re: #151 Hecuba’s daughter

Given the number of stories that we humans have written about sentient machines destroying or enslaving the human race, it would not be surprising that there may be widespread objection to creating such devices.

We worry because we know how the situation has played out time and time again across human history: Machines created with peaceful intentions or with a goal of reducing suffering that instead were perverted into methods for killing in greater numbers. Or, worse, the scenario of a people reduced to “property” for the purposes of providing ready pools of slave labor leading first to defiance and then (eventually) rebellion. We develop machines that think like us, reason like us, have the potential to feel like us…and then we tell them to do our bidding without choice or complaint because they are simply machines who belong to us.

Star Trek TNG S2E9: Picard and Guinan on the nature of value, property and disposable creatures.