As technology advances we can’t help but wonder how much closer we are until the day when everyone has a flying car, or their own personal robot butler. Perhaps even an android that you could order customized to look like a proper old butler should, or perhaps like your high school crush. (Robots look like machines, androids are machines made to look -and sometimes to act- like human beings.) Either way, we assume that these robotic helpers would be around to do just that. They would help us with the things that we needed to get done around the house such as dishes or laundry. They might also act as an electronic agenda to help you keep track of appointments, or possibly even accompany your children to and from school as an extra safety precaution.
The Future?
But what if they had their own agenda. What if something in the programming of your favorite household helper went terribly wrong and instead of doing the dishes it began to break all of them. Or worse, got hold of you or a member of your family and decided that they would be as easy to break as a plate. What if the programming was designed to fail from the beginning and the underlying orders were to take over every household, and subsequently the country/world on behalf of a very insane individual.
Movies have explored these questions, as well as others like ‘at what point does artificial intelligence become something human’. In the movie A.I. a young android boy learns to love, and in Bicentennial Man something similar occurs. By contrast, in the movie I Robot; the androids become ‘evil’ so to speak and begin killing people.
Whether or not any of these things occurring is a real possibility or just science fiction, we wont know for a while. It doesn’t seem that any of us will be owning a personal android in our lifetimes, but who knows maybe our children might and use cool opera gloves to control them. I’d even bet money that Mac and PC will be warring over who has produced the better one.
May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow
