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People often ask me, “You say you're here to prevent what happened in the old world from happening again. What exactly does that mean?”
There's no real easy answer to that. Well... there is, but not one that most people are going to like. I could say that I'm here to make sure that the human race, blindsided by hate and fear and the desire for ease over freedom, doesn't continue building themselves a maze of self-destruction that they can't climb out of. Just like in the world of the Matrix, that's how it starts. It's like a precocious toddler building an atomic bomb: technology comes before understanding, weapons come before tolerance, and before you know it you've built yourself an enemy. And everyone needs an enemy, right?
Because if what you're fighting, if what's keeping you from making your own choices, from standing up in your own life and existing outside the pervasive mindset of fear, if what's holding you down out of fear of change and any unknown that may represent that change... if this unnamed thing is outside of you, well then. You can destroy it, can't you? You can trample it down, dust off your hands, and not have to be afraid anymore – until the next thing comes along. It couldn't possibly be a mindset as a whole... oh no! It couldn't be that you're afraid to move beyond the preconceptions you're taught... to make those choices instead of having them made for you. It's GOT to be some evil outside enemy.
Doesn't it?
I'm not here to tell you with 100% certainty that the world is going to end in a great Machine war, with humanity's own creations rising up against them. That sounds ridiculous, really. I'm simply here to offer you a glimpse at several possible futures: and what all of them have in common is the fact that they all begin with that blindness – that fear of what's different, the fear of change. Condemn something long enough and loudly enough, and you don't have to listen to it. You can't. You've drowned it out. You don't have to learn. But whether or not this history will eventually repeat itself, one can learn a lot from the past... whether that past is linear, parallel, or running in any other direction, really. And no one can argue that humans are quite busy.
They surpass their humanity with their technology – because an easy life is far more highly valued than a good one. You'd be surprised how many people get the two confused.
I'm offering these words as a way to step back and get a rather unique perspective on just how close two of those futures might be. To demonstrate that the world is on a path, to be sure – it just may not be the one they want to be on. ‘Write what you know,’ people say, and if I'm here for this reason than it stands to reason that I have this singular viewpoint to speak from, this ability to see the trend. This isn't good, bad, or indifferent: it simply is. And so, from the desire to illustrate the thing I believe humanity must avoid at all costs, this is the result. Take it how you will.
In every bad movie and in every projection toward the future, robots and artificial intelligences are portrayed as having originally been created to make the lives of humans easier. Think about it: computers were originally nothing more than tools. They developed. Others stepped up on the backs of research past and took it one step further... and further... and further. And, of course, the Machine war in the old world began after humans created sentient androids to do their less-than-desirable grunt work. They created other beings, more or less, to be their servants.
Now take a minute and really think about this. Think about the meaning of the word sentient.
Sentience is a capacity for basic consciousness – the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which has a connotation of knowledge, higher consciousness, or perception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different meanings in English. The two words can be distinguished by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, ‘to feel’; and sapere, ‘to know’. Sentience is the ability to perceive. It is separate from, and not dependent on, the other aspects of consciousness. Because of this, some have suggested the possibility of philosophical zombies, beings, which are not sentient but nonetheless behave exactly as you would expect a human to behave.Wikipedia
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