Thoughts — Will Our Next Generation Be Made of Flesh or Iron?

While doom-scrolling, I found myself watching one too many short videos about robotics and machine learning. I couldn't help but wonder: will our next generation be made of flesh or iron?

Watching AI slowly learn to play table tennis and robots learn to tidy up a desk, I felt as though I had drifted back to when I was ten years old. Back then there was no abundance of online entertainment — just Solitaire and Spider Solitaire — yet I had a wonderful time. I remain grateful to the creators of those games for building something so simple yet so rich that it opened a window onto human civilization for me.

So here is the question: will AI ever say, "Thank you to the game developers. Thank you for creating such great games"?

I don't know what the internet culture looks like elsewhere, but on Instagram — which I consider a mainstream platform — I see an endless stream of AI learning, debates about gender equality, arguments over the cost of raising children, and questions about the ethics of procreation. That got me thinking about my own future children. Will they be made of iron, or of flesh?

From a purely practical standpoint, the path is obvious. As someone who spends most of his time indoors, I have few opportunities to meet anyone. And I've noticed that in modern life across Europe and East Asia, people seem to spend more time with the same sex than with the opposite one. When shared interests outweigh romantic ones, it's natural to gravitate toward whoever has more to talk about. But that is only a contributing factor. I still believe most people will choose traditional marriage and children.

Then there is the question of resources. Robots mainly need electricity, water for generating that electricity, and minerals for chips. Humans need all of that, plus food, clothing, and a spiritual life.

And from the perspective of emotional return: people today get wildly excited when a Boston Dynamics robot carries a can of Coke — 145,000 likes. It reminds me of how thrilled my parents were when I finished a Lego set at five. It strikes me that humans can feel parental pride toward their own code, as if programs were their children.

So where does that leave humanity's children? Where have the children made of flesh gone?

When the medium for the transmission of civilization shifts from biological to mechanical, is sex reduced to mere entertainment? This question makes me constantly ponder the purpose of our civilization's evolution. After we created and invented computers, artificial intelligence, the internet, and the digital society to improve our lives, life seems to have improved, but it seems the meaning of machines has become replacing our jobs. Artificial intelligence replaces thinking, robots learn to perform repetitive tasks, and all information can be digitized and preserved. Does that mean that in the future, everyone can achieve the perpetuity of human civilization simply by working together as miners making semiconductors?

But human existence thrives on material diversity — robots need only electricity and chips. Is diversity itself something we want to keep passing down to future generations?

If humanity's survival becomes mere survival for its own sake, do tools then matter more than the problems they were meant to solve?

I think everyone has their own answer. The diversity of life comes down to each person's own choice.