Bloggadogging

I-life and Robots

I think the best part of the Filth was the I-life. “Only humans could make something kinder and better than themselves that makes them smarter than God in my opinion.” I really like this line from Greg that comes in the last few pages. Not even God was willing or able to design a superior creature. The I-life evolves itself so that it may better assist humans. I-life is the ideal nano-bot. Is it possible for us to design something like it? We watched videos in class about robots that teach themselves to walk. It seems that this is the type of programming that I-life uses, where it evolves itself. So can this be considered life? What defines life? Webster’s has several definitions as following: “…characterized by metabolism, growth, and reproduction… Any conscious and intelligent existence. …the period of animate existence from birth until death.” So by these definitions, I-life would meet the qualifications of living, while the walking robots would meet only one (animate existence). How hard would it be to give it the other qualifications? Intelligence is easy, calculators and computers have that. Consciousness would be harder to program into a machine. How will we know when we have given a machine its own consciousness? Will it be through its communication of emotion? Will it be its ability to learn? Will it be through its free will? How much free will does something need to be considered alive? Plants are considered to be alive by most people, yet I have a hard time imagining them as conscious. They do not seem to have much in the way of free will, they just have stimulus-response reactions with their environment. It seems that robots and computers have as much consciousness as plants do. Metabolism, growth, and reproduction are not employed by today’s machines and robots. But machines seem to have a comparable system of energy usage. Machines rely on electricity that comes from power plants, and these serve in place of metabolism. Growth does not occur in machines, but perhaps someday it will. Reproduction happens on a basic level already with robots. In assembly lines in factories, robots are programmed to construct cars and other machinery. This, however is lacking features of animal and plant reproduction, namely the genetic variation. However, it seems possible that in the future robots could be the designers as well as the builders of their offspring. If a programmer adapted the evolution and learning programming into assembly line designer robots, the robots might be able to design better robots than themselves. Someday, perhaps, we may have to compete with robots on the evolutionary food chain, as in the Matrix. However, it would be ideal if we could design robots similar to I-life that have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with humans.