For finishing my assignment of the “computer ethics” course, I’m reading Bill Joy’s great article “Why the future doesn’t need us“. In this article, Joy talked about a situation that, human beings may be displaced by robotics, along with the growth of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies.
In the section of “The Short Run (Early 2000s), by describing how the placental species from North America displaced and eliminated the marsupials in South America after the Panama isthmus rose ten million years ago, Moravec came to the conclusion that the robots would eventually succeed us and humans clearly faced extinction.
At the very moment when I read this, the idea which the title of this post said slipped into my mind.
It is a fact that human beings is evolving on and on. Even before our ancestors said “goodbye” to their orangutan friend and became human, the evolution didn’t ever stopped. During the evolution, livings change from dinosaur to human. And where are those dinosaurs? Died.
Think about a question. When the dinosaurs were going to be displaced by some higher-class living, were they willing to be extinction? I don’t think so. If they could think, or we could know what they thought at that time, we may be told that they had thought about “why the future doesn’t need us” and wanted to find out a way to stop the displacement happening. And we are about doing the same thing at the the very present days.
No matter we are right or wrong, will we get the same ending as dinosaur have? The dinosaurs are all dead. Is that means human beings will be also dead and give the new era to robots? That could happen.
The above words are what I was thinking about 10 minutes before.