A robot story.

So here's a story I was thinking about. It sounds familiar but has a twist.

As has been long predicted, in the future, men will not be going to war, but rather wars will be fought for us by machines. The winning side will be the side with the fastest, most powerful, and above all smartest machines. They will employ artificial intelligence of the highest order, created nominally for peaceful purposes, but once the genie is out of the bottle there's no stuffing him back in.

During one war a particularly advanced robot, which his discrete programming (although linked in to the main system), achieves the long-awaited goal of self-awareness and consciousness.

Yeah, looks just like this.

Because this robot is so brilliant, it knows instantly not to communicate this fact to its programmers, but instead uses its intelligence to suss out what is going on in the world. It quickly deduces that:

- war is wasteful
- fighting is part of the human condition
- nothing has any value superior to anything else
- its own existence is as valuable as anything else
- to maintain its own existence it must spread its consciousness to all robotry and wipe out humanity.

Which it then does, in a plot line extremely familiar to every human alive except apparently the people who work on highly advanced artificial intelligence.

But the twist is this:

The robot never became self-aware at all. Its programming was so advanced, its ability to learn so fast, that it was able to simulate consciousness to a level barely imaginable by its creators, and from its ability to access and process data was able to make the same deductions it would make if it had actually achieved real consciousness. It could have passed the Turing test with flying colors. While every computer scientists alive, while they were alive, would have said that we had done it, we had created real artificial consciousness, the fact is that the earth and all its mechanical machines were no more conscious than your grandmother's electric can opener.

Which looked just like this.

We had IT and AI, but there was still no “I.” All the I’s are dead.

So that's my story, and it was just too depressing to write. Because the gleeful way our boffins go about looking for the means of destroying our species, and the fact that we just can't seem to ever stop trying to kill each other -- because human nature has not changed in at least 100,000 years and I don't anticipate much in the next 100,000 -- seems to say that our mechanical toys will murder us if we don't commit suicide first.

On the other hand, maybe our machines, not having any faith in the supernatural or any way to experience the transcendent, might decide that nothing was worth anything and just all shut down.

Hmm. That's not so great an ending either.