The Robots are coming !

The Robots are coming !
Grab your Plasma rifles and run to the Hills !

Did you, like me, ever wonder where the 21st century got to ? You know the one I mean, the brave new world of jet powered rocket packs, hotels on the moon and Buck Rogers on Mars ? I thought that I had been promised a Jetsons hover car and a personal robot butler but here I am sitting in a wooden house with a tin roof and an internal combustion powered automobile.
Fear not brave adventurers ! The dawn of the Robotic age so long promised and long delayed may soon be upon us. However there will be a few bugs to be sorted out first and a few unexpected hitches along the way.
Check this out, the Times reports on Japanese attempts to get a handle on some of the issues that our plastic and silicon servants will bring with them.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1620558.ece

Issac Asimov, the Sci-fi author and prophet of the Robotic world now seems a bit outdated and naïve. His 3 laws of Robotics now look like something a stone age king might have carved on a obelisk, nice and neat but hopelessly simplistic. For those who need it a quick update maybe in order;

Asimov’s three laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

All of which sounds logical enough. But its still smells to me like the rules a 18th century cotton plantation Master might write to "protect" his slaves. A Negro must obey all orders, a Negro may defend himself but not if it injures a white man and so forth.
Those pioneer science fiction writers and amateur philosophers saw the outlines, the promises and problems of a Robot world but couldn’t possibly see the width, depth, and flavor of the society which would finally make them.
We already have any number of computer controlled automatic systems, technically robots building, monitoring and controlling systems that are too difficult, dangerous, boring or expensive for humans to do but as long as they were in industry Joe Public didn’t really care. Now they are going to be in your home, sitting on your couch, lying in your bed driving your car.
What you gonna do when they come for you ?
Despite what "the Flight of the Conchords" have to say in their ground breaking song "The Humans are Dead", I’m not worried about a "Matrix" or "Judgment Day" style War of the Machines where the human race has to battle against their own creations. Humans will just try do each other in as they always have, just using robots instead of clubs as the tools.
The real problem of course is not the mechanical Robots but their fleshy masters, the ‘bots will do what they are told but what are we going to tell them to do ?
Naturally we will construct them as a we have with all our previous technology to fulfill our more basic needs namely,

Sex, Violence and (to a lesser extent) Food and Comfort.

All obeying a law much more powerful than Asimov’s; the Golden Rule.

He who has the Gold makes the Rules