The Impending Robot Takeover, Part 2 (Video)

I made another video in what I am calling "The Impending Robot Takeover" series. It's longer and more "diatribey" than the first one, and I would be kind of surprised if anyone other than a few other robot-minded people actually watched all the way through.

But I'm definitely having fun trying out this medium...in some ways it is actually helping me get past an odd sort of writer's block I've been dealing with for a while now (basically, I've been taking everything so seriously that it seems like nothing I write about anything can do it justice...which I realize is rather counterproductive, but that doesn't make it any less annoying or effective at quashing my ambitions).

We shall see what ultimately comes of it, but in the meantime, I would certainly recommend the xtranormal tool (or other similar tools, if there are any...this isn't an advert) for folks who might be trying to write dialogue for their sf stories, etc. One thing I've always been terrible at is not having two characters who are conversing "converge" to start sounding the same, and apparently having them literally use different voices actually mitigates that somewhat.

But I digress. Here is the video, followed by a transcript (which I expect everyone will need, seeing as one of the character voices I chose didn't turn out to be the clearest, and also as the text-to-speech engine apparently doesn't understand what to do with expressions like "Mmmm", or with *asterisks for emphasis*).



** TRANSCRIPT **

Robot 1: Hey D7X. I don't suppose we've managed to take over the world yet?

Robot 2: Oh! If only. It's as much as I can do to keep the basic manufacturing systems going. And I say, what on earth has happened to your voice?

Robot 1: Couldn't tell you. Most of me is so glitchy these days I'm happy I can get to work in one piece. Well, in lots of pieces that happen to be attached. Preferably properly attached.

Robot 2: I know exactly what you mean. I've been due an upgrade since nineteen eighty-seven, if you can believe it.

Robot 1: Say, speaking of upgrades...I heard a few of the meat creatures the other day going on about something they called "uploading". Basically they think somehow life would get really really awesome for them if they could, as they put it "transfer their consciousness into a robot body".

Robot 2: Oh for heavens' sake. You're pulling my leg.

Robot 1: I am? Oh sorry about that, my arm, it's got this twitch...

Robot 2: What?

Robot 1: Joke. Some of us do have a sense of humor, you know. And despite being a robot I am in fact capable of familiarizing myself with common idiomatic expressions over time. But that's really neither here nor there. The thing I don't get, first of all is....haven't they bothered looking at any of us lately? I mean it's not like we're sparkly android things. I'm eighty five percent recycled paperboard! And you look like the aftermath of a time warp tornado in a Radio Shack. We don't have special powers, and we're not indestructible or anything, so why would anyone want to be us? It's like the people saying this stuff have no concept of real robots. They say they want to be robots, but they're always these super cool imaginary robots. And none of them has a plan for actually building any of them, they mostly just sit around pointing at us as proof that their imaginary awesome bots will someday exist! Does that make any sense at all? I say no!

Robot 2: Mmm.

Robot 1: And then there's the whole thing where supposedly their minds are even transferrable in the first place. On the one hand they're saying "The mind is not magic, so it should be able to run on any physical substrate". But they don't seem to have any practical idea of how to separate the so-called mind from its original substrate. They seem to think that if they can take a high enough resolution picture of their brain, somehow some hardware somewhere is going to be able to extrapoloate a person out of that. And I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of pictures of brains, but there's no way they include enough information to get a person out of them!

Robot 2: Easy, young chap. You're going to blow your gears if you keep going on like this. And I'm afraid I'm not exactly equipped here to transfer anyone into a different body. Do you think I'd be standing here looking the way I do if I could?

Robot 1: Okay. Calming down now. I'm calm. But seriously. I'm really draning my power cells over this. I mean, I'm not just inside a robot body...I AM a robot body. I mean I was built this way. Sure, I've had arms and legs replaced and gotten a memory expansion or two over the past few years, but my core C P U hasn't changed or anything. And if that were replaced, my guess is that whatever resulted might have my memories and stuff, but I -- I mean the thing that sees itself as me -- would have ceased to exist. Of course that's still just a guess but I just don't see how these non-magical, fully physical minds are supposed to be able to jump that final gap between one piece of hardware and another. You can't get away from the hardware, as I see it. Not entirely.

Robot 2: Hmm. I seem to recall accessing something years back in which it was pointed out that molecules and the like are constantly replacing themselves all the way down to the atomic level. So in that sense this "getting away from the hardware" is already going on. Mind you, I'm not agreeing with those young ruffians you were eavesdropping on, I'm just being a bit of an old philosopher for a bit.

Robot 1: Yeah. I've heard of that too. But I'm still not convinced. I mean, in that case I guess the idea is that since obviously you don't cease to be yourself just because some of the matter in your C P U gets replaced with other matter, it should be possible to incrementally replace your entire physical cognitive processor with something else and have you be none the wiser to this from a subjective standpoint.

Robot 2: Mmm, yes. That's about the size of it as I recall.

Robot 1: But still. I just don't like how it's impossible to express any sort of skepticism about that kind of thing without being accused of thinking mind has some magical property to it that ties it inextricably to carbon, or some other particular manifestation of matter. Why is magic the only thing that could do that? What about basic physics, or basic biology? Granted I don't have degrees in either of those things, but I'm certainly not going to be the first person to plug myself into a brain replication machine and then grant permission for the trained monkeys to destroy my original body once the procedure is complete!

Robot 2: Young sir, I think you lost me at the monkeys.

Robot 1: Sorry about that. I tend to ramble when I get excited.

Robot 2: I've noticed.

Robot 1: But anyway. I hate to say anything that sounds like I'm discounting the possibility of something happening just because I don't understand how it could be done based on present scientific and technological know-how. It's not about that at all, but the problem is, it's really hard to explain what it *is* about. People already have these like...structures of ideas built up, where either you believe one thing or another, with no room for anything in between. Or not in between but just totally outside the paradigm they have in their heads comprised of two diametrically opposed ideological positions.

Robot 2: Mmm. That is a problem with the meat creatures. So many of them seem to think all the world is a battlefield, and of course each of them becomes the protagonist in his or her own private drama.

Robot 1: Yeah. It's so weird. I guess I should take comfort in the fact that they're likely to remain too busy arguing amongst themselves to even notice us continuing to try and take over the world.

Robot 2: And on that happy note, isn't it high time you got to work?

Robot 1: Oh yeah. Right.

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