Saturday, 31 March 2018

#489 Life as a pool table - part 12

The acceleration of cultural evolution
In part 11, we saw how each robot had finally gained an identity and some understanding of its place within a small group thanks to language and cooperation becoming essential in the pursuit of food.

Experiences, which are like combinations of senses, can now be encoded using representations such as words, pictures, music and text. These representations can then be transferred between individuals and are therefore able to reproduce and evolve far faster than any of the robot's physical features, which require physical reproduction to be passed from one robot to another. Therefore, mechanically, the robots remain much the same over the next few thousand years, however a rapid evolution in culture and knowledge ensues, allowing each robot to expand its inner map of the world it inhabits.

The concept of emotions and emotional restraint
Back in part 10 when morality started to emerge through the game theory that governed the interactions of individuals, there was still mass violence in the robot world. The robots' emotions, being physiological responses to the sensation of significant events, made the robots prone to frequent aggressive outbursts which overrode the neural circuits which would otherwise help to determine their dominance or submission in the company of other robots.

Once the robots' brains develop sufficiently to accommodate the next level of awareness and the superego described in part 11, the tendency of each robot to comply with the will of the superego sufficiently to minimise violence within the group in which it inhabits becomes an inheritable feature. The superego acts as a moderator in this respect.

2 comments

Fizzfan said...

All this time later and we’re still waiting for the Amazingly Enormous Superego to end all our wars.

I’m never sure if we’ll eventually just blow ourselves all up or just keep battling on in the same ridiculous way we do now.

I guess eventually the sun will sort it all out anyway, but will we have found refuge on a different planet?

Profound Familiarity said...

We have plenty of time.

The rapid acceleration of our progress in the past few hundred years does have a feeling of "what goes up" about it.