Re: Machines and money

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).

Because it's in our nature to learn and improve, therefore a sentient machine might want to do the same. Knowledge helps you survive and the need to survive is the most basic.

It is our nature as you yourself said (for better survival), but why would a thinking machine possess the same qualities that a human has? My point is that your machine won't have any desires if you barely create self-awareness. It wouldn't care if it survived or not. I doubt that it would even understand the concept of life and death and, unless you provide it with memory, its own existence as such. You know that you didn't exist before having been born or conceived (in fact, before becoming conscious) only from external sources. Internally, there is no before you become conscious or after you cease to be.