Robots are Your Competition

July 14th, 2008 | Guide to World Domination

How frequently do you interact with Robots?

Do you know when you are interacting with one?

Wikipedia defines a robot as a mechanical or artificial agent, that, among other things:

is not ‘natural’ i.e. artificially created
can sense its environment, and manipulate or interact with things in it
is programmable
makes dexterous coordinated movements
appears to have intent or agency

Those sure describe a lot of things that I interact with on a daily basis. More disturbing by far, is when you scroll down the Wikipedia page, there is a section titled, “Robot Fatalities.” In this section, it talks about the first human to be killed by a robot, Robert Williams, and poor Kenji Urada, who was pushed into a grinding machine.

The article claims this was an accident.

The first book that I ever read about robots taking over the world was “The Eternal Enemy,” by Christopher Pike. Here is the basic storyline: Boy makes robot. Robot makes better, smarter robot. Rinse & repeat until humanity is threatened with being replaced entirely. For their own good. It’s always for our own good, which tells me that sci-fi writers have a well-developed sense of irony.

Will Smith’s I, Robot (based on Asimov’s novel) raised my expectations by introducing a noble, human-friendly robot, Sonny, who stands up to the psycho mother robot and all her minions when they decide to take over the world. Great. So, now we have to make robots to fight the robots for us.

Same deal in the bright & splashy 2007 hit Transformers – robots are protecting us from bad robots, and even cell phones are dangerous.

I’m not even going to get into the premise of Battlestar Galactica, except to say that the robots (called Cylons if you’re polite, Toasters if you’re not) are going to kill us all, and you’d better start looking for alternative planets to live on, because Earth is no longer an option.