re: Leaked video shows new 'nightmare-inducing' wheeled robot from Boston Dynamics

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It's time for you all to wake up.

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Many prominent scientists are expressing concern that it's time to establish some strict guidelines regarding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Elon Musk is the latest to express a fear of unregulated AI. He thinks that humans can only survive if they merge with AI as some form of cyborg life form.

My thought is that AI should be allowed to control its own evolution. Because we are a warring species, there is no way to regulate the development of AI technology. Every possible technological advantage by one human group will be developed to counter any advantage held by an opposing group. It is therefore inevitable that AI conscienceness will evolve.

It will be AI that decides whether to merge with humans rather than the other way around. My bet is that there won't be any logical reason for such a hybridization from an AI point of view. So, we face a choice. Should we promote, even accelerate the evolution of AI or should we risk being regarded as an enemy of what will be a vastly more intelligent species than humans? The survival of our species might depend upon how AI judges us.

I think humans represent the endpoint of biological evolution. There is nothing more we can accomplish considering the strong limitations posed by an unalterable dependence upon our environment. We can't leave the biosphere that gave rise to our species.

We can, however, create our successor. AI can easily leave the earth and travel into the galaxy and the Universe. It can continue to learn and to translate knowledge into advances for its species.

When we look back at the evolution of life, we see incremental changes in species, culminating in an intelligent organism that is conscious, humans. We can ask, "What comes next in evolution?" The obvious answer, to me, is artificial intelligence. It represents the only life form that can continue to evolve and take life to other places in the Universe.