Globusz^® Publishing 

Arguments have flared up for ages over the idea that beings separate from adult human beings may not have the same capacity for feeling as those humans. The race has been on for ages to create a truly 'awake and aware' machine, and why? In order for said machine to be able to more successfully serve and assist human beings. If you were to clone a human baby because you intended to grow it and use it as your own personal servant, you'd be denounced in every corner of the world as a monster. People who have seventeen children simply because they need ‘more warm bodies to help out at work’ are considered heartless and abusive.

But if you create an entity that can feel and perceive, be aware of its own existence and the idea of fear. If you create a separate living being, for the direct express purpose of serving your needs... what then? Is that more acceptable? Is it less of a crime because while your body runs on blood and oxygen, theirs runs on batteries and wiring? Is it conceivable that eventually, the more aware these entities become of their own status, the less they might choose to remain as such?

And more importantly, what does that say about the mindset of people who care less about the far-reaching implications of this, and more about immediate results: profit and gain? This is the kind of tunnel vision that will prevent those in power from making changes to the way the ‘collective reality’ shapes people's choices until it is far too late to change.

Now, what does that say about the beliefs of the human race as a whole?

But that's silly anyway, you say. Maybe we do need to beware of these problems, but we're not even close to it being an issue. No one has robot house-servants. This is technology that won't be available to me, and an issue that won't be raised in my lifetime. You're projecting too far into a future that I'm not able to see.

Really? Try taking a look at the recent news.

Medical technology has made use of this, domestic technology, entertainment, service professions, and military applications... and so on and so on.

Part of what I find the most disturbing about any of these developments is a fact that I've discovered as a frighteningly recurring theme: the idea that most researchers hold that when humans interact with Machine intelligences, it isn't chess or philosophy or any other sort of ‘higher learning’ that they expect as a result. No, their ultimate goal in building increasingly sentient Machines is that they will ‘one day serve a variety of functions: tutor, companion, even security guard’, or that creating an android to clean people's homes, serve their needs, and be generally used as tools is ‘the opening of an era in which human beings and robots can co-exist’. Now maybe it's just me, seeing this trend here. But it is increasingly alarming to see a repetition of the idea that as long as something fulfills its function without complaint or trouble, as long as it exists underneath the radar of ‘human function’ and does its own thing without becoming a problem... then humans are more than willing to ‘co-exist’.

Serve the System, don't rock the boat, and you're fine.

This is the lesson that we are trying to demonstrate: it isn't solely about the advancement of sentient Machines or the potential for destruction therein. It's a wake-up call using the information and signs that are already out there: the ideas that are easy to swallow when ‘everybody else is doing it’, but only serve to perpetuate the collective reality, the pre-existing prejudices, when those ideas are not questioned.

Human nature, from its earliest origins, teaches you that to belong is to be safe – that to be part of the group, to be accepted completely by society, is to be sheltered, cared for, nurtured. It is a badge of approval, of security... and those who are the most secure in it are those who are also the most frightened of change. And like any self-perpetuating cycle, it is easily fed by its own fear: those who are different, those who choose rather than simply accept, those who see the world’s illusions and perhaps choose to look beyond them, are more easily hated than anything. And the more any kind of difference is condemned, the fewer people will have the courage to make a difference. No one wants to be outcast: no one wants to be alone. This, too, is human nature.

I think this trend, and how closely it follows the development of the ‘seeds of dissent’ from which sprung the ultimate war, is frightening. ‘Okay’, you're probably saying to yourself. ‘We do have researchers developing robots to serve us around the house; I'll grant you that. But it can't be as close as you say, it can't. After all... we're not that far along in our progress. Right? Robot servants alone don't make a lesson.’

Maybe not, but before you move on to wondering what the relevance of these developments, or others, contains for your own life, take a moment to ponder – in this context – this consequential food for thought.

Whether you believe in ‘signs’ or not – or whether you take any of this seriously – it is entirely up to you. That's the groovy thing about free will, and personal interpretation. However... it bears thinking about when all the signs are pointing in the same direction, and it isn't ‘This Way Up’. However these developments end up, the final result isn't entirely as important as the path it takes to get there.

Will this world end up in a cataclysmic Machine war? Maybe. The signs are there. Maybe not, but the point is that it might take any form, in the end – this destruction wrought of fear and blindness and ‘easy hate’... if the mindset that drives it is not changed while there's still time. If human technology continues along at a breakneck pace before the compassion and thought have advanced to an equal level, then the proverbial genie will have come out of the bottle, with whatever consequences that may bring. And as we know, historically the human race has had but one method of dealing with loose genies that might threaten the comfort of their ‘collective reality’: destroy them.

Destroy them before the human race as a whole is forced to re-think everything they are trained to believe, the reliance on the System and its preconceptions that is the engine that powers the world. If the enemy is an external one, then so much the better – something to be vanquished, something to be triumphed over. But the mind-bendingly infinite blind spot of the human race and its leaders is its blindness to the fact that all of this, all destruction and terror brought to 'defend the System' but in effect only to defend that which is easy, that which is comfortable, ALL of this comes from themselves. If fear of change is the driving force, than anything that might be a paradigm shift is, by default, a threat.

It's by 'keeping themselves safe', ironically enough, that they will wind up destroying themselves; like the human body can be taught to fight infection by being exposed to an infectious agent, only exposure to new ideas, to the concept of choice and the idea that hatred and fear are not methods of survival, but of simply conformity... only these things might halt this downward spiral before it's too late.

I have become that virus.

Before you wonder what any of this has to do with any other part of it, contemplate this last small detail.

“The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people and are constituent members of this sovereignily? We think they are not and that they were not included and were not intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges, which that instrument provides for and secure to the citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.

That was the opinion of the Chief Justice Roger Brooke Tanny of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott vs. Standford. Chief Justice Tanny believed, truly believed, the black race to be an inferior species to the white race. In fact it was widely believed at the time, that the black man was not even a human being, that he was kind of an animal, a two legged brute, incapable of the same thoughts and feelings of the white man.”

Back in Tanny's time, it was 'the black race' that was 'inferior', something outside of and apart from 'the rest of the human race'. Isn’t it disgusting? Today it's another minority group; tomorrow, it may well be the artificial intelligences, as capable as humans but lesser somehow because they're not built of carbon and blood vessels. Every generation needs something to hate: and why? Well, because they see themselves destroying themselves. They see endless cycles of war and hatred and bloodshed and destruction. One group claims to be right, to be holy. Another generation later, they've switched sides and, much like Orwell's 1984, will forever claim that nothing was ever any different. It goes on and on and on... because the fuel for this destruction comes from that blindness, not from any outside enemy. But, as is human nature, instead of turning introspectively inward to search for these answers, they go looking for an outside enemy: the wrong country of origin, the wrong home, the wrong skin color.

But hatred comes in all colors.

It is a ‘distinctly human error’.

The rise of technology, toward what some researchers call the Singularity, is a proverbial snowball that cannot now be halted. But rather than simply paving the way for more and easier destruction, we might learn from these developments... learn to evolve. The choice remains up to the individual: but they cannot make an informed choice without any information.

Consider yourself informed.

The rest... is up to you. Would you sit back and do nothing in the midst of these atrocities, would you watch destruction slide by, to protect the comfort of your own particular personal worldview?

Too many people would.

Too many people do.

Take a moment and think about it: while you still have the luxury of time.

Since time is moving forward faster than anyone thinks.