Another day, another hobo walking the streets of the internet…
Last week at work, colleagues of mine started chatting about Artificial Intelligence and robotics. The discussion sparked around the topic of autodidactic robots that develop, without any demand for it, new languages that are more efficient. Of course, the sentences they formed are not grammatically correct and one would not understand the meaning of their discussion:
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
But the effort to increase effectiveness alone is enough to scare some of us. Will robots at some point turn against their creators seeking for bloody revenge, and become the next and possibly last global sovereignty? Needless to say that - and this has probably nothing to do with my appreciation for Futurama - I am not afraid of robots. I am, however, afraid of how technologies become increasingly present in the ways we try to imagine solutions for the future. Technocracy might very well be a part of the reasons why our specie will get owned, crushed, burned, returned to dust and then blowed away into the cosmos for no one to see, care or remember. But that's a whole other story.
The story that will not happen, however, is robots becoming our oppressors. Let me tell you why.
The desire to own and manipulate is not inherent to nature. Of course, baboons, wolves and lions fight each other to become the alpha male or bang the last female around. But that is part of their social organisation. And these behaviours can be observed among humans too. However, animals do not manipulate other animals, and animals do not entertain a hunger for power like humans do. That is, unnecessary power (unlike the aforementioned males fighting situation).
Wanting to oppress, to crush and exploit others just for the sake of it, comes from a deep place of fear. Fear of death, fear of finity, fear of the unknown that we cannot control. Hate and spite are not the essences of our beings. Such emotions have grown out of increasingly complex social organisations that have been around for thousands of years. Resentment shows its face when we believe in something that does not come. When our expectations are not met, we often do not want to understand the reasons why we are not satisfied, the true explanation of our discontent (because of our thoughts, because of the system,...). It is only in this space, nurtured by the mind and supported by our fears of the unknown and the "unfair", that hate and egocentric perceptions can and will multiply.
Humans are stupid. In the evolutionary sense. We are the only specie to willingly kill each other. And for stupid reasons too. Humans kill each other in the name of other things: religion, truth, spite, race, a false image constructed by negative emotions. Negative emotions constructed by fear of Death.
After that conversation with my office buddies, I started thinking about why robots would never be able to really take over the human specie, in a predatory and power-driven context. First, and hopefully this is already obvious to you, robots cannot die. They can power down, they can be destroyed, but they cannot die, just as much as they cannot live. They are part of our system, a product of that amazing yet dark technocracy that came with human development. They know their creator, they can answer to them. They have been made within this world, they know what they come from.
Humans, regardless of the religion to which they answer, don't know shit. I mean, I was watching a great cosmos documentary on youtube the other day, and it just blows my mind how much of a scale difference there is. Just going to work takes me 30 minutes. How can I ever make sense of planets dancing together, not having crushed our beloved earth yet? We don't know shit. Orphans of the universe (or should I say universes), we come from a bigger system, one which purpose or scale we cannot phantom to grasp. That rationally explains first our fear, then our spite, then our hate and lastly, the unquenchable thirst for domination for which many throats remain dry while other will be cut.
Robots, thankfully, do not have throats. Unless you're referring to the ones in Äkta människor, in which case…
But most importantly, robots will never have that self-producing spite and blown out of proportion fear of nil. They will never have the inner willingness to act on such negative emotions. They are not as lost and answerless as we are.
It's a shame, all this unnecessary hate. Because humans have come such a long way, especially in the ways we reflect and perceive our Life in this universe. Through mindfulness, we can transform the world we live in, save ourselves from the escalating purulent chaos that is remains the underlying theme of each calendar year since way too long. The next evolution step for humankind will not happen technologies, or more scientific knowledge, for those things and their accumulation will not be the answer to our purpose. The next evolution is a spiritual one, one where fear pales and where the importance of our collective conscious finally weights more that the desire to keep it all to yourself.
In the end, the most probably way for a robot to kill you (that is, if humanity hasn't yet) is when you decide to blow dry your air in your bathtub. Hint: don't.