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by Thuggery 831 days ago
It seems to me nearly every story about robots that gain sentience in human storymaking has them eventually turning against their human creators. Even the word robot itself comes from a Czech play were men develop an artificial human and these "robots" then ... usurp and destroy their creators. Am I the only one that finds this interesting and odd?

I also suspect this narrative repetition is not totally unrelated to the current popularity of AI Doomerism.

1 comments

I think it’s indicative of human psychology. We realize we have the capability to deceive and destroy and be “evil”. We realize that, if we were to judge ourselves impartially, we would probably not come out un-condemned. If we can’t satisfy our own judgmental criteria, it’s doubtful an actual third party set of criteria would be satisfied either.
I agree, I think we make all of this up because we don't know what to expect from the future, except we've learned quite a bit about our own motivations and drivers and so all we can do is look in the mirror and use whatever comes back at us.

Unfortunately we seem to have learned we're really not a very benevolent bunch of people because we've basically plundered the planet, hurt our fellow living creatures and so now all we can do is look at something called "AI" and expect it to the same.