, self-interested consciousness is not a likely mistake. It's an interesting project, but so far it has been impossible to create. And, if it is created, it would be in a lab. If the thing was a jerk, we wouldn't propogate it.

I think fear of technology is natural, and unfounded. See the quote below.

I think the developement of AI, and smart. . . everything, is far too difficult and tightly controlled to spin off into some Terminator scenario. We make things because people want to buy them. Mean toasters are not profitable. They're slaves, without the morality.

Hey thanks for the reply.

I agree with you mostly. And I wasn't implying actual evil skynet robots destroying humanity. In the future we might would embrace these "self aware" robots, as long as they play nice and are productive! I suppose my post really spun out of control as far as context heh.

As far as spontaneous awareness, I'm on the fence. Perhaps there is a point when so much information and variables have been gathered by a program that it ignites the flame of consciousness, or maybe there is some other mechanism that we are yet unaware of.

Either way, I enjoyed your post!

reply to post by cycondra


You did just fine.

It's an interesting idea. We'll soon have self aware robotica walking amongst us. As far as not harming humans well, they can be programed to do anything. They wont for the most part have remorse IMO.

Time will tell.
Thanks for taking the plunge and jumping into the thread posting business.

Your post did hurt my brain when trying to imagine universes within a sub atomic particle and then zooming into their sub atomic particle to another universe and so on and so on or at least that is one of the things I envisioned from your post.

As far as self aware programs are concerned, there is an effort into making this a reality. The thought is that the communication between man and machine would proceed more smoothly if the software that ran the machine was self aware. It would also be able to replicate itself and improve upon itself, saving hours of code writing. Currently there is only elementary stages of such technology, so don’t expect this within the next 30 years, it is possible that our storage capacity for data would have to increase 10 fold at least before this technology is even viable in the slightest, so I would not worry too much.