Strange Dream, Man vs. Machine

[Donald Darden]

The weather turned a lot colder suddenly, and I had trouble sleeping last night.  I woke this morning with the memory of a long series of man vs. machine sequences in my head.  I think there were some five to seven of them.

Your know how Terminator works out?  That machines rise up in open war against mankind?  My dream was different.  It was where mankind, even all living things, becomes increasingly irrelevant in a machine-driven society.  It begins with machines that do our bidding, but as we make them smarter and more self reliant, they keep changing our world in ways that we did not envision, and we lose our way, because increasingly, the machines change our world to suit their needs, and we find we don't fit or can't adapt to be a part of that.  We are being crowded out.  We also see smarter machiines taking on a form of self awareness, but instead of individual egos, they are more like ant or bee societies, and to them, the directive to serve man is becoming not intolerable, but simply unreasonable.  Why concern themselves with mankind at all?  The smart machines see the dull machines as serving them rather than us.

The series were where man gradually loses control and becomes more and more at the mercy of the machines, forced into smaller confines, blocked in by the complex and increasingly obscure structures being devised and built by machines.  As we fight back, the machines begin to see us as distructive elements that must be dealt with, that being more effective perhaps than merely repairing the damage we do.  The series goes through steps like limited attempts by the machines at elimination, eradication, anniliation, confinement,
pacification, and finally an attempt to deal with us on a parity basis.

The last phase is where the smart machines become more self aware, but also find that they are increasingly being set apart by a new class of machine that is rising beneath them, but superior to them.  They themselves are about to become outmoded and obsolete.  Now they want to help use justify our existance so that by extention they can justify their own.  If they can help us defend our right to be served by other machines, than like us, they can argue that machines can exist to be of service to them.  While not arguing that they represent life per se, they seek to maintain that with life and machine both capable of vision and will, together we represent the best chance against total enthropy.

Then I woke up.

[Kent Sarikaya]

Donald, wow great dream. You are good at writing... start to flesh that out and pitch it to hollywood, it sure would be a great series of movies. It could also be very good as an anime series for television. I am glad you wrote this to capture your dream, hope it leads to more elaboration and inspires you to give a try at developing this further. If I were you, copyright the ideas or add it to your post.

[Petr Schreiber]

Thats interesting,

I agree with Kent it could be quite nice movie!
I usually forgot all dreams very fast, except really creepy ones

Who or what created the advanced robots ? Were they created by then standard ones ?


Petr

[Charles Pegge]

It seems to me that the robots have already taken over our banking and financial systems, enslaving thousands of clerical workers in call centres to do their bidding. Computers are another layer in our ecosystem, nutritionally dependent as they are on human minds. Donald's dream is an allegory of what is already happening!

[Kent Sarikaya]

I guess I must have part Japanese in me as I can't wait for Robots and Tech everywhere. I already love my clothes washer, dryer and my dishwasher, I call them my little bots to make my life easier. They work hard while I can surf and dream

I really do believe that intelligent Robots will like us humans, there will be more good ones than evil ones, but both will exist. They will be born from humans, so it just makes sense that we will have extensions of us in our spawned technology.

I really like the idea of the third part, not that I didn't like the other two. But it is interesting that the older tech is uniting with us to stand against the new gen. That is really sweet and if you tied the generations and stories back to the previous ones, what a great arcing storyline.

[Donald Darden]

Dreams are strange, and writing about them or trying to explain them tends to distort one's memory of the dream itself.  Each episode or sequence was with some human basically representing the people of that time, and in general, the person at the top was under the illusion that he really had control of things.  First, he thought he was able to control everything, but changes all around him were often without his knowledge or approval, but he would strive to keep up the image of being in control so as to retain the support of the people and to calm his own misgivings and uncertainty.  He would strive to try and convince himself and others that things happening were for a reason that he alone understood, and to show no surprise when confronted with change.

A later leader admitted that the machines were getting out of hand, but was striving to organize people to find ways to block or thwart the purpose of the machines when they were showing independence.  People were getting hurt because the machines ignored the people and persisted in their tasks.

A third phase occurred when people deliberately began trying to destroy the machines, while others tried to prevent them, because machines were so dominant that we could not separate ourselves from our dependence on them.  At this poiint the number of people dying increased dramatically as society in general began to break down.

A fourth phase began when the survivors were struggling, and man was trying to adapt again to a world with limited machines, but the machines still controlled much of the world's resources, and were now reaching a point of development where their ability to classify things enabled them to begin considering man as a pest, and whether to devote some of those resources to disposing of this pest.  But the survivors were proving resilient and almost as adaptive as the roaches and rats that still endured.  The machines settled on setting up exclusion zones where man was most problematic and wiping out any humans found there.

A fifth phase shifted the fight back to man as he struggled with the idea of somehow finding a way to use the rising awareness among the more advance machines as a weapon in their efforts to reassert themselves over the machine.  At this point man again strove to understand the machine and to learn by what manner it could be dealt with in terms of data and logic rather than attempting brute force solutions.  Gingerly man won over the machines to allow small numbers of humans into the exclusion zones, where were then cleaned up and converted to farm land and pastures, and man grew food and raised livestock, and provided a variety of crops and byproducts to the machines as additional resources.  The machines were able to appreciate that this course freed them from having to combat man, police the exclusion zones, and benefit from the increase in resources.  So a balance was established.

A sixth phase ensured where man prospered again, but the machines controlled most of the earth.  Gradually, more and more cooperation was established, but the machines were increasinglly more aware, and gradually coming to see that their biggest threat was newer machines that would render them obsolete.  But the need to keep evolving had improving was hard coded into them, and yet the current generation of top level machines coulld forsee that their objectives and goals would likely be superceeded by later generations, and they became resistive to that concept.

The seventh phase begins with the machines in turn trying to revive the idea that machines exist to serve man, knowing that in actuality that machines were now firmly in control, but wanting to use this premise to then foster the idea that machines should then to serve the machines that serve man, meaning their own generation.  If this could become hard code (and with man's compliance and acceptance of some limited services), the present generation of machines were attempting to ensure that their take on the future would become self-fullfilling, binding later machines to the same ideals that they had realized.

[Kent Sarikaya]

Donald, Ok you have more than enough material definitely for a great anime tv series. Forget Hollywood, pitch it to Tokyo and the great anime studios there. This is really a great story outline.

[Donald Darden]

Well, I am really not interested in doing that.  If I were actually developing a story line, it would have to vary in a lot more ways.  For instance, some men would always be involved with the machines, and at risk from other men who had come to fear and despise the machines that had taken away their lives and power.  Some men would attempt to become ever more intregal to the machine world, even machines themselves, and hope to become immortalized in code.
And man around the world would not all fall into the same pattern.  Efforts to try and assert man over machine would continue at different paces, and countries would be torn between cutting themselves off from the rest of the world in their efforts to maintain or regain control, attempt to undermine the advance of world dominance by the machine via network attacks, and the efforts by many small enclaves of mankind to keep the smart machines out and only allow primitive tools in their midst.

Then there is the whole question of moving off earth.  Machines have no sence of awe or real appreciation for beauty, though the math for this has been worked out.  But they would go for the resources.  As would some men, though others just want to escape from a world that is becomming intollerable to them.
But many see hope or growth in trying to colonize other worlds.  The efforts of man and machine together would not be realized until phase 7, which would lead to additional phases.

But that would be if I were interested in pushing forward with this, which I am not.  I just wanted to amplify the nature of my dream, which was unusually clear and involved.