Nature Future Conditional

Guest post by Michael Adam Robson: the story behind the story

With the increased interest in artificial intelligence, this week’s Futures story is a timely look at what artificial life may be like — and how it might behave. In The puppet, his first story for Futures, Michael Adam Robson offers a fresh perspective on the idea of reality. He kindly offered to expand on the thought processes behind his story here on the blog. As ever, you really ought to read the story first, otherwise you might find your view of reality infected by spoilers …

Writing The puppet

With the singularity fast approaching, I find myself speculating about how biological and artificial intelligence will coexist in the future. It seems to me the most likely outcome is that biology will continue to be replaced by technology in one way or another, until it disappears entirely.

Maybe the decline of biology isn’t such a terrifying prospect, maybe it’s just the next natural step in our evolution. The long, blind process of natural selection has got us this far, but to go any further we’ll have to take control of that process, to transcend the mistakes of biology and engineer something better.

I know I shouldn’t care if my descendants are flesh and blood, or plastic and wiring, but being a biological organism (for the most part), I don’t find the idea of a machine-dominated world very palatable. I try to imagine other possibilities, other futures where humanity as I know it might be able to compete.

One possibility is that artificial life won’t be in competition with us, because it’s just not interested in the same things we are. Perhaps it will be more software than hardware, and so will be content to live in a virtual world, leaving the management of what we think of as the real world to us.

This may leave us feeling superior, but what makes the real world better than a simulation?  What is the difference, really, between reality and perception?

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