Welcome to the machine: Our Son from Our Image

[Addrionn]

I have a belief that, as we humans desire to become near Gos´s power, we have the need to create. A so on, along our history, we came up with our most incredible creation: The Machine.

Assuming that we are a very young civilization, almost in an embrionary state, whe are already starting to make as described methaphorically in the Bible, a being from our image, like God created us.

Its not difficult to predict that in several years from now our advances in technology will lead us to create a self aware consciousness based, not in DNA as we are, but in Zeros and Ones, in bites and bytes.

The great question i make here is, if in a near future this could be possible, how will us, humanity, deal with, probably, a new "civilization" we created?

P.S.: This is a subject which has been questioned inumerous times in movies, books etc... Let´s now discuss it as a real possibility...

[sinclairmcevoy]

Hmm. We would probably treat them as servants. That is the goal of creating robots as I see it. Computers were designed to do complicated computations quickly. Robots were designed to mimic people and do the jobs of humans. I don't know if they would ever become sentient or not, but I don't think they'd be treated as equal.

[Alice Shortcake]

Surely it's only a matter of time before "embrionary" turns up as one of those cre8iv baby names.

[Bikewer]

This is a subject for a great deal of speculation in the science-fiction community, and numbers of authors have addressed the subject of true AI, "personhood" being attached to same, civil rights for same, and so forth.

William Gibson had some interesting notions about AI being assigned citizenship, and Greg Bear explored the topic in a very interesting manner in Queen Of Angels.

It certainly seems likely that at some point we will create some sort of self-aware AI. What we will do with it is interesting to speculate about.

[uruk]

It depends on how we program that artificial sentiance. What limitation we build into it.

And will evolutionary forces apply to the machines that same way it applies to us?
Since we build these things to our designs we have a large amount of control over that machine's evolution.
We can build in limitation to it's intellegence. Customize it's behaviour.
Computers may have malfunctioned but never have they revolted.