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The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.
The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.
The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.
Engineers want to build artificial muscles - actuators that change length in response to a stimulus - because they create a smoother, more human-like motion than jerky electric motors or pneumatic devices. Such muscles would be used to power robots, prosthetic limbs and artificial tissue for implantation.
Nanoscale silica materials self-assembled in artificially determined patterns can improve upon nature's designs, such as bone material, researchers have found.
The silica nanostructures may improve performance where increased pore volume is important. These include modern thin-film applications such as membrane barriers, molecular recognition sensors, and low-dielectric-constant insulators needed for future generation of microelectronic devices.
Originally posted by NGC2736
You bring up many valid points with this post. We are entering a new era. The arrival of an AI would be as much of a watershed moment for our species as contact with ET.
The potential for conflicts of interests would be enormous. And while ethical behavior would be in the best interests of any group of AIs, as some studies have shown for humans, there is no way to be sure that this would always be followed.
What if an AI were constructed by very unethical people? How long would it be before it posed a threat to humans? How long would it take for this AI to acquire ethics and decide to apply them in it's dealings with us?
There is a lot to consider in the near future, because we are just about to the point of this "first contact".
Movies often depict AI going well beyond human intelligence and taking over. I doubt this would be the case... in fact I believe humans and AI will inevitably join.
Even if we didn't merge with AI, it seems illogical that AI wouldn't turn all evil and take over the world.
It would probably be more beneficial to have a symbiotic relationship with us anyway
. Also, with any intelligence, whether biological or human, I believe that acquiring ethics are a natural process of evolution. AI will just evolve a lot faster than we did.
Originally posted by robertfenix
Say the AI has evolved past current human understanding, the AI might chose to get rid of humans knowing they have no possibility to evolve past their war like death mongering state.
The AI may chose to wipe out humans therefore as a necessary evil a means to achieve a docile end to ongoing death and destruction. The AI itself is self perpetuating, "death" is not a known value as there is in indefinite time line available to the AI.
Humans by having a limited biological time span therefore might be considered of little value or of little impact on the success of the AI existence.
A drain on available resources.....
And a threat to the existence of the AI, so the AI constructs may break their moral code and "kill" as a matter of self preservation from the perceived, inherently hostile, life form that is humans...
Originally posted by robertfenix
Carbon is still carbon at its basic element, should technology advance to the point to identically mimic the creation of biological systems then Humans as we know them today could be re-created using this technology thus the Human computer could be created.....
An interesting paradox of todays 2007..... what if this has already transpired.... And "man" is an advanced technology biological construct of some "other" creation......
Originally posted by InSpiteOf
That is a very interesting idea. We have all heard of the concept of terrestrial seeding, but what if we are actually the mechanical creations of another race? Perhaps abandonned in haste, or by choice to see how the experiment progresses. It would be a touch of irony if we were to create yet another type of AI.
I never even thought of that!
Originally posted by NGC2736
NOT that I think these things are so, but it is human to imagine things that have never been imagined before. It is why an AI would need us.
Originally posted by NGC2736
InSpiteOf, I'm not sure that any other intelligent being would want to become human. It's not like we're that great. We're unique, for what we are, but that doesn't mean that we're the best possible form of intelligence.
Just my take on it. Too bad we don't have an AI to ask for an opinion.
Originally posted by InSpiteOf
I was thinking more along the lines of the AI wanting the experiance, simply because it hasn't had it yet. Not that an AI would want to aspire to humanity, but rather experiance it at least once, even if just for refrence and catalogue.
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Say the AI has evolved past current human understanding, the AI might chose to get rid of humans knowing they have no possibility to evolve past their war like death mongering state.