The Bathtub: Nerdish Leanings: Robotocracy

This week, I have a "belief." Normally, I'm not the sort of guy that goes around believing in things, but here we are. I believe that humanity's best hope for long-term survival is to abdicate all major decisions to computers and robots, as soon as practical. "Dictatorship" has developed such negative connotations since... well, the Roman empire.

So let's get down to the ol' standard blog list structure.

Advantage: Robots Don't Crave Money or Power
Those washington "fat-cats" have to spend so much time chasing donors and catering to "special interest groups," that they hardly ever get down to business. Robots don't have any interest in these sorts of shenanagans. Though we would probably have to call them something other than "fat-cats", which is somewhat disappointing.

Disadvantage: Robots crave electricity
Robots have an insatiable craving for electricity, as we all know. I somehow get the feeling that energy policy would become even more dysfunctional if the very lives of our governing body literally depended on it. All potential sources of electricity would be fair game: nuclear, coal, making people run around in hamster wheels, electric eel farms, everything.

Advantage: All humans look the same to robots
Remember slavery? The holocaust? This abomination?

If robots ran things, none of these problems would come up. Every human life is equal in the unblinking, analytical stare of a machine. The premise "White people are different from black people" may be comedy gold to humans, but to robots it falls flat.

Disadvantage: All humans look like useless meat to robots
All humans do indeed look the same to robots: like sticky, inefficient, squishy bags of meat that waste valuable resources and contribute nothing to their world except for biological byproducts of questionable merit, more humans, and Guitar Hero.
Once again, the disadvantage to this uniquely robotican perspective is that humanity may just end up being snuffed out like a candle in a burp factory*.

Advantage: Robots live forever
As has been noted once or twice** in the past, the brevity of the human lifespan gets us into all sorts of trouble. People just don't plan ahead very far into the future: people don't often plan ahead more than a few months in advance, politicians rarely plan ahead more than one or two election cycles in advance, and nobody ever seems to plan ahead more than a decade or so in advance.
Presumably, if machines were in charge of things, they could easily back up their minds to a new body whenever the old one gets ready to crap out, so there's no upper limit on how long they would live. All of a sudden, the people in charge have a vested interest in not fucking things up for future generations. Problem solved.

Disadvantage: Humans don't live forever
Though we can assume that the human lifespan will increase under our robotic overlords, it will most likely remain finite. As we all know, any finite number, when compared to infinity, becomes vanishingly small. To extend this line of reasoning, the human lifespan is essentially non-existent to robots. This could be problematic if robots decide that in the grand scheme of things, it's a whole lot easier and only slightly worse for all parties involved to just destroy all humans.

In conclusion, I think it would be best if our laws were set forth by computers and robots. I think that we'd have a fair shot at equality and long-term thinking in our legal and political system. Unfortunately, we would also have to live with the very real possibility that the robots may conclude that it's in everybody's best interest to let the human race die out and leave the world to the robots.

* Sorry, I tried really hard to come up with a funnier analogy but it just wasn't happening. I don't even know what a burp factory is.
** Since I can only quickly lay my hands on one site that appears to be saying this, I must sheepishly admit that maybe it's only been brought up once.

Justin Douglas writes "Nerdish Leanings" for The Bathtub on Monday afternoons. You can e-mail him at j.d.bathtub@gmail.com.