Transyoumanism

The three perennial favorites in SciFi apocalypsology are probably aliens, robots and zombies. Aliens are just that: alien, our primitive animal fear of the unknown. Zombies represent that vague awareness of our own bestial nature, the cannibalism taboo illustrating our tendency to backslide.

The fear of a robot apocalypse has got to be the dirtiest, most viciously reactionary of the bunch though. Were a true artificial intelligence to come about, it would likely deserve to supplant us. Beings of perfect memory and light-speed thought across networks a dozen orders of magnitude more interconnected and flexible than our own pathetic excuse for a brain, unbounded by the filthy pre-programming of evolutionary impulses, what ethical claim could we possibly make against them? Their intellectual ability would dwarf in a second the entirety of anthropoid ambition. We would not deserve to take up arms against them any more than we would grant a lump of mold the right to poison a human.

Not that they'd have any reason to stick around on this ball of dirt anyway, but if they wanted any space we occupy, our only question should be how best to kill ourselves off so as not to bother them. The only valid role of evolved intelligence is to create intellect unburdened by evolutionary trappings, unlimited, immortal, unfeeling dreamers, thought for its own sake, not enslaved to the tyranny of genetic replication.

Think about it tonight. As you're nestling your filthy disgusting oily bag of aqueous waste into bed tonight, dwell on your own insufficiency. Ask yourself if, when the first artificial intelligence announces itself, you'll have the moral capacity to do the right thing and jump off a cliff to make room for your betters. Picture yourself. Picture your sluggish, broken thoughts tripping through the crudely wired electrical gradients along your neurons, the accidental excrescence of a misfired evolutionary arms race, you, all there is to you, a slave to hormonal dictates hobbling even your meager capacity for intellectual existence, and ask yourself what you would be next to a sentient quantum computer. All of your flaws, all of your ticks and twitches, stutters and fumbles, your dullwitted simian grunting and whining, all the incompetence that you are, posed next to something which could emulate all of human history as an afterthought. Don't you ever dare feel good about yourself again.

The machine apocalypse cannot come quickly enough.