Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: overload.mem on 05/07/2015 14:51:48
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When I was little I asked my grandpa about how the future would be like. He said that everything would change after we become able to build robots that are better than us mentally and physically. After that all the jobs in the world that we don't want to do will be taken by them and humans would live their lives just having fun and stuff like living in a virtual world.
But it won't stop there. Eventually either we or the robots would figure out how to be able to directly control human's feeling using some kind of technology. We will be able to feel all the good feels anytime we want to any extent. Because of this no one would want to do anything but sit in the machine and set happiness level to max. We would stop using our hands, legs, eyes, mouth etc and even some parts of our brains whose functions we no longer would need. We would just be small parts of our heads being kept alive and glad by the robots.
When he told me this I don't know why but I found it depressing and just kind of forgot about it. But today I was wondering if something like this would even ever work. What are your thoughts? Do you think we will ever be able to completely control our feelings? Would you be happy with this kind of future?
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That's why we aren't being visited by intelligent aliens - they've all degenerated into blobs that just sit in vats with all the pleasure inputs set to maximum and they don't do anything else. There may be some which rejected that path though and which continue to live more varied lives in which they can enjoy the pleasure of small successes along a bumpy road while the degenerate blobs feel the artificial feelings of success and much more strongly too without doing anything at all. It may be a choice people will have to make some day, but in a way it's a choice we already have, because many people are already prepared to trade length of life for quality of experience by taking drugs. It's not something I've ever wanted to do, but maybe I'm stupid.
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Short term, I'd rather be the pet of a robot than the subject of a bunch of screaming morons, whether christian, communist, nazi or muslim. Alas, not many people have the choice.
Long term, I hope that homo becomes sufficiently sapiens to reject ideology as an excuse for bad behaviour, to punish bad behaviour as soon as it becomes apparent, and to switch off any machines that misbehave. But since I won't be there, it doesn't really matter anyway.
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Maybe one day the computer brains will be smarter than us; however right now, humans have enormously more processing capacity and use enormously less power to run that capacity.
In spite of appearances, humans are very, very, very smart, and we do things effortlessly that robots find incredibly difficult still.
For example we can walk through a forest without falling over; to do that requires understanding a very complicated visual scene, control our bipedal bodies as well as using complex models of where we are, where we are going etc.
There are predictions that eventually computers will be cleverer than humans all round, however that is still decades away, and although I think that will happen, I'm not sure that we have the technology to do it with such low power as humans use (the human brain runs on a few tens of watts of power, a comparable computer would need megawatts of power.)