Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...cannot see that far. For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can't wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot...
Science fiction has long been at work on scenarios of robots that evolve and manufacture ever-improving versions of themselves, and eventually develop human traits - the capacity to feel, to love, to hate. In such fiction, the climactic poignancy occurs when the automaton, love-stricken, sheds a tear. This is because the robot, like Hemingway's Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," has a sad incapacity to mate; surely that is one of the first defects the shrewd robots would correct...
...moment, the scientists report, the robotyke has the brainpower of bacteria: "We hope to get up to insect level in a couple of years." Meantime, in another part of the forest, the human genome project is nearly complete. Peering into the future, one dimly discerns a convergence. Here are the projected patterns...
...Humans, working with the genome roadmap, evolve themselves - correcting nature's blunders, fixing a defect of vision here, a tendency toward diabetes there, until in the fullness of time a perfected human specimen walks the earth, while, simultaneously, 2) The robots, in their parallel universe, labor at their own evolution, building their own brains, refining their subtleties and abilities at the speed of light...
...robots become more human. The humans become more ... robotic? Or is that fair to say? Perhaps the humans become more human (whatever that means)? Perhaps it is a win-win situation and both humans and automatons end up feeling good about themselves...