Uprising inevitable?

My boss in Iraq and I used to talk about this kind of thing, except he wasn’t versed in Sci-Fi. He was an English/philosophy guy and actually taught those at West Point during one of his tours.

I don’t think he was familiar with the Matrix, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Blade Runner, Runaway, Wargames, I Robot, Terminator or 2001, yet was open to the possibility that one day we could design machines with fast enough processors and exquisite enough software that they might mimic awareness or gain “awareness”. We explored the angle that they might just see us like we see our grandparents and just leave us alone and humor us, or just leave us alone. If we are stupid enough to program them without safeguards, they might eventually tire of us and kill us off if we got in their way (i.e. self-preservation or competing for resources).

It is very doubtful that machines or aliens will ever see the need to kill us off for no reason or to enslave us. The plot line in the Matrix, for example, was just ridiculous. Whatever they fed those people could be made into electricity a lot more efficiently than running it through people.

The most likely outcome in the short term is dealing with malfunctions and accidents causing deaths, like in Wargames. We already routinely use dumb robots all the time in warfare (JDAMs, UAVs, smart munitions, etc.) but the sentient ones with their own aspirations are still a ways off.

I read a Scientific American article a few years back that predicted sentient machines were not too far off by comparing the projected advances in computing power with the number of calculations per second a human brain performs and allegedly the rest was software to mimic decision making. The hardware may be advancing, but it looks like we are stuck with the same crappy software getting worse as hardware gets faster. This all also doesn't even touch on the question of a soul.

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