Then the only thing I could advise you is to read Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
I don't know if you have ever heard of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation:
http://www.alcor.org/ It's an organization that, for a fee, freezes people until the day when technology has improved enough to bring them back to old state. They have been doing roaring business for decades. Their fees have gone down quite a bit, but it still costs much less to freeze just the head than to freeze the whole body:
http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.htmlBack in the 1980s, they got into trouble when they were accused of homicide. Apparently, if just the head is to be frozen, then it is best to cut it off right after death or, even better, just before death---to avoid information loss. The "trouble" was that someone had reported to the sheriff that they had done the latter, which would indeed be homicide. A little circus then ensued, with the sheriff trying to find the head and Alcor constantly moving it. But Alcor never denied cutting off the head, so the view was formed that their might be a basis for a charge of homicide. Alcor was asked to explain itself.
Alcor had this to say: Even if they had cut off the head at the alleged time, there was no basis for a charge of homicide. That might seem absurd, but it wasn't entirely so; their argument relied on how "death" was to be understood. Consider typical definitions:
homicide: the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another;
killing: an act of causing death, especially deliberately;
death: the action or fact of dying or being killed;
One can see the circularity; so the matter of just what "death" is became an issue. All agreed that it could be defined as "a permanent loss of life". Alcor then argued that Dora couldn't possibly be dead, because her loss of life was only temporary. To prove the latter, they assembled an impressive array of scientists, one of whom was Hans Moravec, a leading AI scientist at Carnegie Mellon.
Mr. Moravec was simply supposed to present an argument to the effect that, yes, Dora would some day return to life. That he did. But he couldn't help himself, and didn't stop there. He went on to argue that Alcor's business was quite crude: returning human remains to life was probably a waste of time, given that biological materials would just deteriorate again. He had a much better idea: Computer technology was improving so fast that one day it would be possible to download the contents of the human brain (into something like a really large USB stick today). Materials engineering was also improving to such an extent that it would one day be possible to build an artificial body that could last near-forever. All one then needed to do was upload the saved brain contents into the incredible body and get a much better product. That would be a
post-human (Homo Sapiens v2.0).
Even with that, Moravec and his friends were just getting warmed up. They had other neat ideas, such as near-instant travel: Suppose a post-human in Nairobi wanted to travel to London. All he would do is arrange for a body rental in London and then transmit the contents of his brain (e.g. via the internet or radio waves or ...). (This, of course, raised other problems that could arise from having multiple copies of a person running around.)
Still, it was admitted that it would be a while before we had post-humans. But in the meantime, we could still upgrade to a
trans-human ("transitory human", i.e. Homo Sapiens v1.5). That's the sort of thing people like Nick Bostrom are talking about: go to his webpage and scroll down to "Transhumanism":
http://www.nickbostrom.com/ The industry is now quite busy, and there are "Transhuman Associations" all over the place, e.g.
http://www.uktranshumanistassociation.org/http://transhumanism.org/index.php/wta/hvcs/To get back to the question of machines taking over from humans: no need to worry; we will all have been upgraded to post-humans.
