A Much Older Kind of Robot War?

[Mrekalis]

So, I read Sci-Fi, Terminator is one of my favorite movies, I know what a Robot War/Machine War is. You build an AI that can either improve itself or at least just manufacture more robots, and in doing so this machine becomes an existential threat because it either decides to kill off or enslave the human race/all life. In some interpretations, the AI doesn't even need to be sentient, or even intelligent, just powerful and overly focused on a certain set of directives to the detriment of everything around it.

 

We all know this sort of setting. Every type of media has a famous Robot War story or at least berserk AI story at this point.

 

So. Something occured to me.

 

Organizations are more or less machines. Doesn't really matter what kind we're talking about; corporations, governments, gangs, social clubs, whatever. People cooperating and coordinating based on a set of rules. We don't really think of them in that way, but they have certain rules governing their functions, and sometimes they are large enough to have sub-organizations that fulfill certain functions. Just because those organizations are made up of human beings instead of physical parts doesn't make them any less mechanical. Nobody likes to think about the far-reaching implications of their actions at work. They just want to get the job done and go home.

 

Most organizations these days aren't controlled by singular individuals anymore either. They're controlled by groups of people, yet another organization, as those groups are still people cooperating based on a set of specific rules to try and fulfill a function. Some of these organizations have even formed a kind of collective ideology amongst their members or employees, a set of directives, which is kind of like a rudimentary AI. These organizations can think collectively. Not perfectly, but they can think. And their interests are generally not the interests of the average person.

 

And we've kind of let them run amok. Stuff like laws are supposed to act as failsafes to reign in things like governments and corporations, but the organizations running our societies have more or less just started to ignore those, or started working to deliberately undermine them. How would you feel if a powerful AI started trying to override its failsafes or spread its control to stuff its supposed to have nothing to do with? Yeah, that scenario seems a lot less fictional in the context of the financial world.

 

I'm not saying we should do away with organized structures in our society since, well, that's not only completely impossible but they're also just too useful to get rid of. But I think we *have* let our technology get away from us. Greedy people with too much money are only a symptom of this problem. They're just the most apparent parts of far more massive machines. We're already living in a Robot War.

[BTGBullseye]

While there is some appeal to using that interpretation, all of the "AI war" scenarios are stuck with a major problem... That is that the AI either has human-like emotional capacity combined with a glitch or some form of abuse, or that it comes to the illogical conclusion that it must eradicate our species for some reason.

 

As I am unwilling to go into further detail at this time, (headaches really take the fun out of debate thinking) I'll leave others to continue the discussion.

[Mrekalis]

Eh, not neccesarily. The Matrix and The Borg sought to enslave life, for instance. Though maybe its fandom heresy to lump those sorts of scenarios together with a Robot War. Machine War is possibly a better term.