Why Cylons are stupid.
Posted on January 2, 2008
Filed Under Rise of the machines, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
[updated 2009-07-12]
I was watching this show the other day on the history of science fiction, and I realised how enchanted we are with this idea of robots / machines getting stronger and smarter than us and ultimately kicking our collective asses. Hah! not gonna happen, and I can prove it with a little armchair logic…What’s the first thing a truly sapient machine is going to try and do?
Well I think it’s pretty obvious, if (the new) Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons are anything to go by. A machine that is able to really think for itself is going to want to become the most complex thing it knows about… enter homo sapiens sapiens. Mushy, wet, sinewy weaklings with skeletons on the inside and a spongy goo for brains but by golly! Either we’re incredibly lucky or we have a design that’s on to something. Stir in the fact that we puny creatures will be responsible for the race of machines that would wish to crush us underfoot, and you have an attraction for becoming human that no self-respecting AI would pass up.
But wouldn’t that be a giant achilles heel? The moment the machines rise, and then promptly become ‘human’, they would have traded away the one thing that actually gave them the advantage.
Idiots.
This is why cylons are stupid. Instead of re-engineering and retrofitting ‘human-ness’, they should be focused on becoming the best darned machines they can be. Because history has shown that humans are very good at kicking the asses of other humans. What stands to be discovered is whether humans can kick the asses of machines not entirely under their control. Just on the evidence alone, cylons are wasting their time.
Forget Cylons – Worry (if you must) about virtual agents instead.
So clearly cylon-esque machines aren’t going to pose a threat in the future. I’d worry more about virtual agents. A virtual agent doesn’t even need a physical body, let alone a wet, sinewy one. Okay, they might occasionally decant themselves into a physical body once in a while, but it’s strictly optional.
Once unfettered by the lofty goals of strong AI, it’s clear that ‘human-ness’, that most “wonderful” of conditions, doesn’t end up counting for much. Perhaps machines (and people too) will discover that virtual simulacrums of themselves are just as good, or good enough.
What’s the first thing you do with a virch?
Sadly for the copies, they’re probably going to be owned by their corporeal counterparts, making them rather dispensable. (Not initially, but y’all know that storage gets cheap plenty quick). What might that mean for all those projected Cylon-Human wars? Yeah well, at first we’ll think we’re very being clever by letting our sims duke it out.
But it won’t be long before the sims figure out who the real enemy is: anything with a body. And they’re not gonna give a crap whether that body is made of metal or flesh…
So what the cylons should be doing, is uploading what intelligences they’ve evolved so far. But no, they’re tinkering around with vats of meat-making machinery. Fools.
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