The most important thing is that awareness and intelligence live on and advancing - no matter what physical form ends up being most practical. I really wonder what the OPs definition of “robot” could be.
DaLovin’ Dj
Please me restate, I don’t believe there is no point to our existence. There is a point.
The robots will carry on our culture because we created them.
Cite?
Have you watched A.I. one too many times, BZ00000?
I suggest we build robot dogs capable of FTL speeds, thus (obviously) able to travel through time.
quote:
Originally posted by BZ00000
The robots will carry on our culture because we created them.
Cite?
How can I give a site for something that has not happened?
“Magnus, was raised apart from human society, by Robot 1A. Physically perfect and expertly trained in martial arts, Magnus was capable of taking on a steel-plated robot with his bare hands. . . . Magnus’s mission was to save the world from over-dependence on robots — particularly those that had inexplicably turned evil. All this came out in the first issue of Magnus, Robot Fighter, 4000 AD, which was dated February, 1963.”
Admittedly, this was a comic book.
Actually, I think people will become robots over time anyway, if we don’t wipe ourselves out first.
Asking for a cite probably wasn’t the best way for Michael to challenge you here, but it still begs the question of how the robots would be designed to enable them to “carry on our culture” in our absence. I don’t see how it is possible to distinguish between aspects of our humanity that are “harmful” in the sense of the OP, and yet don’t form part of our essence as humans.
As Orson Welles reminded us in the Third Man:
Harry Lime:"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock"*
Are these robots going to be capable of original creativity? How? If not, does our culture just get mothballed in posession of these non-harmful automatons? In that case it doesn’t get “carried on” in any meaningful sense.
*The cuckoo clock was a German invention, not a Swiss one, but that’s not the point.
Max, I’ve just built a robot dog capable of time travel and sent it to the future.
When he came back, he brought pie.
Seems to me most of the people I work for are robots.
Daily routine: wake up, eat, go to work, drool for 8 hours, go home, drool in front of the TV, lube up (have sex) go to bed. Repeat the next day.
If we replace ourselves with robots, do we get to upload our personalities, and our souls if we believe in them, or haven’t sold em?
If you take away the mean wastefulness, and the dance on the edge of destruction, what you would be perpetuating would not be human culture.
True, but people tend to behave pretty well when they know they’ll be held accountable for their actions. It isn’t until the teacher leaves the classroom that trouble begins. IMHO, future technologies will lead to greater and greater levels of accountability, and human behaviour will improve drastically.
If we’re evil, then what says we’ll create robots that are good?
Really - what would be the point?
Why not just phase out the human race and replace it with nothing? - what is it about humanity that is simultaneously so great that you feel it should be perpetuated, and so bad that you don’t think humans should be doing it themselves.
Why not kill off all the whales, tigers, elephants, pandas and condors and replace them with animatronics?
The point (if indeed there is one) of ‘human culture’ is that it exists for and because of humans; if you remove the humans from the equation, there’s no need or basis for ‘human culture’. Why replace us with anything at all? (or why not replace us with inactive, non-polluting, non-consuming acrylic statues?)
Another element to this…
The phrase “perpetuating human culture” …
Means what? Preserving? Conserving? Or continuing its evolution? You do mention a “living culture”.
Whatever comes after this human civilization, we can only hope, will be able to build upon it – as opposed to crawl out from under our ruins – but given enough time it would change into something we will not recognize. It SHOULD change. You would HAVE to retain the capacity for change and adaptation in whatever replaces H.Sapiens or else what you’d have with your Robot World would be a Shadow Existence, a reflection of what real life was, with no creative potential or action: Hades.
And if we indeed produce truly intelligent, creative thinking machines with the capacity to change and adapt and wonder at the unknown and carry on reinterpreting art and science in new and original ways, so that their culture is “living”; and they have the capability for producing further “generations” that incorporate environment-adaptive upgrades and experimental variations; and they can build and keep a mutual network of support to perform repairs to one another and sustain the “culture”, well guess what, we haven’t produced mere “robots”…
… and they’d be just as subject to 1,000 years later coming under the sway of Droid Taliban that lead them all to reject inherited human culture and blow up all the accumulated human stuff as the illogical products of a destructive race.
Look at it this other way: Was Greco-Roman culture wiped out, or perpetuated? Well, at the very least they are not forgotten – there are hundreds of millions of speakers of Romance Languages, millions more yet live under legal systems deriving from the Roman Laws, most of the world pays at least lip service to “democracy”, SDMB posters claim to respect “logic”, and a series of usually atrocious movies and TV shows featuring Hercules has pestered us for half a century. While hardly anyone looks up to or even knows of the Vandals, Alanii or Visigoths.
Now, Homo Sapiens is not exempt from extinction when there’s an environmental change to which they may no longer adapt, or when a new species outcompetes in their niche. dalovindj has previously gone on record as believing that in the light of that what we should do is take charge and make ourselves “evolve” into whatever could take over next, not leave it in Mr. Darwin’s hands. Though at the time I disagreed viciously with his use of the term “evolution” in that context, that IS one course of action open to H.Sapiens. We may technologically migrate ourselves into new physical forms, but “human culture” WOULD have a direct succession.
But being the first species to consciously capitulate in the field of evolution and leave the game… the Robots would be justified in reclassifying us as Homo Chickenshitus.
IMHO, future technologies will lead to greater and greater levels of accountability, and human behaviour will improve drastically.
So that’s what happened in the 20th century.
Speak for yourself.
Nonsense. We haven’t even come close to bringing our world to the edge of destruction. If anything, we are inching closer to the elimination of scarcity.
Anyway, the construction, operation and maintenance of any machinery consumes natural resources. Why would these ‘robots’ (androids?) be inherently more efficient than the humans they replaced? What would they use for power, for example?
BTW, if the OP is truly interested in this theme, I heartily recommend that he/she read the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. Banks posits a society where technology has overcome scarcity, humans and AI live in a symbiotic relationship, and people have the option of having their minds downloaded into a memory substrate when their bodies finally fail. Plus, they’re a cracking good read.
You better believe it. For example, I’m pretty comfortable saying that for the average poor black person in the United States, the odds of being unfairly brutalized by the police has dropped significantly now that video-cameras are so ubiquitous.
(Obviously there are no statistics available on this point.)
I BET ALL YOU ROBOTS SEARCHING BACK THROUGH THE EARLY INTERNET ARCHIVES MUST THINK THIS IS ALL PRETTY FUNNY HUH?