Archive for the ‘John McCarthy’ Category
Robot Uprisings edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams
published April 2014
Where I got it: purchased new
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Robots are supposed to help us, right? they’re supposed to do the jobs that humans don’t want to or can’t do, right? and thanks to Asimov’s three (four!) laws, there’s nothing to worry about.
right?
wrong. Leave it to folks like Alan Dean Foster, Seanan McGuire, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, Ernest Cline, Nnedi Oforakor and others to remind me that robots do exactly what we program them to do, and in many cases this is fucking terrifying.
I just about every story in this anthology, we played God. We created something, typically in our own image, that would be able to do things we couldn’t. Our creations raise and teach our children, solve our computer programming issues, clean up radiation, do jobs that are too dangerous for humans to do, protect company assets, keep us healthy, etc. When we’re so sure our inventions will help us towards a better world, what could possibly go wrong?
But lets say we succeed. the computer programming issue has been solved, the kids are grown up, the asset has been protected, diseases have been cured, the radiation has been cleaned up. What do we do when our problem is fixed and our shiny tools are no longer needed? Robots are designs to work. they are not designed to stop.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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