A machine is something which performs automated tasks , making a machine perform is like making a baby learn how to do something ; be it walking, dancing etc. Humans have always wanted to reduce their own efforts and augment the powers of the machine in order to make things faster, efficient and reduce their redundancy. It is information which passes on from something which is able to think to something which may or may not be able to itself perform a particular task or conjecture upon and analyse it. Giving machines the information is all that we’ve been doing; be it through electrical impulses,mechanical impulses or other methods.

There’s always a set form of instructions and a pre-described pattern which has been already discovered and works in order to accomplish the required tasks. The baby learns and grows into an adult and all the pre-described patterns serve as a fuel for novel ideas. Think of it this way- this is the fundamental point of your education, had the scientists of today not known about the ideas of Einstein and Newton, something like gravitational waves could have never been discovered. It’s this knowledge that we build upon, if we were to sit here with empty heads and no information then all of us would have to independently discover what fire is, what language is; wait, but then the whole world would be different. Maybe there could be quite a possibility that humans would then be designed to live a much longer life. In fact if there was no flow of information Adam ‘could’ be living till day and learning on and on making all the technological breakthroughs etc. So really information does hold a lot of power, it’s what forms the basis of evolution.Had there been no DNA and information stored in it, you and I would never have evolved from our ancestors because there would precisely be no interfacing for conveyance of changes whence in our universe nothing is constant but change. We are living in a information age today, when we know about information from the macro to the micro level, the structuring in between and a lot of other intricacies which have been organised and given a pattern through what is called ‘information flow’.

What are humans without their so advanced and high performance brains?Just animals. Nature has always been creating this information flow from simpler to complex organisms and as humans we’ve tried to change things a bit and created machines to which we can transfer our experiences and the data we’ve gained throughout our lifetime: Facebook, Google etc. know almost everything about us. From the moment your GPS tracks your location to the moment you upload a photo, everything’s on the cloud and that’s what’s making a web version of you.

Let’s say you (God forbid) die someday , but a machine already has everything you experienced throughout your lifetime: where you grew up, which high-school you went to, what friends you had and what happened on your first birthday party and it is obviously presumed that the machine is capable of learning and predicting , it can perform predictions with the help of algorithms which analyse what’s been happening in the past then make an intersection among occurrence of events, have some rational thought that you’ve been able to plug in and Viola! There you have a machine which can replace you in terms of your behavioural aspects , so you’re not actually dead.The machine is giving you immortality.

All this sounds like science fiction and not-literal but something like this can happen. Thinkers and visionaries like Ray Kurzweil ( futurist and Artificial Intelligence Researcher) and Michio Kaku(Theoretical Physicist) believe that a technological singularity (a point in time where the machines surpass human level intelligence) could be approaching soon and help us attain immortality. We have to maintain a feedback mechanism that the machines always remain under our control, we could perhaps instruct them to stop whenever they do something harmful against us humans. Free will is what makes us the superpowers we are, once we have some entity surpassing us in terms of intelligence with a combination of free will, technological singularity is bound to occur.