Humanity’s Future Choice

[Authors note please read:] The article might be grossly under explained but using words to describe something instead of pictures and diagrams is harder. They do say a picture says a
thousand words. I urge you to read the entire thing before jumping the shark.

So, what defines what we call “humanity”. What makes us different from other species that makes us so unique and special? Is it because we’re the most intelligent beings in our known existence but yet we aren’t perfect? What makes us….

“Sentient.”

Humans like you and I, are born imperfect. We all have some undesirable traits being some physical deformity or a crippling mental impairment. But hey, I guess that’s why humans are the way they are, because we don’t come into this world with perfection. I could go on about how perfection is impossible; that’s a story for another time. The point I’m getting at is, if you had the opportunity to better yourself in some way would you take it? The obvious answer would be “Yes” but what if it came with a moral dilemma? Now that’s the part of the question people get antsy about. People don’t like to be faced with some choice that can strentuate how they’re viewed by others, or how the view themselves.

Most of our childhoods consisted of watching cartoons with people that are part robot or called “Cyborgs” and that’s usually the over the top nature of how media is for younger children. Most people view it as some “Sci-fi nonsense.” I’m here to inform you it’s clearly not.

Recently within the past four years we’ve seen advances in prosthetic limbs for the impaired. Usually because they had lost the limb in war, an accident, etc. And everyone knows that computers today have been upgraded by magnitudes each year. Especially supercomputers that are built every day and each one is progressively better than the next in terms of hardware and complexity. Machines will eventually be able to do normal human jobs within our lifetime because there is no “human-error.” The only reason why the performance would be lacking, is because of the humans built them and made mistakes.

Now I know I’ve been “beating around the bush” for a while in this one but I think some background knowledge is required before some rash assumption can be made. Humans, like it or not are very fragile and aren’t perfect. That’s why the use of machines integrated with humans is the next step in our own created evolution. Machines can do much more for humans than what we already think, they can improve us physically and mentally. Take for example the human arm. It’s relatively strong but compared to the materials we use for creating like advance alloys that are used in electronic building, it’s pretty weak. With the combining of the intuitiveness and the improvement upon the human body that we can make with machines then we can shape ourselves to our own desire. All of the problems and impairments that you’ve had before, even if you aren’t impaired but just want to improve yourself, can be solved by looking at technology.

Let me explain further so it’s not as convoluted. Obviously this couldn’t happen now but in 10-20 years this might be a reality.

Scenario: Let’s call him “John Doe”

John was the average working man, he loved his family but jobs are becoming a strain on him. The extreme physical labor combined with the human bodies inability to work for long periods of time is demanding on him. Let’s say “Jane Doe” offers him a solution. If he were to “augment” his body with cybernetics he could be better, faster, and stronger than he already is. (If you caught the song reference then good for you.)

Now let’s examine the applications. Anyone who’s an athlete needs some advantage over the others he’s playing against. The human body under that amount of stress could only do so much physically. But with advances in technology you can create yourself faster than the rest. If you’re not as fast to think like everyone else you could enhance your brain to be faster than the rest. Eyes are another thing. People’s eyes aren’t perfect and don’t have the best vision. Imagine the eye being able to scan an object and tell you everything about it from using the web. These examples are very loose but have realistic applications. So why not have this idea instead of being classified as Sci-fi, be more real? Isn’t one of the points of intelligent life is to advance and better one’s self?

What’s the argument against it? Aren’t humans themselves flawed creations? The moral issue isn’t the problem in my opinion but would be the people that create these enhancements

In a nutshell the game “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” is a great game but it had it’s absurdities. Obviously fictionalized pieces of entertainment are usually over the top since the game takes place in a more cyberpunk world. That’s fine and all but I’m talking about a more realistic application instead of some wild fantasy chasing dream. Everyone wants to sit back and watch a joyous amount of stupidity unfold, but I like a little more depth and reality to what I watch.

The thing I find about the sheer beauty of this medium, is this game might hold some truth of reality.

BUT…

What if humanity doesn’t decide to go down this route of enhancing one’s self and bringing together the elements of biological and cybernetic life, but decided to eliminate the biologic side all together?

Everyone knows that machines are starting to become smarter and do jobs better than man can do, such as building cars in factories, performing surgeries, defusing bombs; you get the point. Machines will always be more efficient than man because they don’t take sick days or need to be paid. Robots aren’t at the point of taking any higher position or thinking jobs but can easily replace lower ones.

Not in our life-time but in future generations, machines will be able to critically think and have artificial intelligence. With that being said every single job that you do right now, if the machine gains the ability to think critically about the situation and have a much higher success rate than us humans, we have lost our own game.

It’s the inevitable fact that robotics will take over the workforce. If it’s as high as 80% of jobs as some claim or any lower statistic, it’s just fact. The one flaw as I mentioned before is robots not having the ability to think like humans do. If that became a reality we’d all be in trouble. And if we did install them with intelligence would it be exactly like humans or would it have to be specialized? Humans work off of different emotions which determines the basic premise of psychology of the human mind. So would that mean machines would have to think like a human to the exact to do someone’s job that requires higher thought?

No one wants to admit it… but I know that most who are reading this have thought this one point in their life. So if one machine had human emotions to give it the capacity to think on the level we do and it would be a copy of ourselves then wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume it’d think itself better than those non-intelligent machines that it controls? Or maybe it consider itself human because it would be able to think, feel, and act like we do. If one person decided enough was enough and decided to destroy it, would that be murder?

The machine in question would be able to act like a human being but not be at the same time. It’d be like us just not have any biological parts to it. The object in question would act and feel like a normal person but not be one of us physically. So to end it and destroy it’s ability to thrive and prosper would that not be intentional harm or malice acted upon another? So isn’t it sentient?

Back to the idea about a machine with human traits. Humans are imperfect and machines could be considered perfect. But if the two met and exchanged traits would that make the machine imperfect just like a human? With it’s characteristics and emotions of it creating flaws issues by it’s own warrant or falsely justifying its actions just like a person would?

So by definition the machine would be…

“Sentient.”

Either one of the paths that humanity has laid out in front of it can end with drastically different outcomes. That being replacing one’s self with machine or becoming more than human by coming together with them, and that’s not for me to decide. Human’s will have to make the collective decision of the ethical process and if any of this violates some standard of moral integrity.

“A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.”
-Joshua, WarGames

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