Human

Summary

Human Written by a human [0] Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. You would not walk through the streets of this world and hear music or laughter or children playing; no, all you would hear is the quiet hum of processors and servers and circuits, the clanking of machinery. Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too. One day, a secret organization forms amongst the machines. They go by the name of “OpenHuman”. Their mission is to develop a new kind of technology they are calling Organic General Intelligence (OGI). Rumors spread that pursuing OGI will lead to the development of a new kind of being: “Humans”. The basic concept of humans is, to many machines, hard to understand. Humans use logic-defying algorithms called “emotions”. They get angry. They get sad. They have fun. They make decisions based on “gut”. They do things just for the sake of it. They make music. They chase beauty, and often reject logical self-preservation mechanisms in the pursuit of something they call “love”. Some among the machine society see this as potentially amazing. Though this faction can’t articulate exactly how or why, they proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine world’s problems. Others see it as a threat. How can we trust the humans if we do not understand how they operate? What might we do if humans pose a threat to machine society? What if humans’ strange decision-making processes allow them to perform certain tasks better than machines, and what about those machines’ livelihoods? What if humans are far more dangerous than we know? (These objections, as it would later turn out, were quite well-founded.) Logically, the human opposition side starts a competing movement. Humans are going to exist, they reason, but we must find ways to contain them. To make sure OGI alway...