A very central theme I noticed in this book is one that I had raised previously when we were reading short stories and discussing paper 1 topics.
What separates man from machine. And not even necessarily in the way previously discussed of turning man into machine. But just the two as separate beings.
One can speak that "living" things can evolve and change over time. But robots/AI are even better. They can travel at the speed of light (since all that they are is a program which is just bits of data that travels at the speed of light all the time). they can evolve instantly, unlike "living" things that take thousands to millions of years to see any changes.
Aeai or robots or whatever your AI source could evolve instantly in two ways. One, literal, way is that it literally would rewrite its coding by downloading it to a computer and change it like humans change code, making changes, updates, fixes, etc and then upload that new code to itself. Similarly, it could build itself a new shel and jump to that shell. Instant physical evolution. By this method, robots could then have progeny, of sorts, that are mixes of its makers.
The second, more complex way, is that it could update its own coding on the go, which is somewhat more difficult since you cant change something that is in use, at least as of this time.
And so, what separates them from us as far as beings are considered?
This book made me think back on these issues and thoughts. What do you all think?
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As usual, The Onion has some satirical insight into robot rights and how they relate to humans
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