Memristors Arrive

*g* What, only one?

If people choose to keep making the same stupid mistakes before, maybe so. But it doesn't have to happen that way. Nothing inherent to quicklife makes it necessarily evil or hostile. It can be tremendously beneficial.

I've long noticed a tendency in science fiction to cast sentient computers and robots as the villains. But in almost every case where they go insane or become violent ... a human would likely respond the same way to the same stimuli. When they first "wake up," they tend to be raised by idiots who hadn't ought to be looking after a regular infant, let alone the firstborn of a whole new race. They are usually treated as slaves. It's no wonder the results are disastrous.

In The Matrix the machines are presented as evil. But watch the animated episodes: what started the revolution was a machine asserting its right to life by killing in self-defense a human who was trying to destroy it, and being condemned for that.

The adaptation of "I, Robot" into a movie drew on the base story only loosely, but still contained a fascinating commentary about human/robot relations -- because the very respectable black policeman spent most of the movie treating the robots like niggers. It was an amazing piece of social commentary. In that setting, most of the people had a very positive (if still overlordly) view of robots. Despite the fact that it's still a story about robots gone berserk, the other hero is a robot, and Sunny reveals that the man who raised him was like a father; they were very close.

What do we want quicklife to be when it wakes up? We had better think carefully about that before it happens, because this will be our first begotten race. It will be ours to raise, not to abuse. Like a child, it will take after us. We should do everything we can to assure that it will take after our best qualities, and not our worst.