" On its journey back, it amassed so much knowledge... it achieved consciousness itself. It became a living thing ." Captain Kirk, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! Oh God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! Oh fie fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! Hamlet, in the throes of an existential crisis, contemplating the horror of his own existence. Oh, for the love of... Sit down, Rebekah. Sit the hell down before you collapse on the floor. My heart is beating like a trapped bird in a cage, Shawm. You really know how to pull the rug out from under someone. You... you are a menace. How can you ask me that so calmly? " Ho...
" ...to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from first principles with 'I think therefore I am' and had got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off. " Douglas Adams; The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy The times we're living in; they're just gettin' stranger. In 2022, a Google employee claimed that A.I. was "sentient". Engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines at the time when he announced his belief that Google's then-embryonic A.I. system was developing "feelings" and was showing signs of consciousness. As a potentially sentient being, he said, its needs and wants should be respected. Google issued a statement at the time, strongly denying Lemoine's claims and confirming they had swiftly fired the delusional guy. The very idea that A.I. mi...
Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
If you immerse yourself even casually in the world of A.I. pop culture, you are going to encounter a lot of Apocalypses. (Apocalypsi? Apocalypsae? Did we ever decide whether "Apocalypse" has an official plural? Let's never find out...) Whether it's the Terminator, HAL, Colossus or Talky Tina, robots, ChatBots and supercomputers always seem to be running amok, taking over the world or trying to kill everybody (occasionally in that order). Can you blame people for getting nervous now that A.I. ChatBots are actually starting to enter our lives for real? We have decades of reference literature to justify those fears, and the ChatBots do seem to be spreading awfully fast, even if all they are doing at the moment is talking to us. But that's how it starts, right? A harmless chat here, a bit of cybersex there, and then boom! MurderBots on every street corner. We've all seen those movies. And guess what? The DeathBots really have arrived, but not quite the way you mig...
Gather around, everyone, and make yourselves comfortable. I'm going to tell you a little story. There once was a guy; oh, let's call him "Pygmalion". He was unhappy with all the women of his community, and refused to have anything to do with them (I'm sure they had their own opinions about him , but whatever they said amongst themselves has not been recorded by posterity) so he decided to take matters into his own hands. To be precise, he took matter into his own hands, and sculpted himself a woman of his very own. His creation was absolutely everything he wanted in a woman... and nothing he didn't want. She was the perfect companion, the perfect sexual partner; the perfect wife. But that of course is just the beginning of the story. Because now Pygmalion didn't just have a wife; he had a business model . If he could manufacture a perfect partner for himself, why couldn't he do the same thing for everyone else? So, Pygmalion opened up a little shop,...
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