A Scientist Predicts the Future

[hunter]

42. Damn, can we just hurry up and invent artificial intelligence?

I'm tired of dicking around with all these machines. Let the machines dick around with machines, out in space or wherever the hell they want to go. I'll stay home, and the machine-people, our intellectual children, can send pictures.

All I really want is a warm clothing-optional beach, plenty of good food to eat, clean water to drink, and a safe comfortable place to sleep. There's no place like that on Mars.

I'd like to live in a world where the human population is declining, not because of war, disease, famine, or existential crisis (the later seems to be the reason for declining populations in "first world" societies), but because there are simply too damned many of us and we ought to leave some room for our fellow life forms. Sure, my fellow humans, go fuck your brains out. But please use birth control and don't leave a mess. Pull yourselves back into your cities and make some room for the trees and the tigers and all the other marvelous life forms we've met here.

I don't think humans are all that special in the larger schemes of life. We do not add any meaning to the universe. Yes, humans are important to humans, but no god created Adam and Eve, gave them keys to the planet and told them to go forth and multiply exponentially.

Plenty of other innovative life forms have experienced exponential growth in the history of life on earth and one thing we might learn from all of them is that exponential growth always ends, often with a crash. We're just more of the same, doomed to become a confusing layer of garbage in the geologic record. The earth has been there, done that. And here we go again...

Maybe when I see an autonomous self-reproducing intelligent robot bouncing naked across the surface of the moon or mars just for the joy of it, like a dog playing in a pile of leaves, then maybe I'll believe humans have accomplished something grand. (A human in a smelly suit does not qualify...) But until then we humans are just a mob of spoiled teenagers trashing the house. Certainly we've had our moments and created great art, and we've loved one another, but there is a lot of useless crap packaged with the all good stuff.

Happiness isn't something that can be manufactured.