The Living Machine

I don't care how smart they make their machines, just so they don't make them conscious, but that ship may have already sailed. Okay, it's not a whole machine yet, just a bunch of artificial neurons floating around in a Petrie dish, but it has dreams. Dreaming is a function of an unconscious mind, but unconscious is not the same as non-conscious. A rock is non-conscious, a sleeping human or animal is unconscious, which means it has the potential of becoming conscious, which means it is alive. Some people don't know this, but the Supreme Court of the United Federation of Planets ruled a long time ago that artificial life forms have the same civil rights as natural life forms. The worms are out of the can, Pandora is out of her box, the Rubicon has been crossed, the die is cast, it's all over now Baby Blue.

I said yesterday that we would be alright if we just made sure that all the sentient robots have good guy chips implanted in them. The more I though about it, though, it occurred to me that what can be implanted can also be un-planted. What's to stop the bad guys from capturing our robots, removing their good guy chips, and replacing them with bad guy chips? For that matter, what's to stop them from making their own robots and installing bad guy chips as original equipment? Don't tell me that all we have to do is make sure this technology doesn't fall into the wrong hands, that's what they said about the atomic bomb.

Meanwhile, they keep inventing artificial spare parts for human bodies. Nothing wrong with that, but how long before they come up with artificial parts that work better than our natural parts? Why should we wait till something goes bad to replace it when we can replace it with something better right now? Before long we will all be walking around like the Borg, half human and half machine. Well the Borg had a collective consciousness, but nothing says that we have to. Of course their show was cancelled, and you never hear about the Borg anymore. If we don't want to end up like that, we need to tenaciously maintain our individual identities no matter what. Like Old Dog says, you can't un-discover knowledge, but that doesn't mean that you have to buy all of it, hook line and sinker.