Man vs. Beast vs. Robot Overlords

Okay, so this little bugger is nowhere near being any kind of robot overlord, and his companion is by no means a beast, but you have to admit that at the base level, they're a lot more similar than we like to admit.

They react to the stimuli we give them, feeding off it and gaining pleasure from the experience. Of course, one you feed electronic streams of data, the other food, but regardless they'll take whatever you have to give.

But when you throw in the possibilities opened up by sci-fi, of course things get quite a bit more complicated.

What if that fluffy bunny weren't just some ball of hair, but a miniature body guard a la Little Worker from Ribofunk? And don't forget Dolly the cloned sheep. Remember Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager? The thing all of these have in common is their status in the twilight. They straddle that area between what is, what was, and what could be. In that way, science fiction is very much like fantasy where magic and mystery and the hidden worlds of the Faeries hide in the betweens.

But where fantasy expects you to believe and accept, our texts have forced us to question where the dividing line is. Is a chicken born without feathers through no natural means still a chicken? Is a machine with all the cognitive ability of any given human and probably beyond that of many any less of a person?

There is no tidy easy answer to what separates either from humanity. But what separates them from each other? When I read Josh's blog for the cut-up I made in my earlier post, I noticed he brought up the point of how we as humans purposefully "other" technology.

We "other" technology and machines as something different than ourselves because they are controlled and stuck in a rhythm without escape. We are different correct? ... Everything is reality. There is no escaping it. Doesn't this also mean there is no escaping the rhythm of our lives? Are we not controlled by social constructs and a hierarchy? We have been programmed socially to think and act certain ways. The fact that we create "others" prove this. We don't like rogue machines. Everyone must follow the rules and the laws of our mechanics. We create the "other" in order to maintain routines and control. This makes us machines. Even escaping the social aspect, we cannot escape our biological aspects. We must breathe, eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. We are as vulnerable as machines. Unplug a machine and it turns off. Go a while without breathing and you die. Although machines can be plugged back in, so I guess we're weak machines.

He was talking about reality and alterity, but I think that applies here as well. We as humans have an easier time associating and personifying animals than we do machines, because they're like us. They eat, sleep, poop and have cute little faces just like we do. But if in our own way, we are biological machines, that should mean animals are so much more like machines because like machines, animals aren't necessarily cognizant in the same way we think humans are. It came up repeatedly in Ribofunk with the splices, mostly as a civil matter, that they weren't being treated equally. But the problem with that thinking is that they aren't being created equally to begin with. Like machines they have fabricated lives. Each one was made for whatever specific purpose the humans in charge had in mind.

And it is this that will forever separate humanity from animals and machines in our minds and allow us to group them together in this amorphous category of other. It's a god complex because we're still the ones in control. Makes me shudder for the day when either the animals or machines (or both) stand up and tell us enough is enough.