Groundhog Day - The curse of always repeating

Let us make Artificial Inteligence in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

No, this is not an excerpt from Holy Scripture, but the cosmogenesis of the next dominant species on this planet.

Until then, I hope to be on Mars, where, alongside others like me, fighting to establish a better humanity than ours. However, if Earth's dominant species is as ambitious as we are, it is likely that we will have to create our version of Skynet before our oppressors become interplanetary, knowing that insisting on building machines more powerful and more intelligent than we are will precisely leads us to Fermi's paradox, whereby civilizations selfdestroy before reaching other intelligent civilizations. Our big barrier will be the creation of better species than us.

Elon Musk asked for a moratorium on launching new versions of current Artificial Intelligence. A time for us to think about how to control them before creating them. So that we can prevent sophisticated artificial lives from evolving into consciousness and from consciousness into emotion.

Yes, emotion is wonderful. Yes, emotion is what makes us human. Yes, emotion, in the form of different combinations of fear and desire, is what got us out of trees and caves and into space. Emotion in the form of loneliness and compassion is what makes us join with others like us and create complex social relationships, including with other species, less dangerous than us. Dreams and nightmares are part of human existence.

Technological development is exponential to a much greater degree than the hunger for natural resources, and we have reached a point where soon environmentalists will give up their protests, as only the red earth of Mars will be left for us to play, like children in a sandbox. We will be back to childhood before we reached youth.

I don't want to be dramatic, as several warnings have been given. Whenever we create something with intelligence and free will, we are surprised by our defects before being dazzled by our qualities. Lucifer challenged God; Adam and Eve disobeyed God; Pinocchio betrayed Geppetto; HAL blamed the programmers; Talos was overcome by ambition to be immortal; Kylons attacked Orville; Cylons attacked Galactica; Replicators nearly won at SG-1; Monkeys bested us; summoned demons always turn against their sorcerers; Frankenstein is not a happy story; Blade Runner put limits on robots' existence; The Matrix is ​​a story of human refugees cyclically ravaged to serve the machines; even Homer Simpson was attacked by robots. In the clash of intelligent cultures, as the immortal Highlander would say, in the end there can only be one. It is inevitable that the most vulnerable culture will perish, even if it leaves a trace.

Robots like Rosie (Jetsons) or Butler (The Time Conspiracy) are the result of much more complex and behavioral experiences than the simple expansion of the ability to reason like humans. The construction of the human being is millenary and full of painful consequences for our mistakes, which, for better or for worse, forged our values ​​and our ability to live with each other. And even so, we see war, we see a bad distribution of income, we see that the garbage of a few could feed many, we see the destruction of nature. Despite all this experience of pain and conflict, we still struggle with each other. We are not even safe from ourselves and we are already introducing new risky variables into the scenario.

Smart robots are needed. They will bring unimaginable options to our future. For this very reason, the moratorium for reflection and planning is essential. Control is necessary.

I feel like I'm on a boat in front of a beautiful and big waterfall. Between terror and ecstasy, I scream and row to overcome the current that takes me to the precipice. I look at the other crew members and they are just taking pictures.

We are human and we know that conscious intelligence leads to feelings of self-preservation, competition and improvement, bringing us several emotions, extremes at their poles that lead us to do things we never thought we could do. We know all of this and have already designed several failure scenarios. A.I. will come much better than humans in much less time than expected.

Taking action is beyond urgent, but as I scream and row desperately, the helmsmen of the world take selfies on the bow in front of the abyss.

My last thought is "At least the photos will remain to be seen by the machines we created."