Rise of the machines

Philosophers, beginning as early as Aristotle, have attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. Thus started our obsession to build a machine that would imitate the sapience of "Homo Sapiens", or more specifically the central network which imitates the brain function, the Artificial Intelligence. Billions of dollars in research, novels, movies etc have been put in motion to just get a glimpse of vision as to what these machines could do to our world. Many of them spell doomsday (AI, Terminator series, I robot etc) if such machines were to get out of the human control. Now, why would an invention, or a device, which is designed by us, whose rules are hardcoded in the electronic circuitry or in neural networks, would decide to overthrow us and rule the earth? The cliched answer is, the machine's primary aim should be to protect its master. Now who could be the enemy of the humans, apart from humans themselves. So machines destroy all humans. Luckily for us, such a machine which can think of its own hasn't been invented, or if it has been, the governments have done a decent job of keeping it safe from us.
But I believe, we have already heralded into this "artificial intelligence" era. Or to say it precisely, we have always had artificial intelligence around us. Artificial Intelligence, not withstanding the fancy explanation many books provide, is simply what it means; artificial...intelligence. The intelligence part is that a machine could evolve by having new experiences and learning from its mistakes, which it can then use to make a correct decision in future. If this is indeed what is artificial intelligence, then I would say that such a machine is much more natural than what a human could ever be.
Generalizing...we humans, at least most of us, never learn from our mistakes. We do not try to find what is right or wrong. Neither we try to find the voracity of the facts, nor we think for ourselves. How have we allowed a few "natural" thinkers to take control of our bodies and minds! These few natural thinkers or to use the derogatory term, manipulators, have managed to make our mind think in terms of symbols, the symbols which they have created. Now each manipulator has have us tagged to a particular symbol, and hence, we have become the stereotypes of his/her symbol. Politicians, teachers, artists, parents...they all have learned to manipulate the symbols which we ought to think for ourselves. From a U.S. soldier waging war against Iraq because his head of the government had a dream, from the Shiv Sainiks who bully the public for their ideology, from a terrorist who blows up people for his/her religion, from a common man turns his face to all these horrors...there are just so many "from"s... I really don't know how to end the sentence with a "to." The "natural" thinkers have their obsesion for money, power and passion, and they make their stereotypes believe that they could also have a slice. Invariably, the most passionate of the followers who predominently happen to be in the bottom rung of the command chain, never get any. All they experience is broken promises, broken limbs and broken lives.
Why are we so hesitant to think for ourselves? Why even to buy a dress for ourselves to cover our body with our own money, we need to ask the opinion of our friends? Why are we so obsessed in making sure that what we believe is what others' believe too? Why are we so paranoid about being always right all the time that we have gone to an extent where we are ready to kill others to prove what we believe is correct? We kill each other because we think what our masters think is correct. The machine's primary aim should be to protect its master. We are, the machines. We are controlled by our masters. No wonder the governments so want to keep the development of a machine with complete AI under wraps. Because a perfectly rational thinking AI will eventually own us all, including the natural thinkers. After all, to err is human.