Heh, I just had a funny idea today before even reading about this. I read something else though, and it gave me some funny ideas. Namely, I think there's a fair chance that once technology evolves sufficiently, we'll get Deus Ex and start implanting stuff to improve ourselves. Sooner or later we'll all be practically some sort of cyborgs, and at some point we're probably bound to start augmenting our brains as well. That's a slippery slope, and at some point we could reach a situation where there's more machine than human in us, and we'd have replaced ourselves by robots - voluntarily, all by ourselves (with possible help from the robots we created).
Of course it'll be a long time before we reach that point, and there's other ways things could go too. But that way seems, eh, natural. I almost feel like we should actively take steps to prevent that if we don't want it, because with the constant urge to improve, it'll be hard to resist such easy improvements.
| RadiantDanceMachine said: Stick to physics, clearly you know next to nothing about computer science. |
He's not referring to computer science alone. And assuming you're referring to AI, it's a real threat at the very least until development evolves quite significantly to reduce the number of programming mistakes (i.e. bugs). With the current ways of development, producing bugs, even dangerous ones, is dangerously easy. And that's not even the only way things could go wrong with AI. Personally I'm not foreseeing any concrete threats in AI development but acknowledging that the risks are there is important.
