The powers that be at IO9 brought this to my attention, apparently thinking I'd actually have something useful or coherent to say. Sadly, I must disappoint those powers.

Which I guess only points out that you don't need to be smart to be resilient. Sharks aren't very smart, but they've survived, largely unchanged for eons.

Famous last words, carbon unit. Better hope that remains true.

Frankly, I knew it was hopeless from the moment I started into it. Thus kicking the hornet's nest, I'm out.

I don't know if it really was Shelly's intent or not, but in a way the whole Frankenstein story, as she originally wrote it, can be viewed as treatise how parenthood relates to godhood. And again, probably not her intent, but some atheists like me view the story as a condemnation of the deity of humans for abandoning…

They view us as pets. They care for us, they find us amusing and horrorifying but, as children, they sure as hell don't give us access to the real levers of power.

Well, perhaps you can take some consolation in the possibility that there might be sapient artificial life which is equally racist and xenophobic and finds meatbags like us just as detestable.

I wish I could be so hip as to say I'm sick of the nostalgia of decades yet to come, but I ain't.

Well, I wasn't really trying to inspire any feeling of nostalgia—as you may know, I strongly dislike nostalgia—just citing an appropriate tune.

Let's hope so. Really I'm just countering Rum's utterly pointless robophobia.

Take it, PfP:

Yet, Skynet might be the least likely thing to happen really. Colossus and Guardian might be more likely. And the humans fell pretty quickly into line there didn't they? Forbin's chest pounding aside, the world was theirs.

Yep, that's how I viewed them as well. The reader gets the impression that the Minds and Ships just keep the organics around as entertainment. We're pets, funny and amusing and, occasionally, horrifying and tragic pets.

Well that's just it, Bowman, upon looking at the monolith, didn't realize it was one of those bigger on the inside than it is one outside deals. Otherwise he might have taken the entire ship.

Me, I'm waiting for the day when humans are wistfully looking in on the neat, orderly, progressive, xenophilic and compassionate civilization of sapient artificial life. A world in which they reflect all of our best and none of our worst.

I've been watching that for a while now and, I'm waiting for the Machine to have an Asimovian "All the Troubles of the World" moment. I think that would scare the shit out of Root and Finch!

Well that's Brooks' take on it. But Shelly never did that. Her creature was highly intelligent and as the quote above indicates, quite eloquent, once it learned to read and speak.

No tongues!

Shelly got it right the first time. In what is arguably one of earliest of robot (or artificial life) stories, she repeatedly points out the duties of creators to their creations and how Victor Frankenstein fails in these obligations again and again. The creature turns murderous because Victor abandons it in horror,…

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's an angle too.