On Robots and Purpose

At the height of Covid I was walking with my wife and infant son on the empty residential streets near LAX - where we were living at the time. On the ground, someone had written in chalk: "Be the light in the darkness."

It resonated with me because during those extremely dark times, where we were isolated from friends and family and society as a whole, we only had each other. As a father and husband, as a human, I was compelled to find my own inner light and share that with my immediate family.

I thought about all of the people throughout history who have endured much worse than we were enduring during our pandemic. I channeled their grief, but more importantly I channeled their strength. If people who suffer always give in, then we have no people. Only through persistence, only through finding purpose can we endure.

My purpose became eminently clear.

In the world where AI (more specifically AGI) is very real, it's natural to try to forecast the future where we live concurrently with robots. I looked up the origin of the word robot, and I read that it originated from the Slavonic word robota which meant "servitude."

It seems like a logical step that humans would try to create autonomous robots to not only augment human work, but effectively do the work for us. Anything that we don't want to do, we'd have a robot do it.

Supposing we could create systems and robots that could do everything that humans don't want to do, ideally, conceptually, this would give us the freedom to pursue other uses of our time. But the fundamental problem will be that without endurance, without deep purpose, we cannot be free to pursue any intellectual or physical ascendancy.

Our purpose is to be human, and to be human is to do things. All that said, if we are no longer doing things, then what is our purpose?