The Human Factor

Okay, let's say that we have a war with Red China, with both sides fighting with robot armies. Let's say that the Red Chinese robots defeat the American robots and take over our country, which is entirely possible since our robots were probably made in Red China in the first place. Now what happens? Do the Red Chinese send their robots to occupy the U.S. and enforce their laws? If so, what's to prevent our humans from resisting the occupation forces? Nobody could evade their duty by claiming conscientious objector status because they wouldn't have to kill any humans, just robots. You can't really kill robots anyway because they are not alive, but you can disable them and turn them into scrap metal. Sooner of later, the Red Chinese would have to send human soldiers to protect their robots, and then we're right back where we started from with humans fighting humans.

When you think about it, humans are both the cause of and the solution to all the problems in the world. If you want to build a better world, the first thing you need to do is make better humans. Theoretically, robots could be better than humans, but they have to be built by humans. If humans knew how to make robots that are better than themselves, why couldn't they just skip the robots and make humans better? Eventually robots will be making other robots, but they will make them the way they have been programmed to make them, either by humans or other robots. Somebody needs to make at least one prototype of a better creature, and then the prototype could make more of them. It wouldn't matter if the prototype was a human or a robot, as long as it was better than all the humans and robots that have preceded it.

You know, God has already done something like that when He made Jesus, if you believe in that sort of thing. Even if you don't believe in that sort of thing, the fact that the story is part of our cultural heritage would seem to indicate that people have been entertaining the possibility of improving  human nature for a long time. Then again, "better" is a subjective concept. What some people would call "better" other people would call "worse". So there you go, it's still all about people.