Will Robots Take Over the World?
Androids, Actroids, Bots – all robots that look and behave a bit like humans – and they may be reality!
Over the years, we’ve seen films like Blade Runner portray robots faster than humans, smarter than humans, more ruthless – so are we as a race doomed?
It gets worse. Science Fiction writers imagine a future world in which the ruling humanoids are little more than brains on flabby muscles, dependent on an array of machines and equipment to keep us alive and our body functions working. You may scoff - but when was the last time you dug your own vegetables, hunted down your own rabbit and skinned and gutted it?
We're content to leave our morals behind, and let a set of machine rules dictate these too - witness the portrayal of the humans in "Avatar", a metaphor for the way we're treating the world we live in and the phenomenal damage we're doing to which our own planet responds with climate change.
Concepts like the Genetic Infantryman, The Matrix and Minority Report suggest a future world in which the bulk of humans are more like sheep than rulers of our own destiny, as the powerful keep even more power through technology. We normal humans are becoming "unfit for purpose".
Is there no hope?
These many projections of a future world, in fact many creative ideas that are repeated from community to community and age to age, may actually be the space-time continuum speaking to us1. When the world came under serious threat of climate change, first a book (Silent Spring) appeared, then scientific projections, then films (eg The Day After Tomorrow). The world (according to the Gaia hypothesis) is perfectly capable of recovering from climate change, but when it does we may not be the dominant species. However this threat is different. Without the physical capability, our brains will atrophy - in effect, a healthy mind needs a healthy body (and no, before you get on your high horses about Aryan races, many of the physically and mentally different people I know are active in a sense that puts people like me to shame).
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