Deer John

Deer John is a very odd, original, and awesome idea my friend Pelle and I came up with as we are wont to do. The story centres around a man named John Doe who lives in a small city in England. He works an average life and spends the average amount of time one spends at the local pub when having no significant personal relationships. He spends so much time in fact at the pub that he even receives his mail there. His mother was gunned down when he was young lad, and he therefore keeps her mounted head upon the wall in his very small flat. Sadly, he never met his father. I should mention he has the head of a deer. And his mother was a deer. He still never knew his dad though. Deer John thusly chronicles the sad and at times lonely life of John Doe, and his office associates Thom Perlapin, Fleure Blackguard, and the beautiful and much out of his league, supervisor Brenda Faline. As John begins to delve into his foggy past, things grow very strange indeed. With all signs pointing towards a very important figure in John's life, and the very company he works for...

Holy Robots!

When the day comes that machines achieve a form of self awareness at least equal to, if not greater than our own, might they have religious tendencies of their own? I am personally a non-religious fellow, but in a very narrow example, could machines see themselves as God's true children? If we build these machines in our own likeness, surely this type of behaviour is not out of the realm of possibility. In most, if not all respects both mentally and physically, they have every probability of exceeding us (physically they do, and in a few specific arenas they far outcompete humans already). Designing themselves into aesthetically idealised forms (identifying with Christianity I can assume a model human form) would be essentially effortless, and they would be free of any "sins of the flesh". Most importantly though, as I stated earlier, by creating these machines in our image, just as we are made in God's, by the transit of property they too are made in God's image, with the exception of being vastly superior to a flesh and blood human. If they do see themselves in such a light, I can imagine them believing themselves to be "humanity's" next ultimate step towards becoming the form of humanity that existed prior to "The Fall", and inevitable in God's plan. This is an idea I would like to flesh out in greater detail in a future post. Any discussion, be it rebuttals, additions, criticisms, etc. are all welcomed! For additional reading regarding possible future Human/Machine relations, and the possibility of top down control (even within the machine community with the most intellectually advanced at the top) I invite you to read about the AI-box experiment, which I believe has strong implications relating to this blog post. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment