Benighted mumbo-jumbo
I pondered about purpose of life in my first blog. Couple of my friends shared their thoughts. They had similar questions. They expressed their doubts in a slightly different manner, though the fundamental question was the same.
We are working hard to learn new things. We have made several technological advances. We have mastered the known science. Or is it the other way, has the science mastered us?
My father used to say that during his childhood he used to go onto the street and read under the street lights. He used to remind us that the street lights were nothing but kerosene lanterns. Youth of his time never had any problems reading that way. Today we have progressed a lot and invented several things like Electricity, Air conditioner, and Refrigerator to name a few. Youth of today are handicapped if something happens to the electricity grid. They can’t continue living, leave alone reading, without electricity, even during day time. So, with all these inventions have we mastered the technology or has technology mastered us? Are we slaves of our own inventions?
Consider this
- when we made oil and figured out how to fry, we found out cancer
- when we figured out a way to make butter and cheese we crowned heart attack and stroke
- when we discovered tobacco we discovered lung cancer
- when we created atom bomb we created Hiroshima
Not that Cancer, heart attack and stroke were non-existent earlier. The populace was just ignorant of them. They had no count of the number of people who died due to these illnesses. My guess is that the number of deaths due to these ailments was not as high as it is today. But we can never be sure.
According to one school of thought, this is the process of evolution. Human race identifies problems, it researches and finds solutions to these problems, which in turn will reveal further problems, and the endeavor continues.
So, ultimately we will catch up with the creator (God/person/force or whatever created this universe and all of us), and we will become creators. Some people think that we are not too far of. They say that we already created a robot, we mastered artificial intelligence, we can make the robots understand voice commands, we can make these robots see, and we have successfully cloned. It is just a matter of combining all these and making these robots feel, like we all do – understand the emotions, empathize etc. However, feeling is overrated. So, do we really want these robots to “feel” and suffer the same way we do? Keeping that aside, I was told that we are close to mastering the art of making machines “feel” (not just see, touch and smell).
We are working hard to learn new things. We have made several technological advances. We have mastered the known science. Or is it the other way, has the science mastered us?
My father used to say that during his childhood he used to go onto the street and read under the street lights. He used to remind us that the street lights were nothing but kerosene lanterns. Youth of his time never had any problems reading that way. Today we have progressed a lot and invented several things like Electricity, Air conditioner, and Refrigerator to name a few. Youth of today are handicapped if something happens to the electricity grid. They can’t continue living, leave alone reading, without electricity, even during day time. So, with all these inventions have we mastered the technology or has technology mastered us? Are we slaves of our own inventions?
Consider this
- when we made oil and figured out how to fry, we found out cancer
- when we figured out a way to make butter and cheese we crowned heart attack and stroke
- when we discovered tobacco we discovered lung cancer
- when we created atom bomb we created Hiroshima
Not that Cancer, heart attack and stroke were non-existent earlier. The populace was just ignorant of them. They had no count of the number of people who died due to these illnesses. My guess is that the number of deaths due to these ailments was not as high as it is today. But we can never be sure.
According to one school of thought, this is the process of evolution. Human race identifies problems, it researches and finds solutions to these problems, which in turn will reveal further problems, and the endeavor continues.
So, ultimately we will catch up with the creator (God/person/force or whatever created this universe and all of us), and we will become creators. Some people think that we are not too far of. They say that we already created a robot, we mastered artificial intelligence, we can make the robots understand voice commands, we can make these robots see, and we have successfully cloned. It is just a matter of combining all these and making these robots feel, like we all do – understand the emotions, empathize etc. However, feeling is overrated. So, do we really want these robots to “feel” and suffer the same way we do? Keeping that aside, I was told that we are close to mastering the art of making machines “feel” (not just see, touch and smell).
Is this the ultimate purpose, to create a machine which has all the qualities of a human being? What if these machines think that we are lowly mortals and wipe us out (I am assuming that these machines have no death, I mean indestructible)? Will they have the same issues with their very purpose? Will they continue the research? If so, what would be their ultimate goal?
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