General Question

ragingloli's avatar

If all of humanity were to be instantly and irreversibly sterilised tomorrow, locking in biological extinction for the species, how long would it take for humans to turn themselves into robots?

Asked by ragingloli (52202points) December 26th, 2018

Would that pressure be enough motivation to accelerate the development?
Or, like with global warming, would humanity sit on its collective arse until it was too late?

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15 Answers

elbanditoroso's avatar

I’m not sure “robots” is the term.

The better question is “how long would it take humans to turn into wild animals?”

Answer: 30 days or less.

rebbel's avatar

The collective arse thing; they can’t be arsed.

flutherother's avatar

You mean robots that live forever? That will never happen.

ragingloli's avatar

@flutherother
They do not have to live forever. They can just build new ones, and copy the consciousness to the new chassis.

mazingerz88's avatar

Wish we can find out now while I’m still alive and might have a chance of transferring my consciousness to a supermodel robot. : )

flutherother's avatar

@ragingloli But is a copy of me really me? It wouldn’t feel like it and this sort of technology would take thousands of years to develop. I don’t think we could ever make perfect copies even given limitless time.

ragingloli's avatar

@flutherother
Would you even care, if you had nothing left to lose?

flutherother's avatar

I don’t feel I’ve much to gain either.

rebbel's avatar

Think of all the bugs, alfa’s and beta’s, non updated versions, safety patches (that some brands don’t supply), bloatware, ransom ware, virii, exploding batteries, bend gates…..)
Gonna be great, gonna be huge.

ARE_you_kidding_me's avatar

Why does it have to be robots. Why can’t we just start to reproduce asexually.

josie's avatar

Most of them are already robots.

kritiper's avatar

Not
long
enough

Zaku's avatar

It’s a pipe dream.

Someone might delude themselves into thinking they can project themselves into a robot, but that person would have a peculiar idea about what effect that would have.

A lifetime is theoretically enough to make a somewhat self-sustaining robot, but probably not enough to make it actually adaptive and thorough enough to really keep itself going for very long, and there are several conceptual and existential hurdles between having a machine that does things, and having an animal, let alone one that “is human”.

It would be more on-target, if the goal is survival of humans, to research ways to stop the problematic aspects of aging.

But even that’s not going to help much against a climatic cataclysm.

Pinguidchance's avatar

In an anti-climactic cataclasm, I’d be too busy monkeying around with your dna to reach for the wrench.

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