006.5 How would you feel if you knew that within a century, intelligent machines would be self-aware and much smarter and more creative than humans? Why?

This is a tag-on to my last post. It sort of ties in with my penultimate (I love that word) paragraph:

"What if in three generations, the world is populated by cyborgs? They would be the 'super race', perfect "humans" with no diseases, no angry feelings, and no mistakes."

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Something about it seems inevitable, that computers will be made to resemble and act like humans. I don't think I would like that very much, and I don't think anyone would. It would make things so much more convenient, but would it make things better? Instead of men working out in the fields to harvest crops, we can have computers. We can create brainless slaves like the eejits in The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer (which I also recommend). That would save a lot of people pain and poverty. It would be a great solution, wouldn't it?

But think about it. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck. The line between robots and humans is blurred as it is. Should we treat these brainless slaves like we would any normal human? Do they have souls? Minds? Lives? Do we treat them like farmers or computers? In The House of the Scorpion, the humans treated the eejits like computers. And the eejits were actual living people, only computerized to obey orders. Would these computer-people be like tools, like calculators or refrigerators, or would they be more?

I'm so scared for the future. Something tells me it's wrong to interfere with nature like that. But something also tells me that, with people finding ways to get rid of tough jobs, it's bound to happen. I'm so curious and extremely frightened to see it all unfold.

- Quibbles 7/11/14