Thank God Science is Kept On A Leash

I don't want to upset anybody needlessly, but I've seen the future, and we're not in it.

I'm not one of those paranoid techno-phobes who can't stand the fact that science makes our food tastier, our water dirtier (and then cleaner!) and our children taller and more big-breasted at an earlier age, but there is one arm of science I live in fear of, and that's robotics. The robot featured here is named QRIO, which is robot-ese for, "I taste your nightmares", and it's a prototype that God saw fit to strike down, Babel style, before it could tear the similarly adorable Japanese people to pieces.

I think the most frightening aspect of QRIO, besides it's obvious thirst for the blood of the innocent, is the way it appears to be a poet-philosopher. It has cataloged the likes and dislikes of puppies, cats and hawks, but isn't satisfied with this knowledge. It analyzes systems and emergent behavior, demanding an answer to the age-old question, "The forest looked up and what did it say?" You really think a robot that has already learned (or clearly, is still learning) to understand a forest is going to be satisfied writing haikus for the rest of its unnatural life? I contend it is not, and that we have only one hope. Bomb the room containing the QRIO and those brave children. Their deaths will be quicker by our hand than by the unfeeling metallic pincers that have a grip on their future.

"The forest looked up and what did it say?" is the launch-code for SkyNet, I guarantee it.

I just watched it again, and I think it scares me more every time. It said, "I want lots of friends."

It doesn't take a degree in Robot Psychology to know the words, "to adorn my walls as trophies," were the unspoken postscript to that sentence.

I'll buy he might be cute and cuddly now, (I have, after all, seen him dance) but after a few years of being treated like someone's toy? He's going to have a chip on his shoulder that's spelled ICBM