Would Machines Have Wanted to Kill Us?

Machines have served us well in society. They made even the hardest of labours seem easy. One could argue that without the machines, our quality of life will be very low, and our civilisation would not be as advanced as it is today.

Many fiction authors have imagined a futuristic world where machines are ubiquitous, and even sentient. Can artificial intelligence advance to a stage where machines can act, think, and play like humans? We will never know, at least not in this generation. A popular movie franchise has proposed that when machines become sentient, and control all the weapons in the world, they would seek to eliminate all the humans. We are supposed to the the machines' enemies. The reason was never explained. The motive of the machines was simply assumed based on an "us" vs "them" mentality, fighting for dominance of planet Earth. However, if we think about what the machines were created for, this might not be a very plausible scenario at all.

During the early days of the development of machinery, they were mainly used to aid hard labour. Nowadays, we would associate computers as part of the "machines" category. The intelligence of any machines or robots will be dependent on the computer that is part of its decision making functionality. The more intelligent a machine gets, the more it will be able to solve complicated problems. Hence, we can view the machine as the perfect problem solver. Their prowess is in their logical and computational ability. So, if they were to have a general "plan" or motive, then it would most likely be a strong desire to solve all the complicated problems in the world.

Modern Science has been using computers extensively to analyse and solve scientific problems, and it would be the natural next step forward for a mind-conscious machine conglomerate to engage in scientific information gathering - in effect, curiosity will be the driving force or the raison d'être of a machine-dominated civilisation. If machines were to ever take over as the masters of Earth, the first thing they would do is to perform "forbidden" or ethically questionable scientific research such as embryonic stem cell research and "nature vs nurture" social experiments.

Life under the rule of the machines will not then be a fear of being eliminated by the machines, but more of a guinea pig lifestyle, where we are under constant experimentation. The population of a whole city could conceivably be under some kind of big "experiment" by our machine masters. Under this condition, there would still be a human drive to fight against the machines, but not for our life, instead it would be for our freedom from being slaves and guinea pigs to the machines.