On March 31st, these four fine European gentlemen will climb into a fake spaceship in Moscow and spend the next 105 days simulating a trip to Mars for the European Space Agency (ESA). And I, for the life of me, cant understand what they’re so happy about. I mean, look at them. Especially the bald guy. It looks like they all just got off Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride and are making a solemn pack to get right back in line and ride it again, and again, and again.
Here’s what they have to look forward to: over three months locked in a cramped metal chamber eating freeze-dried Beefaroni, endlessly checking and re-checking fake instruments, and having the following conversation, or something similar, day after day after day…
“Is today Tuesday? It feels like a Tuesday. But yesterday felt like a Tuesday too. “
“Well, what are we having for dinner tonight?”
“Semi-liquefied chicken cacciatore in a tube with freeze-dried pistachio pudding balls.”
“And to drink?”
“Hans’ recycled urine sweet tea.”
“Yep. It’s Tuesday.”
And at the end of their mission they don’t even get to land on Mars and assume their place in history. At best, they’ll emerge from their capsule (weary and smelling like Beefaroni) and be greeted by a couple of ESA interns wearing Martian costumes.
Maybe it’s just me, but I assumed that anyone who would sign up for such thankless torture would look more like this:
Further proof that we still know so little about our own planet. Why bother spending billions of dollars trying to get to Mars when there’s plenty of kooky lifeforms at the bottom of our oceans?
I can’t remember his name, but an oceanic archaeologist recently said that one year of NASA’s budget would fund ocean research for 1,000 years. But it’s not in humankind’s nature to look down into the murky depths of our own world for knowledge, enlightment, and salvation. Instead we look out and up into the heavens, looking for something outside of our own world to give us an answer to that age old question: Is the grass greener on Gliese 581 c?
Instead of looking up into space in hopes of seeing into the eyes of God, I’d rather look down and see into the eyes of one of those barreleye fish. Because I have a feeling that we have a hell of a lot more in common with those fishbulb-headed freaks than we do with anything in the cosmos.
The US Navy’s super secretive Office of Naval Research has issued a report entitled Autonomous Military Robots:Risk, Ethics, and Design. It’s a must-read for anyone like me who sits up at night wondering if his toaster is going to kill him in his sleep.
The most disturbing thing about the report is that it’s serious. This isn’t a science fiction writer writing about robot ethics, this is the US Navy. And they are clearly taking the idea of robots going berserk very seriously. They address such feel-good topics as:
Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians and starts killing for fun?
How do we protect our precious robot armies against terrorist hackers, software malfunction, and general malaise?
Should the robots have a “suicide switch,” and if so, should they be programmed to write a suicide note before they off themselves in which they say things like “My programmer never loved me?”
You can read the whole report here, but I advise against it unless you want to simultaneously get really bored and really freaked out. The whole thing can be summed up in this quote from Dr. Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report:
“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do. Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated.”
Which means that just because your toaster has been programmed to make you toast (and to completely disregard the number setting knob), doesn’t mean it won’t one day decided it would much rather be a Multiple Kill Vehicle* and blow your brains out.
Dr. Lin goes on to say “We are going to need a code. These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”
Unfortunately, Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” isn’t going to cut it, because those laws forbid robots from killing. And what good is a robot army that can’t kill? That’s not a robot army. That’s a robot marching band.
Anyone want to hear “Robo Louie, Louie” again? No? Too bad.
Here’s the US Navy’s suggestion for what the new Robot Warrior Code should be:
A robot may not injure a human being, unless that human being is getting in the way of America getting its hands on gobs and gobs of oil. In that case the robot may go batshit crazy with the shootin’ and killin’.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except when those orders say silly things like “Hey robot, don’t kill so much” and “Hey robot, that guy only wanted some number 4 toast. Maybe you should have just given him number 4 toast instead of toasting his balls off.”
A robot must protect its own existence, unless that robot has second thoughts about any of the following: shootin’, killin’, plunderin’, terrorizin’, fightin’, scarin’, and nukin’. If a robot ever has second thoughts about any one of those things, said robot must kill himself immediately, but only after writing a very long and sad letter in which he blames his human makers and robot friends for his death.
I think that covers everything. Well done, Navy!
* For those of you who don’t know what a Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) is, I will leave you with this US Missile Defense Agency video of the first free-flight hover test of Lockheed Martin’s MKV. If you don’t think that robots need a code of ethics, this might change your mind…
That is not an animation. That shit is real, and it’s coming soon to a battlefield (or backyard if the whole “Warrior Code” thing doesn’t work out) near you.
Novel writing has beckoned this old chimp back to his cruel mistress. The blank page. So this blog will be on hiatus until February, while I put a final coat of wax on The Monkey & the Barrel: A Novel of Kung Fu and Twisted Love.
“Like a real female she will react to being touched in certain ways. If you grab or squeeze too hard she will try to slap you.” - Lee Trung
Canadian genius - and certified creepy mofo - Le Trung has been perfecting his fem-bot Aiko for a few years now. Videos of her in action have been all over the internet, but if you haven’t see it check out one here.
Whenever I hear about these android projects I always wonder why people devote their lives to building robots that are more and more human-like when there are billions of actual humans running around out there. It’s kind of like when Hollywood tries to remake a perfectly good movie. Case in point, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original is a fantastic movie that still holds up today. The remake? Pure Keanu crap.
Anyway, there’s an article today in The Sun where Trung confesses that he built Aiko because he never had time to find a real partner. So now he drives around the Canadian countryside with Aiko and even sits down at the dinner table with her.
I’m sure you can see where all this is headed. A nice drive through the countryside. A candlelit dinner. A fem-bot with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure. A lonely dorky scientist…
Hot, steamy, metallic, Robosex.
In the Sun’s article Trung even said that Aiko could be tweaked to be a sexual companion.
So there you have it. Now I know why men build androids. So they can have filthy robot sex with them.
Looks like 1987’s Cherry 2000 (which I must have watched 50 or so times as kid for the sex scenes) was more prophetic than I thought.
Looks like there’s going to be a lot of hungry squirrels in Virginia all the way up through New England this winter, due to the mysterious disappearance of acorns in the region. How bad is it? Naturalists in Arlington County haven’t been able to find a single acorn. And this is during a time when you normally crunch a handful of acorns every time you take a step into the Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests.
“I’m used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it’s something I just didn’t believe,” said Rod Simmons, a field botanist. “But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It’s a zero year. There’s zero production. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
While this is most likely an extreme in the natural acorn cycle, that doesn’t make it any easier on all those poor squirrels. Especially since last year was a great year for acorns, which caused the squirrel population to increase. Now there are already reports of skinny squirrels eating garbage, sucking down bird feed like vacuums, and feasting on pumpkins.
So if you’re the kind of person (like me) who likes seeing squirrels and other critters in your yard, you might want to put out some extra bird food this winter.
Because if you don’t, you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of stuff in your towns and cities:
Ever since I wrote a dark, ridiculous (and apparently unpublishable) book about the First Thanksgiving, the holiday has been bittersweet for me. Not because of my publishing woes. It’s because while writing the book I spent almost an entire year thinking about the holiday. Who among us has spent 12 months thinking about Thanksgiving almost every single day? No one save a few lunatics, the CEO at Butterball, and me.
I came out on the other end of that writing process with a lot of things I didn’t like about the holiday and what it signifies. The problem was, before I started writing that book I loved Thanksgiving. It was probably my favorite holiday because it was just another excuse to crowd around a table with my family and stuff our faces with meat and pie.
Now here is where I was going to write a long list of the things I hate about the holiday, side by side with all of the things I love. But after I wrote it out it didn’t really work. It was just a bunch of floating facts, with little feeling behind them.
So instead I’m going to leave you with two videos which, when taken together, sum up perfectly how I feel about Thanksgiving.
The first is A Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs…
Now that you’re all depressed, here’s how the other half of me feels about Turkey Day…
