Quadrant 3

F-35 JSF Developmental Pilot Helmet, Image Editor, 2007

One of the more overdone tropes of Western cinema is the notion of the machine revolt. Most people are familiar with The Matrix and Terminator, but I highly recommend Colossus: The Forbin Project from 1970 as an early example of the genre. The final scene of Colossus is as poignant as John Connor's radio broadcast at the end of Terminator 3 (which was in all other respects a bad remake of T2).

In all these films the machine revolt is preceded by a common act - a computer is empowered by man to do what we are either unable or unwilling to do or think.

We cannot process information or crunch numbers as fast as today's most basic computer. In the Cold War we would not shoulder the extreme responsibility of nuclear warfare. Automation has increased every day since the end of the Second World War. As early as 1940, sci-fi authors considered the risks of robotics and artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov famously proposed the Three Laws of Robotics, a primitive logic-derived morality for machines. The most autonomous robots built today are military designed and they will not be moral machines. Objects that supersede us in these respects, make us obsolete in these respects. When machines exceed human intelligence, human intelligence is obsolete. The best outcome would be a parent-child relationship in which we are the child. Who knows best?

The real solution is not to replace ourselves, but improve ourselves. If technology has improved our existence and extended our capabilities, then the next step would be integration with new technologies. There are sociological dangers on this route which I have written about before concerning genetic technology; but rather we destroy ourselves by our own hand, than have a machine determine our fate for us.


Based on drafts written 24/04/07 and 17/09/09
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