According to Dr. Rich Terrile of NASA, one day–and perhaps soon–our computers and robots are going to “awaken” and take over the planet. Okay, whatever. I’m fine with it. We had our shot and effed it up. An excerpt from an interview in Vice which Ben Makuch conducted with the jet propulsion expert:

“Vice:

Listening to you talk about Moore’s Law and our exponential growth in computing makes me wonder what you think about the future, and the fate of humanity?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

OK, well this is where it gets really uncomfortable. I have great hopes for our future, but I don’t necessarily have great hopes for humanity. I think we’ll become something different.

Vice:

What do you mean, like androids?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

I think our machines will wake up and take over our society. They will become us, we will become them. Right now everybody has their own consciousness and we can’t really exchange information very efficiently like computers can. They can exchange tremendous amounts of information and live forever sharing that information at the speed of light, whereas human beings are really quite constrained. We’re caught up in the constraints of our biological evolutionary baggage. I think we’re going to shed that once our machines become conscious. We’ll find ways of continuing our society, but in a different way.

Vice:

So you’re saying in the next hundred years humans will cease to be humans and become machines?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

Yes, I think we’ll merge with machines.

Vice:

Is this something a lot of scientists agree on?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

I don’t think a lot of scientists think about this sort of thing. I think the ones who do inevitably come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of credibility to these kinds of arguments.”