Thanks to Doug for the title

After much debate (largely headed by doug and myself) on the subject of robotics, I’ve decided to make a post about it, about my thoughts responding to it, and what I feel the major issues are. Some good background reading can be found on this site’s loving, nurturing parent site, OOKEE -- see both the practical application of robotics, and the resulting theoretical debate spurred by it (with a little help from a McLuhan-influenced blogger).

The questions aren’t new, nor are any of the answers seen here, but as evidenced by the military’s interest, it is no longer solely an academic (or fictional) question. I plan on going through in a more cohesive and organized fashion the arguments that I provided before (and getting rid of those messy parentheticals), so bear with me, as this will likely get lengthy and repetitive (quite a few pages of text after the jump). I’m going to begin by reversing the order of the debate, because I don’t see how one can talk about the practical use of robots before defining quite what we mean by them. I turn to the most recent aspects of discussion before explaining at length why I think this issue is worth debating, but to hook you let me say that I believe and will argue that robotics will be the field that militarism, politics, Marxism, sociology, philosophy, economics, science, and indeed fiction will combine in; it is impossible to understand the past and current development of robotics, as well as the future of it, without a grasp on each and every one of these fields. As such, I think it is the single most important isolatable issue to be debating, and one that will have the most impact on the world as it develops.(Click here to read more...)

I said it before, and I’ll say it again, but this time I actually mean it (unlike the defunct post below this one. I’m about 5 pages in to an essay on robots, androids, nd their relation to every aspect of human society in the 21st century and beyond. It’s a big project, and it might be as much as a week before it’s done, but as soon as it is, it’ll be up here. This one has actually had a lot of effort go into it, so I’m pretty sure that it won’t be abandoned like the essay I promised last time.