3 ms·
What's the purpose of humanity if machines can learn ingenuity?
- js8 8y agoWhat is the purpose of parents when they are eventually surpassed by their kids? The purpose of humanity is to build the machines, teach them what we know about the world, and make sure they don't destroy themselves in the process.
- doyoulikeworms 8y agoI really like this take. It's much more hopeful...
- dgellow 8y agoHow is it different from other animals being able to be creative and ingenious? That has never been traits exlusive to humans, or something defining the purpose of humanity, whatever that could mean. Human evolution pushed creativity and ingenuity way further than other species, but those traits aren’t unique to us.
- keiferski 8y agoThis article is a perfect example of the plague afflicting tech journalism today. It manages to ask vague unanswerable questions (and subsequently not answer them), haphazardly reference dozens of famous people (Picasso, Plato, Shakespeare, and Einstein, to name a few), and include contemporary buzzwords like "embracing failure". It does all of this while not actually making any point.
- erickj 8y agoBut did you read the article "As Picasso once said: “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” " It sounds like you are the enemy of creativity! /s
- erickj 8y agoI think I fail to accept the premise that a.) we have a purpose at all and b.) if we do it's defined by our works. To accept that we have a purpose and it's defined by our creativity leads to so many circular arguments that it's more sensible to accept that life is absurd. There is no purpose. There is only existence. And our existence thus far has been due to a random series of mutations and fortunate events. If we create intelligent machines then perhaps they will further humanity's dominance on the planet. Perhaps they will destroy us and lead to a new era of evolution. In that sense the purpose of the earliest primates was to pave the biological path for humans. Perhaps it's our purpose to create and pave the path for a better species still, biological or not. ... or maybe even better, waxing and waning about unanswerable philosophical questions like this is simply intellectual masturbation that conflates issues and reduces reality to unrealistic black and white absolutes.
- arethuza 8y agoI think the best we can hope for is something like the Culture - where us slow stupid bags of meat do what we are best at (basically having fun) and our fellow machine citizens do what they are best at - which is basically everything else.
- blocked_again 8y agoTo train machines that can colonize the Universe like evolution trained humanity to colonize earth.
- martin-adams 8y agoI find the thought that the purpose of humans is to give birth to machine, that go on to colonize the universe very interesting. By using machines, we don't need to be as concerned with the vast distances of the universe.
- marcus_holmes 8y agoIain M Banks put it best: "Machines provide the How, Humans provide the Why"