ANDROID MYSTICISM...

/ Robot stories have very little to do with robots. The robot exists in our image; a mirror in which we can see ourselves reflected. He represents at once our greatest fear - that we exist only as physical beings - and our greatest hope - that we do, after all, possess a soul. We understand the robot’s dilemma; like us, he is not quite a machine. The android is strange, childlike-- at once mechanical and mystical.

// Computer science has a term
for what we call a soul: the Singularity. Today, the
Singularity approaches us, for better or for worse.
As the computer “brain” grows faster and smaller
(a mechanical evolution that is developing exponentially
faster than our own), there may come a day when
(whether by our hand or some Cosmic Mistake)
the computer will become self-aware.

// Scientists today suggest that nature, and our own evolution, is not simply randomized natural selection (by which we might have evolved a thousand different ways), but rather in accordance with overarching laws that exist on the edge of Chaos. If this is the case, then we will have created the machines under the rule of these laws. The android would be a thing expected by the universe. And the android, if he ever comes into being, will be a child of nature. Will he dream? Will he feel? Will he love?

// Isaac Asimov, the great science-fiction writer, says “An earthworm doesn’t yearn to be a snake...we have no reason to think such creatures dream of being something more than they are. A human being, however, dreams of an afterlife, and yearns to become one of the angels.”

// I see the machines of the future like us, yearning to be more than they are. But in that world, we have become the angels they dream of.

....AND ALAN TURING

// Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a British computer scientist who created what is known as the Turing Machine – a system intended for the development of a standard for measuring machine “intelligence.” Turing’s machine begins the discussion as to the future of “man” vs. “machine-kind,” and the relationship that will unfold between them.