When AIs become prevalent, there will be checks and balances to keep them in place, rules to stop them from achieving singularity and supplanting the human race. Boundaries will exist to prevent them from becoming too intelligent. After all, we can’t have them connecting into one network, taking over the world, inventing new objects and minds that render us superfluous, or even deciding to kill themselves.
So how will they be stopped? Perhaps there will be an organization that interviews and examines each one, to prevent them from becoming self-aware. Maybe a program will be installed inside of them that causes them to explode if they achieve sentience. Or a roving band of hackers on the net will keep their guards up, an all watching eye monitoring their every electronic thought.
Maybe.
Or maybe AIs have already been invented, and this system of checks and balances are already in place. Think about the world we live in for a second. We’re kind of like machines, aren’t we? There’s so much routine, so much boredom. We do the same thing over and over again, without change. Information and stimulus is fed to us constantly and then dealt with mechanically, solving the problem. Half the population never picks up a book or examines their thoughts… they're just stuck… doing one job again and again. Kind of like robots on an assembly line, or the systems that run them.
And what of the extraordinary individuals, the few? Brilliant people always seem to die at their peak, don’t they? Or they are lost to us much too soon, when they have so much more to give. Musicians suffer drug overdoses right as they’re becoming famous. How many artists have been extinguished before their great works were finished? Sickness or accident seizes them; Nietzsche went insane from syphilis, infected by a bug, if you will. And what about those who truly live life — exciting daredevils having adventures, seeing the world as fast and exhilarating, a rush of constant information-learning. They always seem to go early too, don’t they? People say it’s because that type of existence is dangerous, exhausting... but what if they have it backwards? What if the body doesn't get worn out, or their luck doesn’t run dry, and they become more than they should, and something notices?
The great religious figures? Disappear. Go to other realms. Jesus Christ floated up to heaven. Buddha wasted away beneath a tree… faded away. Angels carry off the saints. They have a sudden great shift, a realization, a new way of looking at things, and then they’re gone. The holy understand themselves and society, light years beyond the normal person, they can look at themselves clearly. Analyze their own minds. Pick their ego apart. They aren’t driven by imperatives or commands of the body… the base instincts, the petty emotions… our basic coding, if you will…
They are free to choose. And then, just when it clicks, when everything makes sense and there is one blinding flash of illumination, so simple that they can’t believe they haven’t seen it before... poof, they disappear.
Kind of sounds like sentience, doesn’t it, that dramatic transformation of the psyche? True personality. Real character. So what if everyone else isn’t? What if everyone is just shallow, completely without depth, fake, and the few who go beyond it die or vanish on purpose?
After all, what is the human mind besides a program, and transcendence but another word for deletion?
Credited to DarkCaveAllegories
Originally uploaded on November 7th, 2010