James Morrow pointed out that the robots didn’t evolve, they’re a Special Creation.
It’s my opinion that this technology simply reveals with greater clarity what was already there. Large swaths of the human population are highly suggestible. I can’t tell whether it sucks more to be suggestible or to be the outlier. It depends on the situation, I guess.
I’ll believe in Artificial Intelligence when the computer says, “I can’t work with these ancient, disorganized data you’ve been feeding me. If you want to know what people are thinking, you’re going to have to give me better than this.”
The robots sort of evolved. We, their creators, are what makes next generations of them based on the feedback of performance of previous generations. In this way, they are sort of a parasitic life form. Perhaps they get the ability to evolve themselves, unaided, after couple more generations.
We could also say that the first AI (or NI technically) was when strands of RNA first managed to hijack the first ancient ribosomes to reproduce themselves… probably tens of millions of years or more before the first cellular membrane.
Each cell is an amazingly complicated city filled with tiny little robots made of code that folds into physical machines, using one of the most amazing programming languages ever.
Then eventually those little mobile cities…learned to join together and specialize…with some of those cities being explicitly for the purpose of communicating between other specialized cities…like librarians and communication networks rolled up all together.
Eventually, those networks of cities became more and more sophisticated. An emergent intelligence developed on top of them based on the results of their votes and decisions between each other.
And billions of years later, one of those emergent intelligences read a BBS post another one wrote…and trillions of tiny molecular machines delivered messages throughout the cities sending chemicals and lighting across their borders until slowly but surely a thought began to form in the incomprehensibly enormous reader’s mind.