Who's Afraid of President Executron?
Why is there a continuing culture of fear surrounding robots? Robots are possibly the most thought-out new technology that we're faced with in the coming century. The human race is likely to benefit greatly from semi-autonomous robots for a Very Long Time before robots begin to become complex enough to exhibit any kind of free will. And you can be sure by the time that day arrives, what with all the Will Smith movies to caution us, that those pesky aluminum pals of ours will be firmly under our fleshy thumbs.
What's more worrying are technologies that are out-running fiction. It was good that people started thinking about artificial intelligences back in the 1920's, well before the fiction could become reality. It gave us time to think. What about genetically modified food crops? What about the internet? Nobody worried too much about what would happen if everyone's computers were suddenly all wired together. We don't have very many scenarios for how things could be as a result of a global internet, and those we do have are not much older than the technology itself. Same for the GM crops.
But it's too late now. The internet genie is out of the bottle. Maybe that's a good thing, because now I can order some GM'd glow in the dark popcorn from the far side of the earth whenever I want, which will go great with the next killer robot movie.
posted by JustJeff @ 4:41 PM
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