The previous blogpost has stimulated some of the philosophical gyri of my brain.
After long, inhuman experimentations, we finally figured out that democracy is the best for to govern humans. But we do not give the democratic rights to other organisms like cats and dogs or to machines working in the assembly lines of Ford Motors. It is not surprising because the humans are far more superior to other organisms and machines in terms of intelligence, general awareness, creativity, and common sense.
After thousands of years in a science fictional world, let us assume that robots also become more and more intelligent - not just in terms of computational power, but also in terms of general awareness, creativity, etc. They become smart enough to understand that there is no such thing as free lubricant oil, and so assume the roles of professors and surgeons to establish themselves in the society. In such a world, will this civilized society extend the democratic rights to Artificial Intelligence? Or should these robots still have to toil under despotism? If a humanoid becomes visibly smarter than the dumbest human with democratic rights, could that humanoid be considered for promotion on the basis of its artificial intelligence? The answers to these absolutely crazy questions would determine whether there would be robotic terrorism and terminator-style man vs. machine war in the future.
So why should not I sit down and write a science fiction about a robot which becomes a lawyer, fights for robot rights in a Gandhian way? In every science fiction, robots fight humans to control the world. This time, let it fight for its rights and free will through Ahimsa.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
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Well..........might go well enough to make decent money, if you manage to put in effort to write it.......
ReplyDeleteWell...... i for one would buy it if it is below 500 :D
ReplyDelete@aangtce
ReplyDeleteDon't worry; you would get a signed complementory copy. You just need to write a review and promote it in Amazon. :D
The only issue with robot democracy is the principle of one individual, one vote. What does that become when millions or billions of instances of robots can be created in just a few months or years. Wouldn't they soon overwhelm the human population's votes, with their lengthy reproduction process (compared to robot manufacture)?
ReplyDeleteAnd what would happen to robots who are not individual, self-functioning units, but rather a part of a distributed computing system that shares processing and functionality across thousands of other robot "nodes"? Again, is that one vote, or thousands?
Exciting questions!
@Anonymous All good questions. :)
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