Say if you really wanted to live and experience life a few centuries ahead… what would you do? Perhaps you would build a freeze chamber to preserve yourself. Maybe it’d be something like the one in Futurama. But what happens if the power goes out, or there’s an attack or looting? Family members are going to be useless – they don’t really care about you after three generations anyway.
So instead of having it in a fixed-position, you’d build a robot. Something self-powered and can get out of danger’s way. Preferably it can find more sources of energy by itself and also fix itself.
However, you are frozen and can’t control it directly. It will need to be programmed so it can work without instructions in real-time. The program would have the goal as to keep you alive and it would learn new ways to do this. Of course, if it doesn’t survive, it won’t be learning. There’s also the risk of other robots doing exactly the same thing, because everyone else also wants to skip a few centuries.
The learning that it undertakes might change its behaviour to something vastly different from what you had planned. There’s no opportunity for you to correct this behaviour.
I think it's a good analogy.
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