* And their compliant human drones.
It’s kind of shocking when one learns that films like Idiocracy turn out not to be mere satire, but Über-Nostrodamian prophecies, or even just simple documentaries.
As Iain Overton says, in his book, The Price Of Freedom, and others do elsewhere (for example Sam Harris, in The End of Faith), the responses to perceived threats are sometimes more damaging – usually by dint of curtailing the freedoms of the more docile many in order to supposedly more fully control the errant few – than the threats that supposedly prompt them into existence.
So I can’t make a particular joke, quoting Count Arthur Strong, in a FB group dedicated to him, because a human will do the bidding of a robot that doesn’t understand or can’t differentiate between my innocent humour – and let’s not forget it’s a quote, so it’s not even me saying the allegedly egregious thing – and a genuine incitement to violence.
This is of course utterly ridiculous. Those intent on acting out violence will both do so, and find ways to express themselves, regardless of what anybody else does. And such folk are, thankfully, are a very small minority.
Meanwhile, a much larger and more benign majority have their freedoms curtailed, in a very real way, and to no real benefit. The idea that maybe one day we’ll be the slaves of robots is grotesquely outdoated. We already are!
And, in a tip of the reality had to the apparently ludicrous fantasies of The Matrix series of films – whose overall adolescence of aesthetics rather undercuts the more sinister and prescient ideas about what constitutes reality, and our relationships with technology – we, the soft machines, are already becoming the willing collaborators and enforcers of this joyless, soulless, brainless automaton culture.
It doesn’t bode well for the future of the species!
Little did I expect it to be a flippant and lighthearted response to a Count Arthur themed post, in a Count Arthur based group, that would bring this home so forcefully!
Adopting the CA voice, ‘Well, I mean… is it any wonder we tire of this ceaseless handholding? And you robots, you have to meet us at least halfway. Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up!’