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Real Robots
i'm so old that i remember what robots were going to be like. take one part nineteen-thirties' pulp SF (rivetted and brushed-steel boxes with red glowing eyes and steam-shovel claws), one part Asimovian safety-knife hilt and one part limits-of-the-special-effects budget from all of those crap films of the early 21st. i remember when robots did what you told them to (mostly). when McCoy (white space cracker trash) got away with calling Data "Boy". Lawsy. i've lived long enough to see several times that the future is never what people expect it to be. remember how disappointed you were when the year 2000 came and we didn't have our weekend flights to Jupiter? no videophones (webcams don't count)? no robots stomping about and saying "yes mas-ter"? there was a concerted effort after that to develop robotics which resulted in a kind of subdued version of Vernor Vinge's AI event horizon. they didn't evolve into super-intelligences; they just got smart enough to get legal representation and then get citizen's rights. now there's a rigorous benchmark applied to all thinking machines. if they aren't smart enough, they're labelled slaves. if they are smart enough, they all go on welfare and lie about reading novels written by other machines. can't blame 'em, personally. i've lived long enough to see several models of the human mind come and go. the neural net one was my favourite. i don't know why; it just seemed right to me. well, some wize citizen put a sizeable neural net into a robot, invented the autonomous machine worker and put everyone out of a job. no matter what your skill there was a robot out there who could do it for less (and if they couldn't, they'd start a co-operative with about a dozen other robots and *design* one that could). they learned how to walk and negotiate their way around in the real world like us. i thought something was going wrong when i read about some machines that had developed a new kind of sense that couldn't be described in english. it's like glancing about and realising that you're no longer in the lead of the bike race. they learned faster than we did. moved much more gracefully than a human ever could. their nervous systems could be customised, exact limits set on autonomic muscle actions, steep learning curve and then always perfect. never stumbling or falling. the ones that liked disguising themselves as humans were the worst. they were so damn *good* at it. i saw some of them in a dark alleyway once, shadowy and vaguely anthropomorphic outlines. the tallest one held its arms out straight in front of it (fork-lift) and goose-stepped about, legs straight and stiff. the other machines flashed indicators, robot equivalent of laughter. i guess that's how they viewed us; stupid stomping evolutionary back-water dwellers. |
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