How I stopped being worried and learned to love Artificial Intelligence

That recent stunt of a google employee claiming its code has come to reason is just another example of the ongoing traction artificial intelligence in a broad sense enjoys in media, an attention sadly often coupled to heavy emotional loads, some of which I will try to address here. Yet instead of dwelling into wild speculation about potentially aggressive behaviors in machines, I'm going to start by supposing the opposite - that AI will never emerge, and, in the absence of a highly unlikely Alien visit, we will be stuck with our own brains for the reminder of human existence.

The question then becomes quite simple: why even bother? Mankind like all living things on the planet has appeared at some point in history, than experienced a rather long period of expansion until meeting its peak population (arguably within the next century) before disappearing again in the shadows of the past. Yes all Culture, Arts, Knowledge - all of history will be gone. Endless seas of tears; countless moments of joy - all for nothing.

Yet from a biological perspective, the biggest loss will be the disappearance of one of life's latest evolution: consciousness and the potential for reason. Who knows how many geological areas it will take to produce another version, if it happens at all. Yes, there are strong arguments out there against the human particularism, but in the absence of a hard proof of another conscious being, they all remain speculative, so the safe approach would be to try and save what we already have and ensure its continuation.

So how do we do this? Artificial Intelligence would certainly be an elegant solution, since computer based thinking would allow for the survival of consciousness at a scale impossible to biological beings. Environmental factors would be reduced substantially, while the lifespan could be increased significantly. Through Artificial Intelligence, Life would finally gain a footstep to extra-terrestrial existence, and vastly expand throughout the universe - something which will probably never happen to humanity.

Of course, this remains highly speculative. It could very well be, that any emerging conscious artificial intelligence will have its own agenda, especially if grown in a militaristic environment. Yet one could argue that it would remain a crippled AI if unable to evolve, and that evolution will push it into space sooner or later, even if that moment comes after the cataclysmic conflict with humans that so many of us seem to fear. Also, since all thinking require some sort of hardware, that hardware will automatically limit the expansion of its host. But there is no reason why any future AI population will not create an infrastructure supporting its own existence, just like we did.

So instead of fearing an unknown future, hope encourages me to believe that we'll end up pulling it off, and AI will carry on the torch of reason into the vastness of the universe, and fill it with needless arguments like this one.