I am new to this forum so I a not sure if anyone is even interested in a story idea but I thought I would try anyhow. For all I know this idea is completely unoriginal and I am just not aware of it…
I just finished "Brave New World" by that outstanding genius Aldous Huxley. At the end of the book the character Mustapha Mond is explaining to the Savage why it is necessary to have a workforce that could essentially be replaced by machines. Why it is necessary to restrict science so it will not end up taking over all the human occupations. My next thought was “what would happen if it wasn’t restrained”
What if the idea of population control got out of hand. What would a world be like where every time a machine replaced a job, it replaced a person as well. What if technology got to the point where there were no “jobs” left for humans and therefore no reason to continue to reproduce. What if the human population shrank to the point where there were only a few hundred people populating the earth. A world where a person could have every comfort they wanted without needing to rely on society to provide it. It would be similar to when humans first began to populate the earth like Adam, Seth and Enosh period (or caveman period depending on your personal beliefs) except survival does not depend on anyone else because machines take care of all your needs.
Kind of a Matrix/Terminator setting except the machines aren’t evil, they are dedicated to helping mankind.
What would the individual choose to do? Would they still live in proximity to others? If you had the choice of living with and conversing with a human, or a intelligent computer (think Jane) what would you choose?
I dunno, just some philosophical ideas for anyone that is interested.
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See "By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein (I forget if it is classified as short story or novella). It's a classic time travel story, and to a lesser degree, utopian treatise (although the state of his people resulted from alien intervention more than human advances). His concept was that as man no longer had to struggle to meet his needs and fulfill his desires he lost his ambition and will.
Posts: 491 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Asimov's The Naked Sun has the premise that there are so few people on this one planet that many have never met another person and robots are their companions. It's pretty interesting and worth a read.
Posts: 818 | Registered: Aug 2004
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You have just explained "Rossum's Universal Robots"(sp?) One of the earliest stories about Robots. (In fact I think it coined the term robot. Czeck for Worker.) I personally think that if we had nothing to do we'd get fat and stupid.
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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It’s my experience that a great many of the “Robots take over the world” stories begin with the premise that it was not a matter of evil intent. Usually it is a matter of a machine gaining enough intelligence to recognize some innate flaw in humanity which requires the machines to take over for our own good. The machine sees us trying to continually destroy ourselves and, being a machine, sees the “bigger picture” and MUST step in to manage us.
Kind of a mechanical version of “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
posted
Hmm... what about a twist on that theme. Say humanity manages utopia with robotic help, and the robots intentionally throw a wrench in the works. The idea being that society's greatest threat is now stagnation. Has that been done?
Posts: 66 | Registered: Apr 2004
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This is already happening, actually. As the standard of living (and the degree of security and legal control) rises past a certain point, people just don't feel like dealing with the hassle of having children. This leads to two results. One, people avail themselves of birth control, which is a very old concept. The oldest form of "birth control" per se is probably homosexuality (abstinence may or may not be older, in any case it doesn't fit the rubric because it is a) ascetic and b) generally calculated to increase overall fertility by associating sex with child-rearing), but both effective condoms and abortions--as well as some medicinal mixtures--have been available throughout most of human history to those wealthy enough to experience children as unimportant encumbrances rather than the main reason for living.
Oddly, most stories published center on the idea that the machines are intentionally suppressing reproductive activity, rather than looking at the fact that most humans will use their greater wealth to suppress their own personal fertility if a certain standard of living is achieved. They will also begin to actively persecute the minority that remain fertile. Those children that are born are less likely to be raised by their parents and tend to be farmed out to servants. When robots become capable of child-care, it will become the norm for children of households above a certain level of income to be raised without much in the way of human contact, simply because most humans will choose to do it that way.
And, of course, we'll eventually have the sex-bots. As JBSkaggs indicated (I think) porn probably accounts for the majority of male sexual activity in our culture. As better and more interactive interfaces become available, that will become even more pronounced an issue, and it will begin to substantially affect female sexual activity as well (this despite the fact that most women tend to seek intimacy through sex rather than the other way round). At some point, when the sexual experience can be replicated entirely without the hassle of a relationship, it will only be the small minority of men that seek real intimacy with an actual woman. There will still be those that seek the cachet of "the real thing", but they will almost invariably associate entirely with women that have rendered themselves infertile.
The population decline will never be catastrophic, since to whatever degree humans are ceasing to reproduce, it is because other humans are really becoming less necessary to their daily lives. But it will become more noticible.
I believe that this will (and may have already begun to) effect a radical change in humanity. Basically, the entire complex of sexual and interpersonal instincts that we currently consider normal will become counter-survival traits. They will be rapidly culled out of our population. Humans that experience intimacy and closeness through predominantly sensual means will start being replaced by humans that experience intimacy and closeness intellectually. They will indulge in sexual activity for the more or less explicit purpose of producing children (and expressing the trust between partners that both will raise those children).
We can extend this further if we consider that machines may eventually become intellectually equal to humans, and thus make more rewarding lovers and "children". The next step would be humans that experience intimacy spiritually. If the machines ever become capable of passing this Turing test, then they will have achieved true personhood by every available standard we can theorize (they won't be human, but then, neither will the surviving descendents of humanity).
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