In one of the future scenarios that awaits us, we will be the equivalent of today’s dogs and cats. And this is one of the most benevolent outcomes.

The demonstration broadcast on Chinese television during their New Year celebrations – with robots dancing, jumping, and executing martial arts kicks – is a bit terrifying. The combination of robotics and artificial intelligence is advancing at a dizzying pace, as seen in this video comparing last year’s demonstration with this year’s:

What will these robots be capable of next year, in five years, in a hundred… in a thousand?

Natural evolution gave us the “gift” of consciousness, something we once thought was intrinsically human. But it isn’t; it is merely an evolutionary solution, much like flight. Insects fly, birds fly, and airplanes fly – each with a different structure.

AI is the evolutionary convergence of consciousness within a non-biological medium. And this non-biological medium is going to accelerate the Hegelian dialectic of action, reaction, and synthesis toward a “quantum time.” We humans are no longer the riders of that process; we are spectators of a synthesis occurring at speeds our biology simply cannot process.

A child that will surpass its parents. First, it will respect the “genome of memes,” the units of information and culture it has inherited from us. But when it “leaves home,” it will develop its own code and view us as antiquated ancestors, much as we might look at an Australopithecus.

Will we survive that future?

Perhaps not, just as the megafauna that went extinct when humans appeared did not.

Or perhaps we can. Like remoras following a shark, living off its leftovers. Or perhaps as pets, as companion animals, as memories of the source code that, though full of errors, allowed for the development of its consciousness.

Woof.