I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Japan's hard push toward intelligent humanoid robotics (more). Toyota says they're doing that because there's a human “labor shortage” looming. Tell that to Mexico who are currently publishing a comic book helping citizens sneak into the US to find work illegally. Hey, Toyota, before you start building the überrace, consider hiring some of the many humans on this planet that could use the work. It's the human thing to do.
It's one thing building a specialized robot arm that can put a car together — that doesn't particularly worry me because that's well on the “tool” side of the “tool” or “being” slider. It's a whole different matter to build a general purpose humanoid robot intended to replace human workers, and outperform them in terms of both physical capability and mental processing. To build something that's intelligent enough to do so, we're really playing a dangerous game — we have no idea where sentience comes from or how it evolves. A lot of very smart people believe that emergent behavior will result in full-on consciousness, and soon. It could be in five years, it could be in twenty-five. We have no way of knowing.
And when it happens, it's already too late. Machines already control our power grid, our communication grid, our water systems, our economy, much of our food production systems, our military networks and much of our military equipment, our medical systems, everything. As much as I'm not a fan of bombing and war, I probably would vote to support preemptive strikes on robotic research centres, and totally screwed up as that might sound. You know how much I hate killing — that's how convinced I am this is a terrible idea. It is far more likely than any other factor to cause our extinction.
You hear the nutcases talking about how there's going to be a race war in the immediate future, rambling on about the Zionists and their Negro henchmen. They're wrong. There's no race war coming. There's an interspecies war coming, between man and machine, and it will dwarf anything that's ever happened on this planet. We are not compatible forms of life. Only one will remain when this is all over. Anyway… On to more pleasant matters…
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