The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

some kind of a brain implant, to treat brain-related disorders. A future
robot, or cyborg, or maybe something else of the same genre, might turn the
tables on us like in Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots).
The future that is being dangled before us is that robots might become
autonomous and outnumber humans, like today’s cell phones, in the next thirty
years;89 or become as common as computers even sooner. And some say that
every home will own a drone by 2025.90 As robots become more autonomous,
there could be a real possibility of computer-controlled machines facing ethical
decisions, like the one faced by the fictional computer character HAL9000 in the
1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. If robots are electromechanical representations
of our entire selves—minds plus bodies, as some say, and if they outnumber us on
earth, what could possibly be the impact on human life, or how do we define them
as human? What would that do to human evolution? Could we embed ethical
systems into robots, so that they mechanically make the judgments that seem
right to most people. How would that affect human-to-human relationships?
First, those who now hire humans would prefer robots and we cannot blame
them as that is a ‘logical’ extension of what we prize most: rational choice.
Some might even prefer a robot mate to a human partner, or a robot nanny to
a babysitter. Humans could be unemployed or be reduced to helpers and semiskilled
labor. If robots are going to have the same kind of mindset that we have,
then they would be no better than us; probably worse, because they will have no
heart as a balance. If they are more ‘intelligent’ than us, and as self-destructive as
we are, we can end up being their ‘robots’, or be eliminated altogether. They can
become killing machines, and we would never know why, when and how they
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might turn killers. In 2015, a technician was killed by a robot at a Volkswagen
plant in Germany. This could have been a freak accident, or a straw in the wind.
But can robots be held responsible? And if they are ‘intelligent’, should they be
treated as ‘persons’?
As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, our greatest gift, creativity, in a
monstrous twist, is reinforcing, in the words of Joyce Oates, “humankind’s
predilection for self-destruction”.91 The evidence is all around. Possibly an
ultimate in this direction would be sexless reproduction; to synthetically replicate
ourselves. According to a report, a Chinese company, which has the world’s
largest cloning factory, already has the technology needed for human replication
through cloning.92 Fundamentally, cloning is asexual—a child becomes a product
of one, not two, as nature has intended, turning procreation into manufacture.
Some society women feel it releases a female from what is euphemistically called
‘to make out’, the torture of ‘someone sticking something in you… for a thing to
grow in your body… which eventually tears itself out, leaving a trail of blood and
destruction’.93 We ‘create’ weapons, wasting precious human and scarce natural
resources, being fully aware that they are too destructive to be used but which
can fall into the hands of those who are too deranged or desperate not to use
them. We constantly enhance the lethal power of hand guns so that one crazy
man can, with every new version, slaughter, more easily and with less skill and
effort, more than he could have done with the previous model of the weapon. We
‘create’ machines with the dedicated objective of rendering us useless. What we
fail to understand is that once something gets made, it is foolish to imagine that
their use is exclusively our prerogative. Machines have a ‘life’ and a dynamic of
their own. The Creator created us; what we create is also His creation. The same
thing goes for so-called inanimate objects. As Jennifer Worth puts it, “Inanimate
objects have a life of their own, especially when they are the daily companions of
a living soul”. Our very life depends on these ‘things’ and therefore they deserve
respect, if not reverence. That is why, in Hindu festivals, there is a ritual called
the ‘Ayudha puja’, where one remains respectful of all things that one commonly
uses, be it a plow or a tool or a knife or a car, or a book—and in today’s world, a
cell phone, or a computer or a gun or drone, or a missile—depending on who we
are and the work we do to make a living. We are supposed, on that day, indeed
every day, bow down to that object and pay obeisance and use it respectfully.
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Unless one approaches something with a certain sense of reverence, and a deep
sense of involvement, it will not yield hope for an outcome. Anything that we
use, we have to see it as something above ourselves, and bow down to it so that
it evokes a deep sense of involvement. Once such involvement is there, we will
handle it well, and will get the best out of it. But what we are unaware of is that
everything in Creation, even if it is an ‘inanimate thing’, has a life in its own
way, and is so integral and indispensable to our ‘life’ that it deserves respect
and reverence. The two principal ‘instruments’, or ‘implements’ with which we
spend all our lives, from birth to death, are our body and mind; so pervasive and
fundamental they are that we have to be reverential. Being ‘reverential’ means
both taking care and keeping some distance, or being detached. Which is what
scriptures advise us to do: don’t be too attached to your body and mind; they are
‘your body’ and ‘your mind’, and therefore not ‘you’.
A broader question that crops up in this line of thought is this: if everything
we ‘create’ is also God’s creation, and nothing can happen in the world without
His grace, does it include nuclear weapons, and weapons of mass destruction?
And did God make man to be self-destructive, or did He allow the ‘finest’ of his
creations, as the Bible says, that which is made on His image—mago dei—, to
spend all his time on earth being self-destructive. To put it differently, how does
Joyce Oates’ predilection for self-destruction fit into or play out in God’s Grand
Scheme of creation and destruction? Just like in creation, are we also doing His
work on earth in all the ‘cides’ we indulge in—suicide, homicide, infanticide,
ecocide, fratricide, patricide, matricide, and so on? Quite logically, come to
think of it: how can we—frail, flawed, slaves of our senses, venal, under the
thumb of materialism and malice-filled mind—acquire the awesome capacity to
accelerate human extinction and to blow up the planet if He did truly not want
it? Technology, in that light, is a divine avatar, both in its ability to lift lives and
to exterminate life itself. And, from this perspective, how should we view our
latest ‘creations’, machines in general and robots in particular, that are predicted
to be even more central to human life in the future, in war and peace, at home, at
the workplace, in communications, transportation and in the struggle for global
strategic power? Are they meant to be acts of creation or destruction? Many
humanoid robots already exist like Darwin Op, Darwin-mini, NAO Evolution,
Pepper, Romeo, iClub, Kuratas, etc. Some are very expensive, costing more than
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a million dollars, while simpler ones can be obtained for just over a thousand
dollars. Robots are no longer used just in industrial environments, factories,
warehouses, and laboratories. These ‘intelligent’ human-like machines are
already becoming part of our lives, of the society we live in. The passage of time
will bring lower costs and new technologies, which will narrow the intelligence
gap between robots and humans and will enable their widespread purchase.94
The question is: what is ‘human-like’, and what does ‘more intelligent’ mean?
Will these creations have self-consciousness and what is their driving ‘thinking
force’ that makes them do what they are capable of doing? And what is the glass
ceiling when it comes to these robots: will man become completely redundant or
be reduced to a side-kick, or will he still call the shots?
Whichever scenario might unfold, man will still matter, and the makeor-
break point to bear in mind is not how versatile, ‘intelligent or powerful a
robot might become. The more important question is, after the tinkering and
reinforcing that science promises to do with our body and brain is done with,
what will be the state of ‘human’ consciousness of that human being? And if we
‘transfer’, ‘upload’ the brain/mind that we currently have, into that ‘being’, it is
hard to predict whom the future has to dread more: the ‘modified’ man or the
humanoid? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein leaps to our mind as a possible paradigm.
The humanoid will be the ‘monster’; and Victor Frankenstein, the ‘new man’.
We will be like the creator who despised his own creation and forced that form
of life to behave like a monster, ending eventually in his own destruction. Like
the humans of today, Victor (the creator of the monster, in the novel) in fact
wanted to make one ‘like himself ’; certainly not the hideous creature it turned
out to be. As for morality, it is arguable who was moral or who the victim was:
Victor, who abandoned his own creation, or the monster who murdered many
people as revenge for his creator’ callousness? We are in fact a bit of both. Like
Victor, we too are filled with hubris and dreams of glory, and have the power
to ‘play God’; and like the monster, we harbor deep longing for goodness, love
and, above all, friendship, which the Buddha said is the ‘whole of holy life’. The
monster might have a good reason to feel like that, but, in our world too, with
far less justification, everyone, even the villain, even a mass murderer, thinks he
is a victim, and like Victor they too run away from any moral responsibility for
what they do. We may not like to own up, but the fact remains that for every
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crisis the world faces, all of us or each of us, is ‘responsible’ for the ‘disfigurement
and destruction of creation’. Another character that we are increasingly coming
to resemble is Duryodhana, in the great Indian epic Mahabharata. Duryodhana
was the architect of his own destruction, as well as of his entire clan. Despite
being the heir apparent of a huge kingdom, he was consumed with greed, malice,
hate, and extreme ambition. Even more telling is that he openly acknowledged—
which we still do not do—that he was following the path of adharma or evil,
but was unable to restrain himself. If we can come to terms with who we are
now—a hybrid or the monster, Frankenstein, and Duryodhana—and if we
are still capable of some sacrifice, should we then welcome what scientists
describe as the ‘human-robot-symbiosis’ as the road to choose at this crossroads
of history?
Brain—the Beast Within
We must first grasp one central fact: whether it is a computer billions of times
more powerful than unaided human intelligence, or a rogue or sentient-robot,
they are all brain-bred and mind-made. But the beast within all of us is the
brain. All of us have what is often called a ‘reptile brain’, that links us down
the ladder to the fight–flight–freeze mechanisms inherent in all mammalian
(and earlier) life. If we do not want the future to be a ‘logical’ extension of the
present, whether and when singularity95 happens or not, and whether or not
man becomes a slave of, or merges into, a machine, for man to evolve in the
right direction, human ‘intelligence’ must also evolve into wisdom and for that
it has to be more broad-sourced. We don’t have to be ‘brain-dead’; for that, we
would need to complement, not supplant, the brain/mind. We have to create or
discover an additional source, not externally but internally. Every thought we
entertain, everything we see and perceive, every word we utter and every deed we
do is wholly mental. This is not a new discovery or revelation. So synonymous
is mind with man and so limiting, that it has even been said by spiritual masters
that ‘man minus mind is God’ or, positively, ‘God plus mind is man’. Not only
spiritualists but even some great scientists have echoed the same thought. For
example, Einstein wrote that “behind anything that can be experienced there
is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches
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us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection”.96 That ‘feeble reflection’ must be a
shining star, a beacon of bright light.
But the mind too, like everything else in life and nature, can be both ‘good’
and ‘bad’;