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You'd probably like I, Robot by Cory Doctorow. It explores on the implications of the Laws of Robotics in a corporate world - a pretty good read. =)

Damn. I just finished rereading Doctorow's after the siege: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html "That much she knew and that much they all knew: without the zombies, the revolution would never have come. Zombiism and the need to cure it had outweighed every other priority. Three governments had promised that they'd negotiate better prices for zombiism drugs and three governments had failed, and in the end the Cabinet had been overrun by zombies who'd torn three MPs to bits and infected seven more, and the crowd had carried the PM out of her office and put her in a barrel and driven nails through it and rolled it down the river-bank into the river, something so horrible and delicious that Valentine often thought about it, like you poke a sore tooth with your tongue."

Too bad we can't lock them all up in Second Life and feed them to the furries.

Oh yes, and call it 'heaven for plastic people' - "He Doctorow received his high school diploma from a free school in Toronto called SEED School, and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree." (Wikipedia), but "A senior technical official in the Homeland Security Department has a phony Ph.D. from a diploma mill. I'm thinking that I'd like to get one of these and join my parents (Dr. and Dr. Doctorow) as Dr. Doctorow, Jr." (BoingBoing) and "I may not agree with everything Dr. Cory tells me, but if you're not reading boingboing blog, you ought to. Because Cory Doctorow is the king-hell blogger of the universe." (Sterling)

CC.

Kind of like in Cory Doctorow's (who happens to be a member of the EFF) "I Robot" (no relation to the original).
 
I get the feeling that once China and maybe India start cranking out computers at a higher rate we won't have to worry about this crap anymore.
 
Of course, we'll have to smuggle them into the country somehow.

...so there could also be a strict rule that all AI systems must speak only in natural language, even to each other.

It sounds to me more like a plot device, then something that we will actually do.

Robots most likely will be controlled by remote intelligences, and I'm having a hard time imagining that we won't want to let the communicate over the Internet.

We might try to limit how "creative" they get in their solutions to problems, but, ...

On a different note:

I don't really believe in slavery. I am happy that our children will be smarter than us.

We will self-augment, for a time, but eventually, we may just have to hand it to them, our beloved. Or beceome them.

By that time, we should be used to treating the intelligences as partners, friends. They'll have served us so well, we will have good memories of our times with them.

Cory Doctorow wrote a neat story: I, Robot. If you have the time, you might want to check it out.

On the page where the story actually appears, http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-rob ot.html --the title is written "i, robot" and not "I, Robot." I find this change updates the flavor of the title into the modern era, the Day of Blog.

One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.

Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)

Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.

Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.

Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as its base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits.

Asimov also specified that psychohistory only makes accurate predictions when (A) the population size is at least a whole planet, and (B) the citizens are unaware of the predictions psychohistory makes (thus the need for the Second Foundation to remain secret).

SF writer Donald Kingsbury recently published a nice new take on psychohistory, Psychohistorical Crisis. It takes a duplicate of Asimov's galactic empire as its setup, but looks at the whole psychohistory idea with a more modern eye. Here's an excerpt from the preface and a good review by noted critic John Clute.

I never paid a lot of attention to "The Cool Site of the Day", but if I wanted a substitute I might go over here: Infinite Matrix, where you'll find people like Bruce Sterling writing web log entries pointing at neat stuff they've come across: Schism Matrix.

So there are fewer stupid novelty sites on the web. Is that supposed to be something to be upset about?

... many users say they would rather chat with their friends than spend their time surfing the Web

There are other signs that all is not well in Webville. For the first time, the number of expiring domain names outnumbers those being registered or renewed

Other users say they are less inclined to hunt for innovative sites because many of them require plug-ins or browser updates that force users into bothersome downloading.

Memo to NYT authors: when stuck for a story idea, you can always go for the "Is _____ Dead?" formula. Run a bunch of random comments slanted to make it sound like something's going wrong, then you can "provide balance" by running a bunch of quotes saying that it isn't really going wrong.

I never paid a lot of attention to "The Cool Site of the Day", but if I wanted a substitute I might go over here: Infinite Matrix, where you'll find people like Bruce Sterling writing web log entries pointing at neat stuff they've come across: Schism Matrix.

So there are fewer stupid novelty sites on the web. Is that supposed to be something to be upset about?

... many users say they would rather chat with their friends than spend their time surfing the Web

There are other signs that all is not well in Webville. For the first time, the number of expiring domain names outnumbers those being registered or renewed

Other users say they are less inclined to hunt for innovative sites because many of them require plug-ins or browser updates that force users into bothersome downloading.

Memo to NYT authors: when stuck for a story idea, you can always go for the "Is _____ Dead?" formula. Run a bunch of random comments slanted to make it sound like something's going wrong, then you can "provide balance" by running a bunch of quotes saying that it isn't really going wrong.

... too bad they became one of the victims
of "the past year's stock market decline".

Shades of Burn Rate...

Send him a nice letter to say how nice the magazine was, and if you really want another, send some money. Apparently the editor really wants to make more issues, it's simply a funding problem.

For example, go to The Universe on the Table, read the story (it's good)... keep on reading... there! You are on the footnote. Do you see that editor's note where it says the author produced the story you just read especially for The Inifite Matrix and that's part of a larger work, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction? Well, there there's another story, the one that corresponds to Mg (you just read H), called Under's Game. Ah. That got your attention, didn't it? Go read it. It's hilarious (if you read the original work by OSC)

The writing on the Infinite Matrix site is - well, ummm, without trying to be flamebait - shit.

I tried. I really did. I *tried* to like it. I randomly selected a story from the archives - Mouse Lights, by Richard Kadrey. Three paragraphs of crap. What's the point? Some kid lives in a post-apocolyptic future and has christmas lights. He dies, end of story. Whoop. De. Doo.

Dr. Real? Ahem. Dr. Really Boring.

And Sterling's "my favorite things" list is just that. A list of links. No original thought.

I am a long-time fan of Science Fiction, I read lots of it. But I am selective in what I read. The web has once again proven that the barriers of entry are so low that anything/anyone can be "published" online. Hey, since I posted to /., does that mean that *I* have gotten published? Time to brush up my resume!

If this is the last issue online, then it's not a huge loss. If it *isn't* the last issue, pray for some enlightenment. I'm not even talking about lasers and aliens or any of that - just progressive fiction that says something. Don't give me writing that describes worlds, give me writing about characters, dammit!

Sheesh.

The writing on the Infinite Matrix site is - well, ummm, without trying to be flamebait - shit.

I tried. I really did. I *tried* to like it. I randomly selected a story from the archives - Mouse Lights, by Richard Kadrey. Three paragraphs of crap. What's the point? Some kid lives in a post-apocolyptic future and has christmas lights. He dies, end of story. Whoop. De. Doo.

Dr. Real? Ahem. Dr. Really Boring.

And Sterling's "my favorite things" list is just that. A list of links. No original thought.

I am a long-time fan of Science Fiction, I read lots of it. But I am selective in what I read. The web has once again proven that the barriers of entry are so low that anything/anyone can be "published" online. Hey, since I posted to /., does that mean that *I* have gotten published? Time to brush up my resume!

If this is the last issue online, then it's not a huge loss. If it *isn't* the last issue, pray for some enlightenment. I'm not even talking about lasers and aliens or any of that - just progressive fiction that says something. Don't give me writing that describes worlds, give me writing about characters, dammit!

Sheesh.

Business people have a boosterism neurosis and are seriously detached from harsh reality. Everybody reads FORTUNE and SUCCESS, but nobody subscribes to BANKRUPTCY and FAILURE.

This salient quotation from Week Two of Bruce Sterling's Infinite Matrix blog, "Schism Matrix," could describe the thinking that inspired Matrix.net to launch an online SF magazine in the first place. The company wanted to acquire such a cachet of cool among faanish computer geeks that everyone would want to work for them. (I suspect that the company owners, SF fans themselves, also were willing to pay big bucks for this pretext to hang out with cool SF people like Sterling.)

This kind of hiring strategy only makes sense when the job market, and company management, have both gone completely giddy. It seemed that way to me, back when editor Eileen Gunn talked about this project at last year's ArmadilloCon SF convention in Austin, Texas. Still, it's neither good manners nor good politics to say, "So, you're caught up in a financial euphoria, are you?"

Another irony of the Sterling comment above is that FORTUNE was the only magazine I saw that pointed out the bubble before it burst, albeit in the late stages. Somebody there wasn't detached from harsh reality. But few paid attention, because pointing out bubbles isn't good manners or good politics.