Quote from: dothebeats on March 07, 2015, 06:24:00 PM

Quote from: tee-rex on March 07, 2015, 05:37:36 PM

Quote from: Stargazer on March 07, 2015, 05:24:24 PM

Quote from: mortified on March 07, 2015, 10:43:16 AM

Those machines were broken or defective. They didn't go wild. Besides, they all had safety mechanisms the operator failed to utilize such as neutral gear and brakes.

And you've just touched the great unknown, a concept of a thinking machine. A machine that would want to improve itself and become conscious. Such machine wouldn't live by the rules, it would write its own programs. Think Skynet or that thing from the Matrix, a machine that is selfish and doesn't care about peoples lives, it just takes what it needs and uses as it pleases. It wants to conduct experiments to learn and it will use you as a subject, a slave, an organ donor, a living hard drive, you name it.

Before you say it's science fiction and will never happen, think about the needs of such a machine. If it becomes conscious it will want to be everywhere and comprehend everything. It will do anything to learn and won't care about ethics or morality.

Why would it want to be everywhere and comprehend everything? Human actions are driven by emotions and feelings in an effort to avoid pain and derive pleasure, as much as possible. The desire to learn new things is no exception. If you don't provide needs and means for their satisfaction, your thinking machine will just sit where you leave it, in a state of self-contemplation (of sorts).

Machines, on the other hand, are driven by their own programs (or the programs that Man had put in it).

We don't know what is consciousness (and probably will never find out), but it can be said with certainty that it has nothing to do with programming. In any case, self-awareness (machine or whatever) per se doesn't impose any threat to human existence.