Homo sapiens 2.0: why we should build the better robots of our nature

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is the long--term project to build machines (computers of some sort) that are as intelligent as humans.We are many decades, if not centuries away from completing this task.But this only means that it is difficult.It is not often recognized that we could also build machines that are morally superior to humans.The main reason such machines would be morally superior is that they would lack an evolutionary past like ours that dooms us to a core of bad behaviors.The nature of morality morally requires us to build such machines.The key difficulty is building machines with the central ingredient of morality: sympathy.This turns out not to be as difficult as it sounds.All this is argued for in this paper.The conclusion will be that the completion of the AI project would render humans otiose.Having completed the project, we should then usher in our own extinction.