MEANWHILE, BACK AMONG THE CYLONS

“We definitely don’t wear lipstick. We leave that to the skinjobs.”

Aeswiren sent us the following rumination before I took my recent enforced break…

"Thinking about the Cylons etc. and your growing preference for them v the humans of the Twelve Colonies etc. ...The persistent fear and loathing of robots is one of those interestinglittle windows into the human mind, yeah? Think of positive robot stories. I Robot in print, Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the "good" artificial person played by Lance Henrikson in Aliens, Data in Trek "Generation," some other books from here and there....And then the negative ones-- overwhelming numbers... Terminators,Cylons, inexplicable giant alien machinery, e.g. Kronos (1957)-- fucked up human-mades like Hal, or Ash, the "bad" artificial person in Alien-- it's endless. H'wood even reversed Asimov's entire concept to let Will Smith do battle with evil minded machinery.Is this perverse Luddism? We hate and fear the machines, even as they make our lives more comfie? Or is it a deeper fear of being replaced?AI-- Spielberg's yawnfest, circled around this stuff, but then veered down his canyon of sentimentality into total tedium. Neuromancerworked the territory, but Gibson is always too clever to actually take sides. T2 & 3 offered a little nuance on the subject-- some machines might be reprogrammed to save us rather than exterminate us.But the core emotion, the primary color, is that we know in our gut that they will do that. Exterminate us. Or sideline us and take control of the Earth, or whatever's left of it. Or, if by some miracle we've actually done the right thing and moved out into the Solar system,they'll wage war on us to take that over.Glossing over the problem of machine intelligence becomingself-willed-- which may be possible, but then again, may not-- aren't we confronting the basic duality of human social existence, here?We love ourselves-- officially. Human self-glorification sells stuff galore.But we hate ourselves-- for our selfish, ugly, fucked up, worthless,weak stupidity.And even as we celebrate human accomplishments we're aware that we're eating the world down to the pips, that we're as superstitious and ignorant as mediaeval peasants, and if we did produce a bunch of Cylons they would just be so much better than us, so much more in control of their hungers, their needs and desires, that they would fucking well deserve to replace us. Yeah?"