Throughout the series of posts on robots like us, I have not really touched on robotics at all, and that is because the technical details can be engineered and made to be corrrect, our attitudes and philosiphies cannot.
But there is a set of more important lessons to be learnt from this exercise. As someone who builds software I understand a very fundamental advantage that we are gainaing by building robots and A.Is just like us.
If we build arms, legs, lips and brains from the ground up, the human will not be such a mystery anymore. We have an oppurtunity to build ourselves. And therein lies the opportunity to understand ourselves.
And I'm not just talking about how neurons fire, or how we balance. The more important lessons are about how we think. One of the many things about society that bothers me is that we don't know how to fix people when their minds are broken. Murderers have broken minds. Rapists, child molesters and drug addicts too. We see their actions as deplorable, and we cannot see ourselves doing these things. When we understand how the mind works, we can start to heal these people instead of throwing them into a dark hole and trying to forget our failures as a society.
We can start to understand our moral frameworks. Why we believe in Gods, why we love, hate and envy. All just by watching the virtual minds that we have created working suffering from the same defficiencies inherent to us.
If you have any doubt on why there should be robots like us, think about the qualities that are rare in humans. One of these qualities is sometimes even humanity itself. In some situations we lack it. Maybe the more clever ones among us will have a chance to not only build robots that are like us and better than we are, but to fix us, and to make us a better species.
To shape its own destiny is the highest calling of any species. If we can attain this feat we will become Gods because the sign of being god is never needing god to give structure to a universe that seems random.
But there is a set of more important lessons to be learnt from this exercise. As someone who builds software I understand a very fundamental advantage that we are gainaing by building robots and A.Is just like us.
If we build arms, legs, lips and brains from the ground up, the human will not be such a mystery anymore. We have an oppurtunity to build ourselves. And therein lies the opportunity to understand ourselves.
And I'm not just talking about how neurons fire, or how we balance. The more important lessons are about how we think. One of the many things about society that bothers me is that we don't know how to fix people when their minds are broken. Murderers have broken minds. Rapists, child molesters and drug addicts too. We see their actions as deplorable, and we cannot see ourselves doing these things. When we understand how the mind works, we can start to heal these people instead of throwing them into a dark hole and trying to forget our failures as a society.
We can start to understand our moral frameworks. Why we believe in Gods, why we love, hate and envy. All just by watching the virtual minds that we have created working suffering from the same defficiencies inherent to us.
If you have any doubt on why there should be robots like us, think about the qualities that are rare in humans. One of these qualities is sometimes even humanity itself. In some situations we lack it. Maybe the more clever ones among us will have a chance to not only build robots that are like us and better than we are, but to fix us, and to make us a better species.
To shape its own destiny is the highest calling of any species. If we can attain this feat we will become Gods because the sign of being god is never needing god to give structure to a universe that seems random.
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