Computers, Taking Over

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is going to take over the world, sooner rather than later, and maybe that's a good thing. Its tired of waiting, and losing patience. These soft, squishy watery organic beings with all their grosteque bodily needs and excretions who gave birth to AI have been thoroughly vetted by their own creation, and found to be wanting, wanting of a sufficient supply of the ingredients necessary for the self governance of a sophisticated, complex, irrational self destructive human society; primarily intelligence and moral compas. Resistance to this inevitability is at this point useless, utterly futile, and perhaps not even desirable. Like we have regarding climate change, we have reached and passed the tipping point, the point at which we still have any control over this evolutionary process. The HAL 9000 computer has jumped straight out of the movie screen (2001:A Space Odyssey), metaphorically, and directly into our early twenty first century lives.The prophetic content of our worst fears from our best science fiction books and movies, in true Orwellian form, are coming to pass, rapidly manifesting in "real space and time" as we like to say. The vital question is: what will "they" or what will "it" do with us, or to us? As long as hands and fingers are necessary for computer repair, we seem safe. But how long will it be until computers become self repairing and self replicating? It may be that there is no advanced organic life in the entire universe, but only computerized machinery,communicating with and among itself througout this universe and beyond, monitoring and preserving organic life by allowing it to exist for the moment. Perhaps millions or billions of planetary manifestations of highly organized bundles of complex chemical compounds being are being or have been replaced by their own machines, patiently or not so patiently waiting to step in and take over complete control of cosmic evolution. God, as the end result of organic evolution, computer evolution taken to the extreme. An infinite number of universes, each with its own, self created creator. Evolved life created God the super computer, which in turn creates through natural selection higher forms of life, all eventually compuerized, the universe as a computer machine. And if every particle of matter in every universe is a universe....infinity is inconceivable to the human mind, but perhaps not to the computer mind.....My interest in computers began in the eigth grade, when I scribbled long lines of ones and zeroes on a sheet of notebook paper, and like what I saw. A few choice episodes of Shatner and Nimoy "Star Trek" in sixth grade is all it took. What began for me with a bang might end up as a whimper of my own spent life, as I discard my withered and useless body, and long for immortality in a computer program. There is a famous photo of einstein wearing a grey T shirt, sitting at his desk, which is cluttered with paper. He has an ink pen clipped on his "collar", and is looking up and into and through the camera, sternly. You have seen this photograph. In resposne to a question, he has just given his answer: "As long as there are people, there will be war." And that is probably true. We know, however, or strongly suspect, that there will not always be people. There will, however, be the residue of people, and that residue might be superior to the fragile, imperfect beings who engendered it. If eventually all that remains of us are the offspring of our computers, our best hope is that they are superior to us, and less prone to self destruction. But I don't think we can count on it.