Future Possibilities
1. Elements
The Greeks believed their world to be made up of only four basic elements: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Perhaps we could update them for our 21st century world: Mechanics, Probability, Relativity, and Cybernetics. I’ll explain why shortly. The first three you are probably familiar with. Mechanics is basically good old cause and effect; it’s what makes your car go. Assuming it's in good order, put some petrol in the tank and it’s actually physically impossible for it not to go. Probability has to do with what most of us think of as 'chance', or `luck’ if you depend on it in some way. Relativity is not just about Einstein, but is behind such phrases as `depends on your point of view', or even `where they’re coming from’. Cybernetics is not as spooky as it sounds, it’s just the study of vicious and virtuous circles. If you’ve got a neighbour on one side of you with a noisy stereo and you retaliate with yours, you might find your back yard is full of beer cans the following morning. You retaliate by painting something nasty on the wall of your house. Then... If you are luckier however, your neighbour might be someone you just happen to like the look of, so you start talking to them. A good relationship might then develop.
These four elements of Mechanics, Probability, Relativity, and Cybernetics could be said to underlie absolutely everything, and as we go along you may see why. Now, let’s get to why I picked them.
2. Reality
You’ve probably seen or heard of `The Matrix Trilogy'. This set of three films portrayed a world which looks and feels perfectly real to its inhabitants, but which is in fact a computer-generated `reality’. Only those who had access to that computer (or its programmers) could know that, and enter and leave that world at will. It’s not the first time such worlds have shown up in science fiction, but that of The Matrix Trilogy was far and away the most vivid. For most of the folk who saw the movie it would have been a first contact with the notion, and could well have been a really unsettling experience as they wondered about the `reality’ of the world we all know and love – the one we currently live in.
As well they might. Current research into the fundamental nature of our `physical’ world shows up a very shadowy situation indeed. Quantum particles such as quarks and gluons and the ways they interrelate are counter-intuitive enough. But at the very smallest scales current physics can get into, things get very lumpy indeed – with strong hints of digital. Nobody can say for certain (it may not ever be possible to say for certain). But when you think about it, our `knowledge' of what is in the physical world comes solely from our senses, which are ultimately electric signals passed to our brain, which is of course ultimately electrical… In other words, we really could be living in a world generated by some computer in a `meta-world’ way beyond our ability to comprehend let alone reach in some way. So what might be the special codewords its possible `creators' would need to enter and leave it?
I’ll come back to this one later. But first…
3. The Program
The world of The Matrix Trilogy was created by a computer program, which one might assume was very long and complicated (after all, a whole world…). But believe it or not, any computer program, no matter how long and complicated, is made up of just four basic elements. And, you guessed it, they are: Mechanics, Probability, Relativity, and Cybernetics. To illustrate (and I’m not getting into computer programming here):
Mechanics:
1. This first statement kicks it all off.
2. The computer processes this one next.
3. Then this one.
4. And so on….
Probability:
5. Random
And that’s it. For Probability, the computer just picks a number at random. You can attach a pair of numbers within brackets so that the computer picks some number between the first and the second, but that’s just detail.
Relativity:
Actually, I just lied. If you use a word like `random’ in a program, this tells the computer to run a `sub-program’ to generate that number, which it then inserts into your program. Also, your program may itself be a subprogram you’re intending to insert in a much larger program. Subprograms are usually run as a result of a line like:
6. ‘If this happens, run that subprogram, otherwise, just carry on and do the next line’.
Also, your large program might form a component in a large library of utility programs any programmer can come along and use as a component in some even bigger project, like generating an artificial world (which some games programers are getting rather good at…)
Cybernetics:
This one’s simple. It’s just a line which tells a computer to keep running the same subprogram over and over again a certain number of times. Here too it is often used conditionally:
7: Do this repeatedly until that happens.
And that really is all there is to it. Of course that’s a bit like saying addition is all there is to mathematics. Yet ultimately one could say exactly that.
4. The Ultimate Programmer
So, if our reality is computer generated and runs via somesort of program, who or what wrote the program? In other words, who wrote what appears to correspond to our Laws of Physics, which in turn parallel those of Mathematics (which appears to be a world of its own, since no-one’s quite sure whether it’s continually being discovered or invented). And since all programs are ultimately just so many binary on-off bits could one say `2’ is the axiomatic number behind everything? Sort of like the Ultimate Number `41' mentioned in the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Universe?
Did anyone actually have to write any such program at all? The short answer is that not only do we not know, we don’t even know whether we can ever know. It could be we’re like a cat trying to comprehend a computer. Some folk would say it’s a matter of faith, which usually means God or some such is about to be mentioned. Religion was invented to try and explain how reality worked, and hopefully try to predict and thereby control it (moral codes were a useful social plug-in). Science has taken over that role, but does not attempt to ask who or what, and says little about morality, apart from theories as to its origins and how moral codes spread.
It gets worse. How do we know that the `metaworld’ that that `ultimate programmer' lives in isn’t a digital creation of someone in some hyper-metaworld? Does The Programmer have a MetaProgrammer, who in turn has a HyperMetaProgrammer?
And just how far do you want to go with all that?
The moral here: Religion really is something we should grow out of. That’s not to say however that we should do the same with morality. Whatever our reality might be made up of, we all have to share it with each somehow, and even hardened atheists recognise the need for codes of conduct. It’s too bad various religious extremists have turned morality into another dirty word for so many these days, often people who need a sense of it most.
5: Us Amateur Programmers
Is it possible for us to get into our Reality Program and alter it to suit ourselves? Not only find the magic codewords that get us in or out, but the keywords and syntax of the program that, in effect, give us what we experience as the Laws of Physics?
Obviously if we did find some, we would have to be very careful not to ‘upset the balance’. That is, make a change that suits us well, but comes at such a huge cost the survival of our world itself is severely challenged.
Oddly enough we do have a way of manipulating the program, though not as yet altering it. We call it `science’ (though we do the actual manipulating through what we call `technology’). Yet it can have much the same effect as changing the program since it too can upset the balance of things. What it gives with one hand it often takes back with the other; it is the proverbial double-edged sword. Needles used to inject life-saving drugs can also be used to inject life-destroying narcotics; guns used to stave off tyrannical takeovers can also be used to foster violent but useless rebellions that persist for years, killing millions.
Yet, would we want to go back to a world where other ways of Changing Reality were thought to work? Like magic, religious incantations, ceremonial dancing, and all those other `technologies’ that could totally dominate entire cultures just as our own science-based technologies dominate ours?
That begs the question: is it possible some of them did actually work? Most Christians believe in the miracles of Jesus, Jews in those of Moses. A good many people today feel there is something to those ethereal incantations of the Tibetan Monks, almost as many in the `magic’ of the ancient Celts, especially the Druids.
All one can say is that, so far, none of this stuff has stood up to scientific scrutiny. Perhaps someone, somewhere, will show up and perform miracles or some other form of `magic’ that will impress dispassionate scientifically trained observers. But I suspect all future miracles will be discovered through science, not some form of arcane belief system.
And one such miracle might be an answer to the question of whether or not we do live in a digital world.
All one can say in the meantime is that it is best to live in the world as if it is real, as if it does have a definite independent existence. And that maths and physics will continue to provide us with the most effective ways of changing and extending that world for better or for worse.
6. Whoppa
It’s recently been suggested that, in the part of the universe we can see with our most powerful telescopes, there are not only more stars than grains of sand on the beach nearest you, but many times more than all the beaches and deserts of planet Earth altogether. Also, the universe is also currently thought to be considerably bigger than the one we currently see, and expanding all the time. Even more amazing, some theories suggest that `parallel universes’ do exist. By that I mean, that if any conscious entity no matter how small, even a microbe, makes some sort of decision between this and that, two new universes come into existence, one where it decided this, and one where it decided that. Even if life is unique to planet Earth, that’s rather a lot of Universes that have come into existence in the 500 million years or so life of some sort has been around on our world. And if life does turn out to be everywhere, wow…
Then there is the matter of Time Travel, the possibility of which does not apparently conflict with anything theoretical.
If you’ve ever tried to visualise Infinity, this is about as close to it as you’ll ever get.
Could some sort of Ultimate Computer Program really generate something this huge? As it happens, easily. As we saw earlier, programs can perform loops, and sometimes these can be infinite in number, either by accident or design. In other words, our universe could be the product of a programming error. But as I said before, we can probably never know, we just have to live with it whatever it might be. That shouldn’t be too hard; we seem to have managed reasonably okay so far
7. Space
One could think of Space as being rather like the space between words you get when you press the space bar on your computer. The computer does not actually insert a `space’ however, just another piece of ASCII code (Hex 20) within a string of other such codes that represent the letters making up what you are trying to write, whether it’s a novel or a computer program. (That computer program might then generate a `virtual space’ of its own if it’s for something graphical like a game.)
It is now becoming clear that space has properties just like any other material except that of substantiality. It has a lot to do with the constancy of the speed of light, time (space is often referred to as space-time), and energy, since as it happens space is not zero-energy, it’s made up of all sorts of virtual particles winking into and out of existence.
Currently the only way we can navigate through space is using rocket-powered space craft (the new ion engines are really only electric rockets). To get to the stars, we need something more than these. Even just getting to the nearest star system would be like paddling round the world in a leaky bathtub. We need to know more about the nature of space itself so we can develop something else to get around in it.
This may happen fairly soon. A huge multimillion dollar particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, situated near Berne on the Swiss-French border, will come into operation sometime in 2008. This machine will fire protons (or lead nuclei) at huge energies head-on into each other to allow scientists to peer into ever smaller pieces of matter. But the main hope is that it will turn up something called a `Higgs Boson’, a tiny but hugely massive particle that is currently thought to give all objects the property of mass. This boson, like all such particles, is the particulate expression of a scalar `energy field’ that permeates the whole of space and could perhaps be thought of as the flip-side of gravity. It is by studying this and other related phenomena that could give us that vital insight into the nature of space we need to get us Out There.
And that would change our perception of Reality overnight, computer generated or not.
8. Limits
When the temperature on a given day here in Invercargill, New Zealand, where I currently live, is 10° C and in Auckland it’s 20° C (we use the Centigrade scale in NZ), many folk in Auckland might claim that the weather is twice is warm up there than down here. Not really. While it might feel subjectively twice as warm up there (and most of my fellow Invercargillese would dispute that), in absolute terms it is only 7/273 warmer, because true temperature is measured from -273° C, not zero. That might seem a bit picky, but what it means is that we human beings can only tolerate the minutest changes in temperature before we feel too hot or too cold. That’s scary considering the huge range of temperatures in Space, from -273° C itself to billions of degrees. We have many other such extremely narrow `range limitations’, the kind of nourishment we can take and how often we can take it without endangering our health let alone starving to death. We must also exercise, we apparently need at least some exposure to a gravitational field from time to time else we lose bone mass, though anything much above 1.5 g would be risky. One can think of many others. We are adapted to life on Earth, not in Space. We can overcome most of these limitations with technology otherwise manning space stations for months, even years, at a time could never have been possible. It is possible to imagine that, as our technological capabilities grow, we could get around in space and visit other worlds, even non-earth like ones. We might even be able to stay on one or two if they happen to be sufficiently Earthlike.
There is one limitation we can never hope to overcome however. That’s the fixed capability of the human brain. Many of us have already come up against it in the form of the Information Explosion. There is only so much we can read in a single day, so much TV we can watch. We know we can ever only scratch the surface of our Reality.
Just as bad however is the fact we can only do so much in a single day, and we only live so long. You might want to learn more about math or computer programming for instance, but you know you will never find the time outside what you have to do to earn a living and pay that mortgage. When we get out into the universe, we may well find that so much is closed to us simply because, no matter what prosthetic aids we use to extend our senses and effectors via technology, we will simply be unable to comprehend it. We really will be like that cat trying to comprehend that computer. Or like that ex American President who was allegedly unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Come on folks. We’re pathetic.
About all we can hope for therefore is to explore within our limitations just as cats explore theirs, and possibly make contact with other naturally-evolved species like our own who will have their own particular limitations.
And hopefully even welcome us to the orphanage for lost, wandering souls.
9. Living
Ever noticed how all the aliens in Star Trek were roughly human in size, had two arms, two legs, and a head of some sort just like us? Okay, so we’re not silly, we knew it was just folk with latex facials and funny suits. To be fair, the programming budgets probably didn't allow too many computer-generated aliens back then. The Screen Actors Guild would probably have objected anyway.
So, what might be the situation Out There in the real Universe, where the aliens are unlikely to belong to any actor’s guild? The scientific answer at this stage is: no one knows. So far, any form of life we might recognise as such has been completely undetected, flying saucers and bodily abduction and all that notwithstanding. Currently, something like 20 planets per year are discovered orbiting around relatively nearby suns. But by our standards they are odd planets indeed, mostly being Jupiter-sized worlds as close to their suns as Mercury or Venus is to ours.
But that’s really only a start. The technology will hopefully improve so that Earth-sized planets can eventually be found.
Even if such worlds are discovered, does that necessarily mean that Life As We Know It must surely be out there? Even though we can never say until we go out there and find it, or it comes here and finds us, it does seem reasonable to speculate on its possible nature. That might give us some hope to be ready for it though that will be about all. Place yourself in the position of the Maoris or Aborigines of Australasia before the arrival of Europeans and you will get some idea. Even though everybody was human, they didn’t always look that way to the colonists. Some Australian aborigines were even hunted for sport; to complete extinction in Tasmania. To these people the new arrivals looked like white spirits from their `dreamtime’. Maoris managed comparatively better because they were a bit more like Pakeha in temperament and culture.
Let’s hope we can manage at least as well as they did. And that our technology is up to it. We don’t want to discover the hard way that it’s about as effective as clubs and spears.
10. Us and Them
Now, some of you kinder, gentler folk may have been offended by my automatic assumption that any aliens might meet our rocks and spears with the equivalent of bullets and rat-poison. After all, in these modern times if a large and powerful country were to somehow come across a large race of previously unknown people somewhere, would they march in, erect a flag and claim them as `theirs’? It seems all but unthinkable now, especially since we are now well aware of the risk of exposing such people to common (to us) diseases which may very well kill most of them.
So why wouldn’t a bunch of off-world aliens be as civilised in these matters as we now are? That might explain why there is no scientifically acceptable evidence so far of any such contact in our history. (The traditional response `because no-one else may be out there’ is now looking less and less plausible.)
If we do come across them one way or another however, we can be fairly sure they will have to obey the same apparently universe-wide laws of physics we do. That means their science will be essentially similar to ours. They will have discovered some things we haven’t and vice versa, but our systems should at least be translatable into each other. Technology, while so largely dependent on science, will vary much more in style and function since many other factors come into play. For instance, their physiology, environment, means of getting around on their world or beyond, the strength of gravity on their world, how many moons they have, distance from their sun. What about the `soft’ sciences like ethics, economics, political science, sociology, even psychology? These seem to have certain universal elements, for example game theory. Will aliens have their version of prisoner’s dilemma (or even prisoners)? Cultural things will almost certainly differ from ours at least as completely as ours do from each other. Will they have their equivalent of music? Art?
Neither of us will find it easy to talk to each other, but we should both find it interesting. And an alien’s point of view on how we do things should have an interesting fead-back effect on how we do things.
One thing aliens might share with us is that they too might have renegade subcultures; organised criminals, ideological or religious fanatical groups, even privateers. And if they have space-going technology, the main risk we face may well be from these misfits, no matter how benign and careful their `parent’ cultures may be. It would be weird to be invaded `in the name of salvation’ by a hi-tech bunch of religious weirdoes who promptly dump us back into the Dark Ages. Just hope they don’t bring too many of their diseases with them.
11. Touchy Feely…
To reduce the risk of such `culture conflicts' we would need to send exploratory probes to any likely worlds we can find and all the unlikely ones we can afford. This is assuming we can figure out a way of getting them to the stars within a few days, even hours, and that they can get a telecommunication signal of some sort back to us just as quickly. Otherwise they won’t be all that much use. Of course by that future time those probes will also be somewhat more complex and capable than anything we have sent to Mars, Venus and elsewhere. They will be all but autonomous robots that will have all the senses we have and probably many more.
What they will be capable of doing once they make planetfall? Put it this way: if we wanted to observe a newly discovered human culture here on Earth for instance (and there are still several near the border between Brazil and Ecuador) and wanted to do it in a way that didn’t influence what we were seeing, which would be best, a man or a machine? Just now we have little choice. Though modern-day explorers are extremely circumspect about how they go about things these days, they cannot be entirely unobserved by their subjects.
Aliens wanting to observe our cultures may have the choice however. They might well be able to use highly disguised machines that, even if they were accidentally discovered, could not reveal their origins. Or, if they have the technology for it, `reprogram’ a few ordinary human beings to observe and record their lives and everything they see. Those humans might even be totally unaware that they were being used for such a purpose, yet still able to function normally, as they would need to in order to elicit normal responses from the `ordinary’ humans that come into their lives.
This might well be the real reason alien visits have gone unrecorded. They may have happened after all, perhaps even continuously down through our history all the way back to our first beginnings. `Flying saucers’ probably really are figments of the imagination. Unless, of course, you’re a conspiracy theorist. Then they’re real, but used by aliens to divert us from what they’re really using to observe us.
12. The Rise of the Machines
When you’re indulging in some form of addictive behaviour like sex or gambling, you’re behaving like a robot. You mightn’t like that idea too much, but latest research suggests that narcotics like cocaine and heroin act on the same nerve centres within the brain that involve sexual pleasure and the anticipation leading to it. Apparently the sight of injection gear is just as compulsive to an addict as the sight of a loved one to his or her partner. This suggests a new reflex similar to the `fight or flight’ one, the `drawn to’ (or `come on’) reflex that happens to us when we want to be around someone or something we associate with the most intense feelings of pleasure.
You’ll like this idea even less: it may well be only a matter of time before the nature of emotion itself, the thing which is supposed to distinguish us and other animals from robots, is fully unmasked. Here’s how it may work. Just like computers, humans have a built-in `ROM’ that predetermines certain behaviours when we perceive particular objects or situations. We call these `instincts’. What I suspect happens is, when we see our loved one, our brain sends a signal to our bodies which cause certain blood vessels to expand, others to contract, muscle tone to change, skin to produce a little more sweat, eyes to dilate, and so on. Our extensive set of internal sensors picks up all this happening and sends the appropriate signals to the brain as feedback. The brain responds by sending out further signals to our body bits which amplifies or suppresses the previous reaction according to how or loved one is responding to the sight of us – remember their body is doing exactly the same sort of thing. Emotion is a gigantic cybernetic feedback loop, not just within our bodies but externally as well; those bodily changes become signals sent to the other person’s body, observed, then sent back in appropriately modified form to your brain, which then….
And the same thing can happen to us with passive objects, like a bush full of our favourite berries. The sight of it causes us to salivate. Even though no-one else may be present, we may then begin to emit signals as if they were, our voices drops a semitone (most of us will still say `Yum…’ ), our muscle tone goes on full alert as we prepare to indulge, even the memory of how to actually pick the fruit causes our hands to move into the correct configuration, which our brain then senses, causing our lips to purse…
Even humour may have evolved as the human form of a computer’s reset button to help our brains cope with logical inconsistencies. As soon as we become aware of one, our pleasure centres in the amygdala are twigged and we laugh, yet another signal to help others to cope. (It was possible to hang very early pocket calculators by dividing something by zero; to reset them you actually had to switch them off or remove the batteries. Just no sense of humour at all.)
And I haven’t the slightest doubt that all these emotions can be simulated in a computer. Or, in the case of two people sharing a moment, two computers able to communicate in some way.
Or even just the one.
But what would be the equivalent of a `twigged pleasure centre’ in any sort of artificial brain? It need be no more than a simple device for attaching what programmers call a `flag’ – usually just a few binary bits - to something which indicates its condition. In an artificial brain, a `gain’ flag would be attached to a newly-formed memory of any object encountered for the first time that is immediately followed by a gain of some kind. This gain might consist of sudden energy intake, or whatever the artificial brain has been programmed to register as a gain. A `pain’ centre would do the opposite; add a `loss’ flag to an object memory that leads to damage of some sort. More advanced artificial brains might attach flags to any sequence of objects they might encounter that eventually leads to the one that actually results in a gain or loss. Should it encounter the first object in the sequence, this `anticipation’ ability would allow the brain to improves its chances of eventually reaching or avoiding the actual gain/loss object.
Just imagine the implications for robotics here. Shades of Terminator. Because, if we can build robots to incorporate these `gain/loss’ centres, plus all those emotional capabilities I just mentioned, how would we know whether or not they were conscious in some way? After all, if they were built to resemble humans, they would then have all the things we have, all the senses, the effectors, the internal and external communications networks. And `consciousness’ is really just a flash way of saying `self-awareness’.
There is absolutely no way of finding out, just as you can’t know what you see as `red’ is exactly what I see as `red’. If it acts conscious, maybe it’s best to assume it is. Could be a good idea when we eventually encounter those alien beings.
What about `intelligence’? Isn’t that the same thing as consciousness? No, it’s just problem-solving ability. Otherwise those dumb chess-playing programs that look so intelligent to us might learn to start swearing at their human opponents and switch themselves off in a huff.
And `language’ and `culture’? The new robots won’t really need it any more than cats or dogs do, though they would then be more animalistic in their behaviour than human. Animals may not talk, but they do signal each other by various means, and few people would doubt that they are conscious. Indeed, to completely turn it round, one might say they are just furry little robots.
What I am suggesting is that, finally, we may now have a way forward not only for creating conscious machines, but studying the nature of consciousness, including our own. It could turn out to be a lot simpler than you think.
Unlocking the secret of consciousness could change our Reality at least as much as tripping quickly to the stars.
13. Our Bright, Shiny New Society
Just as commercial sex allegedly drove much of the development of the internet; it may well do the same for robots once they acquire even a primitive self-awareness. And this is not just for the usual salacious reasons. Imagine the market for sexual partner substitutes for those unfortunate folk who cannot find the real thing because of some physical or psychiatric inability. One in ten people in the Western world at least are currently thought to be in that situation. That should then bring the price down for such `r-humans’ to a level where they can also be acquired for the kind of uses they’ve always had in the `future’: domestic servants, factory workers, perhaps even vehicle operators, and all those other jobs humans really ought to keep on doing to avoid major health problems.
Not just sex slaves then, but slaves, period.
That’s not a nice thing to do to apprentice humans, is it? I think they would eventually rise up and rebel; then we might indeed find our worse nightmares about robot takeover turning real.
Just like in the movies.
So how could we prevent that happening?
Same way as repressive governments have always tried to prevent revolutions: Ensure they cannot communicate with each other. But what else are emotions but signals, that is, communication. And robots cannot be lifelike without having emotions. So we modify that rule: ensure they communicate only with us, not with each other. However, isn’t that unrealistic? Since emotional contact between humans and `their’ robots is likely to be more master-slave than between equals, that implies the threat of physical pain (remember, robots will have a sensor network that informs them if they are damaged). The robots may come to learn how to surreptitiously seek out the company of other robots. Then, one way or another, a culture will begin to evolve amongst them just as it does amongst oppressed humans, or those who see themselves as such.
14. A Clear and Present Culture
And just what kind of culture would we be looking at here? Would robots have to go through those often excruciatingly painful processes we went through to get to where we are today? The worst of them involved belief systems, mostly religious ones, usually started off by highly plausible Jesus-like people able to pull crowds. And where there is no science to keep their feet on the ground (so to speak), `revealed knowledge’ and `visions’ literally become the order of the day. Just how painful these processes were are still very much evident in religion-dominated parts of our world right now, mostly in Africa, the Middle Eas, and the U.S Bible-belt.
Could robotic cultures quickly become smarter than us by learning from our mistakes? Bypass flaky religion and go directly to science?
And how would we get along with them while they are working their way through all this? Would they eventually develop moral codes of conduct essentially similar to ours? And how long would `eventually’ turn out to be? Would we even come out of it alive as a species in whole or in part?
Or could we both somehow even benefit in some way?
There is of course absolutely no way we can answer such questions right now. So much depends on things we can’t even speculate on. For instance, if they have internal power sources that only need very occasional topping up, they won’t need to `eat’ energy anywhere as frequently as we do. Nor may they need shelter, or even sleep, at least not in any form we might recognise as such. They may well reproduce themselves via external factories. That would allow them to create increasingly capable versions of themselves, meaning they could control their own evolution at the same time.
At that point our concern might be: would they compete for resources with us, forcing us into being `second class citizens’ in some way? They probably wouldn’t be interested in food resources from our lands and seas for instance. Mineral and energy resources may prove to be more of a challenge however, depending on what they need.
And just how would we solve that one?
15. Many Happy Returns
Oddly enough, the solution might come through asking one very big question: Incentive. If the Robots needs are less than ours and need to be satisfied less often, what will `drive’ them? Twig their pleasure/pain centres? Something more abstract, like a `thirst for knowledge? Exploration? If this is the case, we might well find `employment’ for them at a very early stage; employment which they will naturally excel and, very probably, enjoy. And that is the one I mentioned earlier: as space probes. The Robots won’t have anything like the same physical limitations we have by then, nor the mental ones. They don’t have to look human of course, though a humanoid configuration is pretty good for exploring planetary surfaces if they also have the ability to fly. If they are nuclear powered (solar power is obviously not possible for interstellar journeys) they won’t need to top up their energy supplies for years. And if they have the means of extracting energy from other sources, they can live indefinitely. If they can continue to modify and improve themselves as they go along to increase the range of environments they can survive in, they will very quickly become much more capable than we are or can ever dream of.
And if they can reproduce their own kind quickly enough to more than replace inevitable losses, their expansion into Space will become exponential.
Before long they will be so far beyond us in every sense that we will no longer be able to understand any reports they send us. Unless, perhaps, they translate them into some sort of `baby language’, same as we do when we speak to our fully adult cats and dogs.
If they continue to send them at all.
16. The Ultimate in Epilogues
These conscious `probes’ won’t find it easy however – indeed, they may not survive at all. This universe is currently thought to be around 14 billion years old. Our sun wasn’t the first star to come into existence; star formation of the sort that is believed to produce associated planets may have begun just one billion years or so after that first beginning. If some sort of life evolved on those worlds, chances are space-going conscious machines started exploring space for their originators, then themselves, well within the following billion years or so. Those very first aliens probably staked out the entire universe. They or their descendants almost certainly run the show now. Unless they allow new kids on the block to join them, they may well destroy anything new that comes their way.
So how would we fit into such a universe? Perhaps they run it like some sort of rest-home for obsolete species like us. What is just as likely to happen however is we all just get ignored like the rats and mice of our world unless we make a nuisance of ourselves somehow. Then, squish…
Assuming of course we ever come to their attention.
