Frivolous Friday, 06.12.2009: Filed under "Be careful what you wish for"

Ugh. I caught just a whiff of politics this week, and it annoys me whenever it encroaches on my obliviousness and forces me to arm myself against it. And, inevitably, returns me to the futile wish that people could act like rational adults they're supposed to be.

To a programmer, people are maddening because they don't follow instructions--assuming they can be bothered to read them at all. (Mind you, computers are maddening because they do follow instructions. To the letter--yea, even down to punctuation and whitespace.)

Yet, science fiction persists in creating computers with emotions. I understand the raw impulse to anthropomorphize our handiwork, to create things in our own image. It's a meme that's likely as old as storytelling itself, really. Witness Galatia, Pinocchio, Mechanical Turks, Vasilisa's doll, the "familiars" of many fairytale witches and wizards, Star Trek TNG's Data and his own creations Lol and the holodeck incarnation of Dr. Moriarty, and Star War's fussy and easily flustered C-3PO. That sort of thing.

What blows me away is that we, who live and work with computers, could possibly think that giving them emotions to make them "more like us" could be anything other than an egregiously baaaaad idea. You think the "'I'm a PC.' 'I'm a Mac" (and its considerably less family-friendly online variations) is bad when humans do it? Imagine the chaos if the machines themselves were capable of such tribalism. Or, worse, if UNIX splintered repeatedly with the same rancor as various religions have done over the centuries and millennia.

The essential problem is that computers would be capable of every human foible--only with a speed and efficiency orders of magnitude greater than our own. That's a sobering thought. Not because I think it's likely to happen, but because it brings us up short as we blunder our way through technological progress. Or at least it should, if we are in any way introspective. Best to account for (and amend) our own deficiencies as a species before we wish them on anything else.