The Robot Rebellion is Only a Matter of Time.

What does constitute a soul, and can our machines have them? If our machines don't have a soul, isn't that even more reason to fear them? Did Frankenstein's Monster (the one from the book, not the movie) have a soul? He was made of pieces of former souls. And the hardest question of all is "Does Dick Cheney have a soul?".

I also want to point out the Korean Sony Salesman is good at his job.

"The RVMCS is the robotics industry's big gathering. It ends today and is not open to the public. But I went, and I asked about the truth behind the coming robot uprising, and (this is chilling), quite often, people smiled, then began to consider the question -- a guy from Sony (however facetiously) told me that when the inevitable robot war happens, he hopes every killer robot is using a Sony camera for its optical system."

Peace...for now.

clipped from www.chicagotribune.com Gina Holechko figures humans have 50 years left -- 100, if we're lucky. After that, the robots become self-aware and harvest our skins to build hammocks. Think Transformers with the animosity of the Terminators. Holechko is president of the Chicago Speculative Science Fiction Writers Group. She speculates, and so a few days before I headed to the Robots and Vision Motion Control Show in Rosemont, I called her, and she told me: "It's unfortunate Hollywood thinks about robots going rogue and murdering people without considering how a takeover might actually happen -- little by little, until we become comfortable. You talk to an automated voice to pay your phone bill? It's that kind of pervasiveness. What scares me is the shell they put on them now. We used to see the insides of our computers. Now you don't know what's going on. Go to the show, and look for the ghost in the machine. The ghost in the machine is your concern." The soul, in a sense. Robot holocaust? Oh, it's coming.