another robot post-apocalypse

If there's one thing Jim Cameron has taught us over the years, it's that we will obsolesce ourselves.

Hell, if I've burned through 7 Ipods in five years and Steve Jobs keeps making new ones, how much longer can the human race stay top-of-the-line? Pretty soon, somebody's going to make us in candy pink and minty green, too.

SciFi (not the channel) keeps trying to teach us how to die; we keep trying to live. But there are real lessons here. How do the stories say that we will create our replacements? What will the consequences be? And, most importantly, will the coming robot apocalypse go over-budget?

In this paper, I try and wrestle with two touchstones of life creation: Frankenstein and Neuromancer. Not sure how well I do.

My conclusions come out like this:

1. Scientific progress should be rooted in a popular community driven
   by pragmatic self-interest, to sustain the new sentience.
2. Radical emotions are involved in the creation of sentience, and these will infect the sentience itself.
3. Isolation turns sentience into monstrosity. Think about spiritual sustenance early on and continually.
4. Complexity alone can never create something sentient, because a knowledge
   of mortality and the rush which that brings are seen as a necessary component
   of life. So, sentience needs limitations to grow against.
5. The scientist is inside the process here, as much as in the quantum world. His/her frame of mind, spiritual aspect, and humility will play key goals in the nature of any created sentient, which makes a cultural understanding of these issues all the more
   important.

I do get that it's pulp fiction (common noun). But stories make the man, and the first test shuttle was the USS Enterprise. So we glean, and try and use imagination to stay a half-hop ahead.

It's alive! Read about it here!

Comments

[justin bieber supras]

I'm looking for a great quotes that i can use on my everyday task and duties. Lucky enough to drop by on your blog. Thanks.