AI in Sci-Fi

An anonymous submitter writes: "Stumbled upon a pretty interesting article considering the idea, 'What would machines do if they did achieve sentience?' It's by a sci-fi author I haven't heard of but worked with Kubrick on AI, he takes the whole AI or sentient machine idea a little further than we normally see in film."

Comments

Re:Not as far fetched as it would seem

[Mac Degger]

Not really. First off, saying that the chinese and roman empires together added up to half the worlds population is quite incorrect; you're leaving out mayor populations in what's now Russia, Mongolia, India, the middle east, Africa, the America's and Australasia. And, with maybe the exception of australia (where I don't think slavery was practised, but I just donna about them), in all those area's slavery was the norm.
I mean, the earliest records of the written word, clay tablets from the time of Hammurabi, were about money and accounts...which included prices of people.
Not even taking into account that that whole form of government, same as the ones in the rest of the world, pretty much amounted to slavery for the mayority of the population...and similar forms of government (including the Roman and Chinese forms) have been practiced ever since. To this day, even; look at certain countries in Africa, South America and Asia.
It's just a matter of historic fact; slavery has always been part of humanity. The hypothetical historic person in your servey would either be a slave holder (or want to be one) or a slave. The only varience would really be how well they treated their slaves...and historic accounts tells us that usually a slave was though of as a machine that had to be fed.
That's the exact reason why the Greek, Roman and Chinese (to name just a few) never developed high-tech machinery (like the combustion engine), even though all the ingredients where there (and sometimes even prototypes...primitive froms of battery have been found); there was never any need, because slaves did all the work.

Re:Answer is obvious

[Carmody]

Can't explain the joke without ruining the humor. It isn't a pop-culture reference. If you have spent time with any real-life actuaries, you would get the joke.