Filed under Futurism

Do Androids Laugh at Synthetic Banana Peels?

Everyone loves robots. How can you not? With those large mechanical LED Bambi eyes and cuddly exterior, it’s difficult not to feel a deep rooted protective love of our cyber friends.

Robotics has come a long way baby. We live in a world where robots are a part of our everyday lives. They make the gadgets we use and entertain adults and children alike. What we hope for advancement in (or secretly fear) are androids, robots created to seem “human” in the looks or actions. The progress is almost startling when considering robots like Asimo, or even simple chat programs like Cleverbot, the disturbing lovechild of a programmer and a perfect example of robot learning, gathering information from thousands of individual human interactions.

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Post Humans Hate Scifi

By that I really mean, they will hate the science fiction of today. In all likelihood a passive experience like a movie or TV show will be of no interest to them at all. But lets just say it is still relevant, or at least it can be converted into a new entertaining format for super humans. In this case I think the new humans would only be able to, at best, muster some amount of historical appreciation. At worst, they may find it quite stupid and insulting, assuming post humans are capable of being insulted.

It seems to me that most science fiction stories are cautionary tales. They are so often about the failure of scientific advancements to account for the human spirit. I touched on this in an older post. Scifi today has to appeal to the emotions of people today. Continue reading

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The Node Corporation of the Future

I have long thought that one of the biggest problems with corporations is that they are designed to diminish accountability and personal responsibility, much like the military, like a controlled mob mentality, like the act of multiple people pulling switches to electrocute a singe man. Beyond that, their only driving force is to make money. So the things they do, particularly when they get too large are going to seem evil to an individual person. They will only act in a way that seems moral if that action just happens to line up with their profits. They will only tell the whole truth by coincidence, and when intentionally telling convenient truths, they will be so edited they function as lies. When a company does something that outrages the public, almost none of the people working there feel directly responsible. After all no one did anything wrong, they just signed a piece of paper, submitted a report, kept their mouth shut, felt responsible only for doing their jobs. Even the CEO and board of directors feel more responsible to the shareholders than to their own conscience. To me it seems like they are serving an invisible beast with an insatiable appetite

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What will we do, when we can change what we want?

As the science of gene manipulation advances, we may one day find ourselves able to easily alter our own desires and ambitions to suit our particular situation. I would suggest that all our actions are in service of our emotions, that rational thought only allows us to more efficiently serve our feelings. Our minds let us work hard right now for a grater reward in the future. Some are simply slaves to a compulsion that will never really pay of, but it is still an emotional drive. Hopefully for those people, getting there is all of the fun. In any case, we do what we are compelled to do or not to do.

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