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I got some interesting responses to my last blog about machine consciousness, so I thought I'd take it further. Some of the following may be familiar to you already.

A great deal of what we do during our working hours has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. Managers, Programmers, Admin Assistants, Bankers.. the only thing that ties these jobs to the real world is that they involve people!

So it's not unreasonable to see that in the future, we could achieve these jobs more effeciently while living in a completely virtual world, like the matrix sans the prison bit. This would be of our own creation.

This world would be more human than anything we've ever made before. It would also be more alien, because in the virtual we can create what our imaginations desire. We can travel to alien worlds where in reality, we cannot.

Back to the point - we're all happily living in a virtual world. Along comes machine intelligence. In a 'real' world, a machine will never be equal with us. It was born because of humans, not because of nature. Therefore it is best adapted to living in a human society, with humans.

At some point or other, we stop caring that some of the intellects we deal with in the virtual environment are artificial. They think just as well as us. In fact, they are so well adapted to humans, they eventually begin to out 'do' us in the virtual world.

In a virtual world, a machine can replicate better than we can. So if you go for a purely darwinistic measurement, the machine minds will out breed us - we're stuck breeding in the real world.

All too soon the human society we made is run mostly by machines. Not in any kind of hostile take over, nope, just by playing the human game. So what happens then? We need our own society again? we cannot come back to the real world and continue doing things the way we do them in our day and age - there would be no infrastructure left.

I think the answer lies in the fact that by the time that happens, it won't matter. I still firmly believe that the future with machine minds is symbiotic. We create them and invite them in to our world, they carry us along.

In such a future.. does the real world mean anything? To us it might, but argueably by that stage it has less meaning than the virtual one. Okay - now we've sort of made it up to where the machines are in The Matrix, again, sans the prison.