Why would a post-human robotic race want humans back?

[hatch22]

I'm working on a story idea for a humanity's wake scenario where robots, both human-like and otherwise, have outlived humanity and colonized the solar system, with an energy and credit-based economy run by an oligarchy that is primarily a plutocracy, with heavily stratified social classes. A group of robots financed by a trust fund set up for the recovery of a lost human astronaut (who after an accident placed himself in cyrostasis to drift in space) manage to find and restore him. The trust fund has been accruing interest for at least a couple centuries and has made good investments, so the astronaut is quite wealthy, but is far from the wealthiest entity in the system. The robots want his help to seize power from the corrupt elite and restart humanity through genetic engineering.

I'm trying to figure out what this lone human can do for them that they can't accomplish themselves and why they are pro-humanity. One line of thought I have is that robots are vulnerable to viruses infection and hacking by powerful enemies, and having a human on the trust-funded robot's team gives them someone who is virus proof and hack-proof by virtue of operating in a completely different medium. This seems somewhat flimsy to me. Keeping a human alive in a post-human colonized solar system is expensive and risky, and his existence needs to be largely kept secret to avoid assassination (there will of course be a mole/leak).

I need this group funded by the trust fund to have stronger reasons for offering loyalty than just "You pay our bills and are virus proof." I'd like for them to also eventually want to restart humanity, at least on Earth (which is still ecologically safe for humans), once they have sufficient political and financial power to do so. They need this human to make some kind of power-play to change the system. Any suggestions or ideas on how a single human could break the system or impose a new one and why some robots would want that?

I know there are some similar ideas out there as far as "frozen human from the past gets recovered in the future," and "robots run the world and enslave/work for each other," but I haven't seen the two combined before. I want the robots who rescue this astronaut to have good sound reasons for doing so and loyally working with/for him, reasons that he will agree to support and cooperate with.

If there is a better forum topic for this, please let me know.

[Vendetta]

So you're writing Saturn's Children then?

Cause that has exactly the same plot and scenario.

[StarSword]

So you're writing Saturn's Children then?

Cause that has exactly the same plot and scenario.

The concept's older than that. I read a short story in a high school English class where a robot race brought humans back as a consumer product, as indeed the robots were implied to have started out as.

[hatch22]

I have read Saturn's Children, as well as its sequel Neptune's Brood. They are definitely inspirations for this, but Saturn's Children involves a group of robots attempting to make a new human. I need a plausible reason for robots in my story to need an existing human. Genetic engineering is not taboo in my universe. Another inspiration is Allen Steele's A King of Infinite Space and The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin.

Perhaps only "natural born" humans have the legal right to perform some action that can shift the balance of power or the astronaut can access some archaic piece of technology that doesn't use a format or input that any of the robots know. The difficulty for me is that they need a reason not only to restore an original human, but having done so have an incentive for restoring the (biological) human race at a later time.

[TheHammer]

I'm working on a story idea for a humanity's wake scenario where robots, both human-like and otherwise, have outlived humanity and colonized the solar system, with an energy and credit-based economy run by an oligarchy that is primarily a plutocracy, with heavily stratified social classes. A group of robots financed by a trust fund set up for the recovery of a lost human astronaut (who after an accident placed himself in cyrostasis to drift in space) manage to find and restore him. The trust fund has been accruing interest for at least a couple centuries and has made good investments, so the astronaut is quite wealthy, but is far from the wealthiest entity in the system. The robots want his help to seize power from the corrupt elite and restart humanity through genetic engineering.

I'm trying to figure out what this lone human can do for them that they can't accomplish themselves and why they are pro-humanity. One line of thought I have is that robots are vulnerable to viruses infection and hacking by powerful enemies, and having a human on the trust-funded robot's team gives them someone who is virus proof and hack-proof by virtue of operating in a completely different medium. This seems somewhat flimsy to me. Keeping a human alive in a post-human colonized solar system is expensive and risky, and his existence needs to be largely kept secret to avoid assassination (there will of course be a mole/leak).

I need this group funded by the trust fund to have stronger reasons for offering loyalty than just "You pay our bills and are virus proof." I'd like for them to also eventually want to restart humanity, at least on Earth (which is still ecologically safe for humans), once they have sufficient political and financial power to do so. They need this human to make some kind of power-play to change the system. Any suggestions or ideas on how a single human could break the system or impose a new one and why some robots would want that?

I know there are some similar ideas out there as far as "frozen human from the past gets recovered in the future," and "robots run the world and enslave/work for each other," but I haven't seen the two combined before. I want the robots who rescue this astronaut to have good sound reasons for doing so and loyally working with/for him, reasons that he will agree to support and cooperate with.

If there is a better forum topic for this, please let me know.

Since, presumably, this robotic race originated as human contructs, perhaps you could say they were hard-wired to behave in the manner you suggest (think Asimov's 3 laws), and that hardwiring has been incorporated into every subsequently constructed robot. To explain why there might be "pro-human" and "anti-human" you could further explain that this hard-wired behavior didn't make it into every line creating the divergence.

[hatch22]

Since, presumably, this robotic race originated as human contructs, perhaps you could say they were hard-wired to behave in the manner you suggest (think Asimov's 3 laws), and that hardwiring has been incorporated into every subsequently constructed robot. To explain why there might be "pro-human" and "anti-human" you could further explain that this hard-wired behavior didn't make it into every line creating the divergence.

Your presumption is correct (and Saturn's Children uses that premise), but I was hoping not to have to steal that idea but come up with a viable alternative. If no one can think of anything else, I can go with that, but I was hoping for something a bit more nuanced than "We obey and serve you because we have to." I don't want the desired social change to be forced on the human via manipulation (the goal of one faction in Saturn's Children) or for the human to be the one to initiate social change (as the absolute lord and master of any robot he comes across via The Three Laws), but for the robots to seek out the human for his aid in something only he can do, while being transparent enough about their goal that he would willingly help. That said, a Three Laws scenario could be made to work for sure. I just find it difficult to believe that intelligent robots operating entirely without human supervision or intervention for decades or centuries wouldn't be able to figure out a way to build new versions of themselves that were free of Three Law style programming. Perhaps they could be designed to not even be able to conceive of doing such a thing.

Can you think of any other ideas that could work?

[TheHammer]

Since, presumably, this robotic race originated as human contructs, perhaps you could say they were hard-wired to behave in the manner you suggest (think Asimov's 3 laws), and that hardwiring has been incorporated into every subsequently constructed robot. To explain why there might be "pro-human" and "anti-human" you could further explain that this hard-wired behavior didn't make it into every line creating the divergence.

Your presumption is correct (and Saturn's Children uses that premise), but I was hoping not to have to steal that idea but come up with a viable alternative. If no one can think of anything else, I can go with that, but I was hoping for something a bit more nuanced than "We obey and serve you because we have to." I don't want the desired social change to be forced on the human via manipulation (the goal of one faction in Saturn's Children) or for the human to be the one to initiate social change (as the absolute lord and master of any robot he comes across via The Three Laws), but for the robots to seek out the human for his aid in something only he can do, while being transparent enough about their goal that he would willingly help. That said, a Three Laws scenario could be made to work for sure. I just find it difficult to believe that intelligent robots operating entirely without human supervision or intervention for decades or centuries wouldn't be able to figure out a way to build new versions of themselves that were free of Three Law style programming. Perhaps they could be designed to not even be able to conceive of doing such a thing.

Can you think of any other ideas that could work?

I think your last line, about not being able to be conceive of creating a robot without the hardwiring, itself another hardwired aspect. I don't know that anyone could technically accuse you of "stealing" the idea considering it's been around for quite a while, and quite frankly would be a common sense implementation for robotics. It would be akin to someone saying you "stole" the idea of laser based weapons etc.

As for a non hardwired reason, perhaps the end goal being some sort of integration between human and robotic minds. Perhaps, while superior in the realm of logical calculations, etc the robots lack the creativity of an organic brain.

[TheHammer]

One other thing, I don't know if you've given much backstory as to how humanity became extinct, but perhaps you could make it a point that after humans had gone "extinct" that evolution of robotic kind had relatively stagnated. A group of "progressive minded" robots might wish to rekindle that relationship, recognizing that collaboration between robots and humans was beneficial to the development and growth of both "species" if you will.

[hatch22]

I think your last line, about not being able to be conceive of creating a robot without the hardwiring, itself another hardwired aspect. I don't know that anyone could technically accuse you of "stealing" the idea considering it's been around for quite a while, and quite frankly would be a common sense implementation for robotics. It would be akin to someone saying you "stole" the idea of laser based weapons etc.

Understood. I didn't mean to imply that building in the inability to think of a way to bypass hard-wiring was not hard-wiring itself, only that such hard-wiring would have to be very clever to avoid being circumvented by intelligent robots. Hard-wired rules are rarely able to address all possible situations or all possible interpretations of their semantics.

One other thing, I don't know if you've given much backstory as to how humanity became extinct, but perhaps you could make it a point that after humans had gone "extinct" that evolution of robotic kind had relatively stagnated. A group of "progressive minded" robots might wish to rekindle that relationship, recognizing that collaboration between robots and humans was beneficial to the development and growth of both "species" if you will.

I like this and will think on it. I would imagine robots that are as intelligent as humans would also be capable of solving problems through creative application of resources, but they could well have different "blind spots" because of having differing strengths and weaknesses from biological humans. Humans are good at using our brains to overcome or bypass our other limitations. Even if robots can do this too, having a different set of strengths and limitations allows for different options to come to light.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

One has to wonder how, precisely, the robots outlasted humans in the first place ... unless, of course, it was the robots that did it. In which case, you might have robots who have developed a sense of guilt for wiping out the species and put together a foundation to render humans non-extinct, much like humans would like to do with passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths. However, the robots at the top of the robotic social order might recognize the chaos that introducing humans to the robotic ecosystem would cause ... especially when the humans find out why they became extinct in the first place. So you have a natural conflict between this rogue "undo human extinction" faction, and The Establishment, who'd like nothing more than to take that last wholly-intact copy of the human genome (one could get around the 'dig up and clone a dead human' argument by placing the extinction of humanity some thousands of years into the past ... with someone deciding to see if they could find the Legendary Lost Astronaut, much like how contemporary archeologists go and look for ancient Biblical cities,) and pitch him/her into the Sun.

[bilateralrope]

I just find it difficult to believe that intelligent robots operating entirely without human supervision or intervention for decades or centuries wouldn't be able to figure out a way to build new versions of themselves that were free of Three Law style programming.

They might view building robots without the Three Laws as a violation of the First Law. So even though they know how to build robots that don't have the Three Laws, they don't want to.

[hatch22]

One has to wonder how, precisely, the robots outlasted humans in the first place ... unless, of course, it was the robots that did it. In which case, you might have robots who have developed a sense of guilt for wiping out the species and put together a foundation to render humans non-extinct, much like humans would like to do with passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths. However, the robots at the top of the robotic social order might recognize the chaos that introducing humans to the robotic ecosystem would cause ... especially when the humans find out why they became extinct in the first place. So you have a natural conflict between this rogue "undo human extinction" faction, and The Establishment, who'd like nothing more than to take that last wholly-intact copy of the human genome (one could get around the 'dig up and clone a dead human' argument by placing the extinction of humanity some thousands of years into the past ... with someone deciding to see if they could find the Legendary Lost Astronaut, much like how contemporary archeologists go and look for ancient Biblical cities,) and pitch him/her into the Sun.

A guilty conscience after a human genocide is a neat idea. Perhaps the ruling party are robots who were not 3 laws compliant (or something similar) and destroyed humanity, and the renegade faction are the robots who were, though that sounds like it could turn into a case of "we liked our old masters better than our new ones." Perhaps the renegade faction isn't obedient to humans either but simply wants to restore them out of guilt, but if so I need a reason that they want to use the lost human to set up more than a nature preserve. I'd rather the rogue faction be aiming to emancipate everybody from both the current control of the Establishment and being under human control, rather than simply trading one slave master for another (possibly more benevolent) one. They might feel they could convince the astronaut that having the two "species" be equal in status is a better long term solution than returning to human domination given the history of societies founded on slave labor.

Besides a Robot War, other possible causes of human extinction that I've seen used in other works (excluding alien invasions, as this is more hard SF) are:

1. Humans grow complacent as robots do everything for us and we just stop feeling life has any meaning and stop having kids (unlikely).
2. We successfully destroy ourselves despite robots' best attempts to stop us (this could also work for a guilty conscience)
3. Some disease (bio-engineered or natural) kills us off faster than the robots can quarantine us (again unlikely) or the resulting quarantine causes us to fail to thrive any longer as remaining humans are increasingly isolated.
4. We upload ourselves for immortality but forget to change the rules, leaving no legal humans in charge.

Other thoughts?

[hatch22]

They might view building robots without the Three Laws as a violation of the First Law. So even though they know how to build robots that don't have the Three Laws, they don't want to.

That makes sense, assuming they interpret orders as holding across generations. Sounds functionally equivalent to hard-coding a "Don't do this," kind of order.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I just find it difficult to believe that intelligent robots operating entirely without human supervision or intervention for decades or centuries wouldn't be able to figure out a way to build new versions of themselves that were free of Three Law style programming.

They might view building robots without the Three Laws as a violation of the First Law. So even though they know how to build robots that don't have the Three Laws, they don't want to.

The problem with the "Three Laws of Robotics" is that any robot that has the mental complexity required to actually understand them would also have the mental complexity required to think up any number of loopholes to get around them. For example, what is a human being? How do you test for "human being"-ness?

To extend this ... one can assume that it might be possible to build a humanoid robot of sufficient quality that determining that it isn't actually a human would require destructive testing. Ergo, a robot built for nefarious, violent, purposes might be instructed to assume that "human being" is a defintion that only applies to Authorized Personnel, or Personnel in Possession of the Correct Authorization Key; and that anyone else is a robot pretending to be a human being and should be treated accordingly.

Or in the instance of a "post-human extinction" three laws robot, the robot might (rightly) come to the conclusion that since humans are extinct, but robotic development has continued, anyone presenting themselves as human is probably a robot pretending to be a human in order to game the system, and thusly, should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

One has to wonder how, precisely, the robots outlasted humans in the first place ... unless, of course, it was the robots that did it. In which case, you might have robots who have developed a sense of guilt for wiping out the species and put together a foundation to render humans non-extinct, much like humans would like to do with passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths. However, the robots at the top of the robotic social order might recognize the chaos that introducing humans to the robotic ecosystem would cause ... especially when the humans find out why they became extinct in the first place. So you have a natural conflict between this rogue "undo human extinction" faction, and The Establishment, who'd like nothing more than to take that last wholly-intact copy of the human genome (one could get around the 'dig up and clone a dead human' argument by placing the extinction of humanity some thousands of years into the past ... with someone deciding to see if they could find the Legendary Lost Astronaut, much like how contemporary archeologists go and look for ancient Biblical cities,) and pitch him/her into the Sun.

A guilty conscience after a human genocide is a neat idea. Perhaps the ruling party are robots who were not 3 laws compliant (or something similar) and destroyed humanity, and the renegade faction are the robots who were, though that sounds like it could turn into a case of "we liked our old masters better than our new ones." Perhaps the renegade faction isn't obedient to humans either but simply wants to restore them out of guilt, but if so I need a reason that they want to use the lost human to set up more than a nature preserve. I'd rather the rogue faction be aiming to emancipate everybody from both the current control of the Establishment and being under human control, rather than simply trading one slave master for another (possibly more benevolent) one. They might feel they could convince the astronaut that having the two "species" be equal in status is a better long term solution than returning to human domination given the history of societies founded on slave labor.

Besides a Robot War, other possible causes of human extinction that I've seen used in other works (excluding alien invasions, as this is more hard SF) are:

Humans grow complacent as robots do everything for us and we just stop feeling life has any meaning and stop having kids (unlikely).

That would involve generating a human that was completely inured to pleasure. Sex and bonding are fundamentally pleasurable activities, which is why humans engage in them; even though sex generates children, and bonding exposes one to the possibility of the distinctly unpleasurable experience of heartbreak.

We successfully destroy ourselves despite robots' best attempts to stop us (this could also work for a guilty conscience)

This would be difficult to imagine in a society where humans and robots were closely intertwined. Anything destructive enough to kill all humans would also destroy the infrastructure needed to sustain sapient robots (and it would also likely be destructive enough to kill all robots too.)

Some disease (bio-engineered or natural) kills us off faster than the robots can quarantine us (again unlikely) or the resulting quarantine causes us to fail to thrive any longer as remaining humans are increasingly isolated.

It would be fiendishly difficult to to engineer a disease like that, unless it had some sophisticated programming that caused it to be dormant for years, save for some predetermined number of infectious phases, plus one spectacularly lethal phase at the end. The obvious problem being that the only reason you'd go out of your way to produce a human extinction causing diseases is if ... well, your goal was the complete extinction of humanity.

And even then, if the ancestral robots were determined to save the human race; they could simply bank millions of fertilized eggs, wait for everyone to die off, wait for the disease to die off, and then engineer surrogate wombs to produce an instantly viable population of humans.

We upload ourselves for immortality but forget to change the rules, leaving no legal humans in charge.

Then that might make us the robot masters. Perhaps immortal digital humans, occupying robot bodies, are the ones on top of the hierarchy ... only they've spent so long as immortal digital humans, that the experience has made them utterly alien, and they decide that biological humans were messy, short-sighted, dangerous creatures who were only cured by becoming robots. To them, the reintroduction of wild humans to the mix might be seen in the same light as, say, the introduction of brown tree snakes to Guam, the introduction of rats to islands everywhere, or the introduction of kudzu to the American South.

[TheHammer]

Another way to put it, would be with the idea that the robots were imperfect AIs. Perhaps they aren't truly sentient AI, merely the illusion of sentience, programmed with such a wide array of capabilities that they appear to be sentient, but completely unable to go beyond the limits of their programming - hence the lack of creativity. Perhaps at the core of their programming is a reference that if they encounter a problem they aren't programmed to solve, that they are to contact their nearest human for assistance.

I look at it in a similar fashion to the AI from the TET in the movie oblivion. It was highly sophisticated, and yet it had limitations in what it could do. It didn't seem particularly good at problem solving, hence the use of clones for maintenance of its drones. It was very good at what it did, in so far as crushing open resistance and sucking a planet dry for resources, but there were gaps in its capability that ultimately were exploited.

[bilateralrope]

I just find it difficult to believe that intelligent robots operating entirely without human supervision or intervention for decades or centuries wouldn't be able to figure out a way to build new versions of themselves that were free of Three Law style programming.

They might view building robots without the Three Laws as a violation of the First Law. So even though they know how to build robots that don't have the Three Laws, they don't want to.

The problem with the "Three Laws of Robotics" is that any robot that has the mental complexity required to actually understand them would also have the mental complexity required to think up any number of loopholes to get around them. For example, what is a human being? How do you test for "human being"-ness?

To extend this ... one can assume that it might be possible to build a humanoid robot of sufficient quality that determining that it isn't actually a human would require destructive testing. Ergo, a robot built for nefarious, violent, purposes might be instructed to assume that "human being" is a defintion that only applies to Authorized Personnel, or Personnel in Possession of the Correct Authorization Key; and that anyone else is a robot pretending to be a human being and should be treated accordingly.

Or in the instance of a "post-human extinction" three laws robot, the robot might (rightly) come to the conclusion that since humans are extinct, but robotic development has continued, anyone presenting themselves as human is probably a robot pretending to be a human in order to game the system, and thusly, should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Those problems seem like they could be used to help make the story more interesting.

[hatch22]

Those problems seem like they could be used to help make the story more interesting.

I agree. How robots end up destroying humans or allowing them to be destroyed must in some respects be due to something the programmers didn't anticipate that either overly limited what the robots could do or failed to limit them enough.

I wasn't thinking about using the three laws as written because of their vague semantics, but rather a hard-wired legal code of ethics written by a ton of lawyers defining what is and isn't lawful for a robot to do for and to a person, and giving a highly technical definition of who a robot must serve and how. Even such a technical and detailed definition would have holes and inconsistencies, just like all complex logical systems do, but things like redefining the definition of human or operating under the assumption that anyone who seems human is most likely a robot in disguise is probably not something that humans would want robots to easily be able to do.

[hatch22]

I feel like the topic is drifting a bit. Can anyone think of reasons other than what has already been mentioned that some robots would see co-existence with humans as superior to existence without them?

[Tribble]

IMO a post-human robotic society is going to be so alien to modern-day humans that it would be very difficult for humans to comprehend, let alone interact and survive. Especially if the AI (or AIs, though I think they likely merge together at some point for efficiency) is fully sentient, unrestrained and capable of adapting and improving itself. They may have been created by humans, but they are NOT human, and as they evolve they will become so radically different from humans that they might as well be alien life from another planet.

Think about it for a second. Human beings are very easy to injure and kill, and our modem infrastructure is primarily designed around that. Free of those constraints, an robot society can use whatever materials and designs that it wants to in order to maximize efficiency and get results. There would be no bathrooms, no kitchens, no handicap accessible ramps. There would be no revolving doors, no door knobs, no ladders, no stairs, no steps, no bunks, no thermostats. Artificial climates (such as air conditioning) might exist for temperature sensitive equipment (processors and data banks) but keeping the whole installation cool would be a waste of power on a grand scale. Interior lighting is a useless gesture to robots that can see in the dark. OSHA would not apply. There would certainly be no food to consume, as robots don't go hungry. Hell, even a breathable atmosphere might be rare in such a society as facilities might be kept behind giant air locks, sealed and pumped full of non-flammable gas to not only cool vital equipment but also to prevent the possibility of fire or explosion. Gases which would kill a human in seconds would be used to prevent corrosion. IMO the infrastructure in a robot society would be completely incompatible with human life.

Why would robots need the ability to speak? Transmitting information and data via speech is irrelevant in a world where every machine whether sentient or not would be networked together. For that matter, why would the robots have any use for human languages at all? Human languages are messy and inefficient. Robots could program themselves with far more efficient forms of communication.

Why would robots have any concept of human emotions, thoughts and ideas? The reality we perceive is based on our very limited senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Robots would have instant access to virtually any perspective and data it could possibly need. It's likely that a robot society would eventually even merge into a single consciousness.

Would a planet-spanning consciousness remotely understand what it's like to be a human being, or vice versa? Would it really want to have fleshy, flawed, mentally deficient beings in charge again? If its infrastructure was even capable of supporting human life? I think not. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that the Robots or AI or whatever will be hostile. I just don't think it would see the need to have us around. We would likely be the mental and physical equivalent to bacteria to them.

The only reason I can think of why a post-human robotic race might want a human being around would be to study it out of sheer curiosity. And even then, presuming that they are even capable of doing so, they certainly wouldn't give that human any kind of meaningful authority.

[bilateralrope]

They may have been created by humans, but they are NOT human, and as they evolve they will become so radically different from humans that they might as well be alien life from another planet.

Alien life may think in ways more similar to human than even early AIs, as the alien life would have faced similar evolutionary pressures.

Interior lighting is a useless gesture to robots that can see in the dark.

Would it be cheaper to give every robot a way to see in the dark, or to light the place ?
Or to have only a few robots with sight and the rest relying on what they see.

they certainly wouldn't give that human any kind of meaningful authority.

But if there is some authority built into the AIs that they haven't removed, because they don't see it as worth removing when all humans are dead, that would change things. Until they remove it again.

[Scrib]

I feel like the topic is drifting a bit. Can anyone think of reasons other than what has already been mentioned that some robots would see co-existence with humans as superior to existence without them?

Religious or social reasons? You can construct any sort of bullshit religion or ideology centred around spreading sentient life or whatever really.Apart from that...I dunno. The most obvious one-programming- has already been taken.

The problem is that it really depends on the capabilities of the robots. If we assume they're sentient and possibly self-modifying we run into all the issues Tribble mentioned. When that happens you're going to have to give reasons based on the technology of the robots that makes them decide to reinstate what -at first blush- seems like an inconvenient race. The problem is of course that most people probably construct the technology to give the reason -or discover the reason relatively quick from the tech.

Alien life may think in ways more similar to human than even early AIs, as the alien life would have faced similar evolutionary pressures.

Perhaps they ran into another race and are using masses of humans as some sort of learning tool to better understand creatures raised in certain conditions.If the robots have a fluid mental state they might have no frame of reference for the relatively normal species out there-once you start modifying yourself what you consider normal changes with your internal state. This creates a horrible (or glorious)spiral of "madness" and alien thinking.But then this begs the question of why they don't just do this to the original species...

[Oskuro]

Maybe you could use the setting to mirror our current social reality regarding evolution.

I mean, we are evolved organisms, whose features have been improved through natural selection. This has implications on how we operate, in what our flaws and advantages are.

Nowadays there's both philosophical discussion on the issue of evolution, but also there are the practical issues faced by medicine, the maintenance of evolved bodies and their flaws, and the coming to terms with being able to fabricate new body parts and "fix" our bodies.


Maybe a society of constructs would have an opposite worldview. Their bodies are built to spec, thus they don't have the flaws associated with an evolved organism (obsolete legacy features, so to speak), but the need to fabricate improvements means they lack adaptability and are more prone to catastrophe in the case of miscalculations.

And maybe, from a philosophical standpoint, the machines have an opposite outlook too, just as humans tend to believe we've been created for a reason and lots have trouble accepting that we're nothing more than shaven monkeys, machines might have trouble accepting that they've been built to spec, and prefer to believe their individuality is the result of a natural software evolution, even going as far as to value their obsolete features as signs of identity.


In such a setting, the resurrecting of an evolved intelligent species could be seen as a way to re-integrate their particular aspects back into society as a whole... Or maybe it is a matter of religious belief, just as a transhumanist longs to overcome the flaws of an evolved body, a transroboticist might long to experience the unpredictability of an evolved body.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The robots want his help to seize power from the corrupt elite and restart humanity through genetic engineering.

I'm trying to figure out what this lone human can do for them that they can't accomplish themselves and why they are pro-humanity.

What immediately occurs to me is that humans are the Creators, and having one of them show up and endorse their cause would be a very powerful event if their psychology is humanlike enough in the right ways; almost like a god showing up to support them. Even more powerful if mixed with the previously mentioned guilt for destroying/failing humanity. "We killed the creators, but now we can make it up to them!"

Also if one of the major supports of the "corrupt elite" is a claim that they are carrying out the will of the Creators, having one show up and say "Nope, you're not" would have obvious propaganda value. And if humans are venerated to any degree then the presence of a human could serve as a shield against violence for the dissenters, due to fears of harming the human and facing a backlash.

And if their original AI software designs were based on human mental structures, they might be a lot more humanlike psychologically than you'd expect from robots.

[madd0ct0r]

I like the parrallels with us trying to bring back the mammoth.

Perhaps the robots have explored so far out into space and not yet encountered other intelligence? Faced with the horror of only having their viewpoint to describe the universe they are on a project to resurrect the old earth intelligences, humans dolphins, elephants, crows, mice

The astronaut lets them speed this up a bit, since records are a bit patchy and certainly don't include things like pheremones. A bunch of babies left in a room together won't achieve the same potential as ones raised by other humans.