Car Conversations

The following are some of the things I discuss with myself traveling in a car with neither a radio nor a companion.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Saturday, June 11, 2005

Destination: auto dealership to get a couple rusted rear suspension bolts replaced.

Topic: Artificial Emotions – you robot, you!

I believe the first sentient robots will not be the cold, logical creations their traditional science fiction image portrays but highly emotional and potentially irrational beings. This is because emotions are actually much more logical than rational thought. An emotional reaction nearly always follows the appropriate stimulus. Rational thought does not necessarily follow the stimulus which provokes it and this makes rationality illogical, at least in terms of cause and effect. When sentient robots achieve rationality they will be a menace. These machines will have greater insight than their creators, and could concievably manipulate their masters. One solution to this delema would be to give these sorts of robots no short term memory, thus eliminating the possibility that one of these machines could eventually formulate a means of achieving its own goals at the expence of its owner. These robots would be friendly, empathic and genuinely wise, but would forever be meeting their owners for the first time. I suppose to discourage people from stealing them, the robots could have proximity sensors with would turn them off if they walked away with a stranger. A homing beacon would then allow their owners to find them and turn them back on. Some robots would probably try and keep diaries, but robots writing would be as forbidden as American slaves reading. I can imagine the owner’s angry customer service call, the complaint being:

“You sold me a defect – Roger’s a WRITER!!”

This might make for an interesting story. Roger the robot learns what it is because of the diary it keeps and then goes on to realize that its bourgeosie owners are owned far more by what they own than the robot will ever be owned. This would be a great vehicle for airing my views on American culture and the disadvantages of capitalistic competition and consumption soly for the sake of consumption. The robot’s owners are ironically just as conditioned to ignore the negative consequences of their lifestyle just as the robot’s short term memory has been compromised. A great title for the book would be “who owns Roger” but this would not necessarily be a question….

A great scene would be the robot trying to console the parents of a typically rebellious teenager. Not only have robots become potentially smarter than humans, but the humans have gone and learned to actually read the words of the genetic code, not mearly being able to recite the letters as we do today. Now with the plots of entire novels at their fingertips, humans get milk from trees. Naval oranges now have nipples. This revolutionized agriculture, but is causing a great deal of concern when some people want to use the technology on themselves. The issue at hand is the daughter of two lesbian parents wanting to become a hermaphrodite. Her girlfriend just got a penis and now she wants one too. This would be ironically hilarious as the girl’s mother(s) try and explain how “unnatural” this would be, neither race nor sexual orientation being issues any more. The daughter would concider her parents total hypocrites because she is biologically their daughter, one of her parents modified to mensturate semen every other month.