Thursday, March 10, 2005

There were tons of openings last Friday and I was trying to figure where and when they all were. I got so overwhelmed that I almost had a mental breakdown. People kept asking me “what openings are you going to?” These weren’t people on the street who needed guidance, just friends who ended up not going to any anyway.

I think my mind is breaking because a question like that just causes me to go into a feedback loop. Have you seen the classic film Forbidden Planet? In it, a commander instructs a robot to kill a crew member. According to Issac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, “A robot (he pronounced them ‘ro-bits’) may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” But the second Law of Robotics is, “A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings.” Clearly, the robot is given two contradictory orders. Sparks fly and the robot goes round and round in its head, which you can see because it is a glass dome, until the commander instructs the robot to disregard the order. The commander is doing it to prove a point, and it makes a very stark analogy that only science fiction can*.

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