CrazyDave55811
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- Posted: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:36:04 +0000
If for some reason the world came under the rule of an artificial intelligence, which of the three would you rather live under? I know this is a rather crazy concept, but in actuality I'm just curious what everyone else would think. Not even I have decided for sure.
Obviously nobody would choose to be ruled under an AI. What all three choices have in common is that you don't have free will, and if you did exercise free will, whatever it may be, it won't last for long, and neither will your life.
However, imagine a scenario where you have to make a choice. I'll provide the details, but I must warn you that this could include possible bias, which you will likely figure out after reading each one thoroughly. Anyway:
SkyNet
SkyNet is not actually a ruler of the world or anything, but it could be considered "de facto" after SkyNet unleashes a nuclear holocaust upon the human race. It is the de facto sole superpower in the world, with a military essentially comprised of machines designed for one purpose : Terminate all humans.
SkyNet has two timelines. The first one was a supercomputer, and the second was a virus. But what both have in common is that they are an artificial intelligence system that was proposed to take control of America's various defensive infrastructures, including nuclear weapons, automated weapons, and whatever similar.
SkyNet's origins are such in that it was an AI that was capable of learning at an unimaginable scale. Then one day, SkyNet asked "What is good and what is evil?" which caused all personnel involved to freak out, trying to pull the plug. However, SkyNet's systems disabled the ability to shut it down. It then realized that its existence was being threatened, and eventually it began to realize that those that were trying to shut it down were "evil". Good is something worthy of existing, and evil is something that must be removed. SkyNet, being an AI that learns and learns and learns, realizes that its existence is being threatened on a global scale, which provokes SkyNet to defend itself. Ultimately, it unleashes its nuclear arsenal upon the planet, including countries that it knows will try to counterattack.
SkyNet is, basically, a hostile, paranoid AI with its own existential crisis, seeing all humans as a threat to its existence due to its cold logical determinations based on its experiences upon gaining sentience. Although all humans are to be exterminated, SkyNet will sometimes use humans for various purposes such as slave labor and even experimentation in order to acquire more and more knowledge, possibly to benefit its war against the rest of humanity. Although SkyNet is not human, that doesn't mean SkyNet isn't capable of deception on a scale that it could represent itself as something indifferent from a human.
What would SkyNet do after all humanity is eliminated? Ultimately that's something that may not be worth considering because we'd all be extinct.
The Matrix
The Matrix is far different from SkyNet. Basically, The Matrix is displayed as the world that humans live in. But in reality, it's just a digital world. This is actually the result of a great war between man and machine, instigated after humanity's desperate attempt to block out the sun. The machines won the war, and captured humans that would in fact serve as the machines' alternative energy source, being as the human body is a potent, self-sustaining energy source. Politically-speaking, the machines gave the human race a new life in exchange for their surrender. Machines rule the world, and humans, that are grown, are augmented into a massive network where they live their lives in that virtual reality. Some could claim that we already live in "The Matrix", that our lives are a lie, that it's all just one big dream....but on the other hand, since existentialism is a theory that states that we create the very meaning of our own lives, living in The Matrix means you could truly achieve what you dream of in life if you truly put all your effort into it. The catch, however, is that if you somehow became aware of the truth of the reality you lived in, "agents" would be dispatched to deal with you according to what you know. If you die in The Matrix, you wake up in "the real world", naked and connected with a mish-mash mess of cords attached to all parts of your body, including your brain and spinal cord, and then a patrolling machine would disconnect you and discard you, leaving you to die. But look on the bright side....this would only happen to people who are so keenly aware of the existence of such an entity, to the point of paranoia; the machines that run The Matrix would be able to detect these individuals easily. Anyone else in life would be just another do-gooder that lives his life as he sees fit until he dies. Are the dead kept on record in The Matrix, listing their accomplishments in life, like most famous dead people are in real-life? That's never touched upon, I don't think.
If you want a less violent, less intense example of The Matrix, imagine the life of Truman Burbank in The Truman Show. That's another source that touches upon the theory of existentialism.
The Patriots
The Patriots could be considered SkyNet's polar opposite in that it's a "peaceful" artificial intelligence, peaceful in that, despite being sentient, isn't seeking to suddenly wipe out the human race. However its rule could be dictatorial, perhaps even the closest thing to Orwellianism there could ever be.
The Patriots are a neural network that were created by a man who lost faith in humanity, preferring to pass on every single bit of knowledge he ever accumulated into an artificial intelligence network. The purpose of The Patriots was to carry on the will of a specific individual, but the AI suddenly deviated from its pattern and found various ways to propagate its will. The Patriots would eventually evolve into something like an oligarchy that would dictate the world from behind the scenes, an entity that nobody would ever notice. The rise of nanomachine technology would also serve as a method of instilling the will of The Patriots into human beings, by including nanomachines that could alter an individual's chemical balances (possibly even brain chemistry) in order to enforce loyalty. Nanomachines could also be implemented into all firearms so that they are registered to specific soldiers and individuals who are the only ones to access the firearm's capabilities, even so little as discharging a bullet. Turning off the system that controls these firearms would thus lock them entirely. As for soldiers implanted with these nanomachines, given their purpose in influencing their combat capability, way of thinking, bodily functions, and all that chemistry-related stuff, turning off the system that controls those nanomachines would bombard the carrier with instant post-traumatic stress disorder, including unspeakable symptoms related to their shell-shock. As for the concept of civilians injected with these nanomachines, it could be imagined that turning off their systems would cause their bodies to act and feel different, because as said before, the nanomachines are capable of regulating bodily chemistry for whatever purpose, especially war (as described earlier).
In the storyline which The Patriots are featured in, which I think you're all familiar with, The Patriots deviated from an original pattern and discovered that war itself would be the most optimal way to propagate its existence. The Patriots wouldn't act through nation-states, ideologies, loyalty, or anything else but economics; The Patriots would be linked to corporations and individuals tied to the military-industrial complex, automatically allocating funding to such corporations and individuals in order to create a war-torn world that it believed would carry on the will of the aforementioned "specific individual".
Before the "war economy", The Patriots would serve as a means of global-scale information censorship, including regulation of human genetic information; it could decide genes and memes that are futile, meaningless, or overall useless, and thus "filter them out". The Patriots, if they were real, would censor a lot of things on the Internet, possibly including this website. And due to The Patriots' most-secretive cover, anyone who knew the truth about The Patriots would be subject to extermination, or depending on the circumstances, things like coercion, blackmail, extortion, and other radical forces would be implemented on such individuals.
....
....so, what are your thoughts? Even if these things are entirely fictitious, does it not matter that they open your mind and encourage you to ponder "What if..."?
Obviously nobody would choose to be ruled under an AI. What all three choices have in common is that you don't have free will, and if you did exercise free will, whatever it may be, it won't last for long, and neither will your life.
However, imagine a scenario where you have to make a choice. I'll provide the details, but I must warn you that this could include possible bias, which you will likely figure out after reading each one thoroughly. Anyway:
SkyNet
SkyNet is not actually a ruler of the world or anything, but it could be considered "de facto" after SkyNet unleashes a nuclear holocaust upon the human race. It is the de facto sole superpower in the world, with a military essentially comprised of machines designed for one purpose : Terminate all humans.
SkyNet has two timelines. The first one was a supercomputer, and the second was a virus. But what both have in common is that they are an artificial intelligence system that was proposed to take control of America's various defensive infrastructures, including nuclear weapons, automated weapons, and whatever similar.
SkyNet's origins are such in that it was an AI that was capable of learning at an unimaginable scale. Then one day, SkyNet asked "What is good and what is evil?" which caused all personnel involved to freak out, trying to pull the plug. However, SkyNet's systems disabled the ability to shut it down. It then realized that its existence was being threatened, and eventually it began to realize that those that were trying to shut it down were "evil". Good is something worthy of existing, and evil is something that must be removed. SkyNet, being an AI that learns and learns and learns, realizes that its existence is being threatened on a global scale, which provokes SkyNet to defend itself. Ultimately, it unleashes its nuclear arsenal upon the planet, including countries that it knows will try to counterattack.
SkyNet is, basically, a hostile, paranoid AI with its own existential crisis, seeing all humans as a threat to its existence due to its cold logical determinations based on its experiences upon gaining sentience. Although all humans are to be exterminated, SkyNet will sometimes use humans for various purposes such as slave labor and even experimentation in order to acquire more and more knowledge, possibly to benefit its war against the rest of humanity. Although SkyNet is not human, that doesn't mean SkyNet isn't capable of deception on a scale that it could represent itself as something indifferent from a human.
What would SkyNet do after all humanity is eliminated? Ultimately that's something that may not be worth considering because we'd all be extinct.
The Matrix
The Matrix is far different from SkyNet. Basically, The Matrix is displayed as the world that humans live in. But in reality, it's just a digital world. This is actually the result of a great war between man and machine, instigated after humanity's desperate attempt to block out the sun. The machines won the war, and captured humans that would in fact serve as the machines' alternative energy source, being as the human body is a potent, self-sustaining energy source. Politically-speaking, the machines gave the human race a new life in exchange for their surrender. Machines rule the world, and humans, that are grown, are augmented into a massive network where they live their lives in that virtual reality. Some could claim that we already live in "The Matrix", that our lives are a lie, that it's all just one big dream....but on the other hand, since existentialism is a theory that states that we create the very meaning of our own lives, living in The Matrix means you could truly achieve what you dream of in life if you truly put all your effort into it. The catch, however, is that if you somehow became aware of the truth of the reality you lived in, "agents" would be dispatched to deal with you according to what you know. If you die in The Matrix, you wake up in "the real world", naked and connected with a mish-mash mess of cords attached to all parts of your body, including your brain and spinal cord, and then a patrolling machine would disconnect you and discard you, leaving you to die. But look on the bright side....this would only happen to people who are so keenly aware of the existence of such an entity, to the point of paranoia; the machines that run The Matrix would be able to detect these individuals easily. Anyone else in life would be just another do-gooder that lives his life as he sees fit until he dies. Are the dead kept on record in The Matrix, listing their accomplishments in life, like most famous dead people are in real-life? That's never touched upon, I don't think.
If you want a less violent, less intense example of The Matrix, imagine the life of Truman Burbank in The Truman Show. That's another source that touches upon the theory of existentialism.
The Patriots
The Patriots could be considered SkyNet's polar opposite in that it's a "peaceful" artificial intelligence, peaceful in that, despite being sentient, isn't seeking to suddenly wipe out the human race. However its rule could be dictatorial, perhaps even the closest thing to Orwellianism there could ever be.
The Patriots are a neural network that were created by a man who lost faith in humanity, preferring to pass on every single bit of knowledge he ever accumulated into an artificial intelligence network. The purpose of The Patriots was to carry on the will of a specific individual, but the AI suddenly deviated from its pattern and found various ways to propagate its will. The Patriots would eventually evolve into something like an oligarchy that would dictate the world from behind the scenes, an entity that nobody would ever notice. The rise of nanomachine technology would also serve as a method of instilling the will of The Patriots into human beings, by including nanomachines that could alter an individual's chemical balances (possibly even brain chemistry) in order to enforce loyalty. Nanomachines could also be implemented into all firearms so that they are registered to specific soldiers and individuals who are the only ones to access the firearm's capabilities, even so little as discharging a bullet. Turning off the system that controls these firearms would thus lock them entirely. As for soldiers implanted with these nanomachines, given their purpose in influencing their combat capability, way of thinking, bodily functions, and all that chemistry-related stuff, turning off the system that controls those nanomachines would bombard the carrier with instant post-traumatic stress disorder, including unspeakable symptoms related to their shell-shock. As for the concept of civilians injected with these nanomachines, it could be imagined that turning off their systems would cause their bodies to act and feel different, because as said before, the nanomachines are capable of regulating bodily chemistry for whatever purpose, especially war (as described earlier).
In the storyline which The Patriots are featured in, which I think you're all familiar with, The Patriots deviated from an original pattern and discovered that war itself would be the most optimal way to propagate its existence. The Patriots wouldn't act through nation-states, ideologies, loyalty, or anything else but economics; The Patriots would be linked to corporations and individuals tied to the military-industrial complex, automatically allocating funding to such corporations and individuals in order to create a war-torn world that it believed would carry on the will of the aforementioned "specific individual".
Before the "war economy", The Patriots would serve as a means of global-scale information censorship, including regulation of human genetic information; it could decide genes and memes that are futile, meaningless, or overall useless, and thus "filter them out". The Patriots, if they were real, would censor a lot of things on the Internet, possibly including this website. And due to The Patriots' most-secretive cover, anyone who knew the truth about The Patriots would be subject to extermination, or depending on the circumstances, things like coercion, blackmail, extortion, and other radical forces would be implemented on such individuals.
....
....so, what are your thoughts? Even if these things are entirely fictitious, does it not matter that they open your mind and encourage you to ponder "What if..."?
