(Australian TV, btw, broadcast a nice program last night where Agent Scully
told us about robots, along with clips from sf movies, interviews with
Asimov as a young chap - who to my horror and amazement pronounced `robot'
as `ROW-but' rather than `ROW-BOT' - and Rodney Brooks. No Hugo de Garis,
however...)
----- End of forwarded message from Damien Broderick -----
Something I found amusing: soon after Gillian Anderson tells us that
one day robots will be superior to humans, we have her voiceover saying
"Next week, we learn how humans will travel to the stars." I thought
it was a great example of compartmentalization of ideas. The robots,
which, we were told only a few minutes earlier, will probably dominate
our "fantastic future", have now disappeared from the picture, and we're
back to a future of humans.
I only saw the last few minutes of the show, but it looked to me as
though they'd neglected the ideas of cyborgization, uploading, and
the postbiological "upgrading" of humans - ideas which do something to
subvert the perspective that it'll be "Them or Us".
-mitch
http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch