{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3480",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3480,
    "subject": "Sawyer's bio/chem war of annihilation",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-10-10T20:35:23+00:00",
    "last": "2002-10-10T20:35:23+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0210-1844@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-10-10T20:35:23+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Sawyer's bio/chem war of annihilation",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Rostrum wrote, quoting Roy:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Regarding the Asimov story:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "I haven't read the story but, based on mantis's synopsis, that girl did\nthe right thing. Lest that robot \"become like one of us\". <g>"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "That may be the crux of our disagreement.  Killing the robot might have\nbeen \"right\" in the sense of \"looking out for our interests,\"  possibly\neven \"right\" in the sense that a time traveller murdering the baby Hitler\nwould be \"right\" (although, if I recall the story correctly, I don't think\nSusan has enough information to be sure a robot uprising would mean war\nand death for humans), but it is not \"right\" because robots as Man's\n\"creation\" could never have the moral status of humans."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I myself have not read the story, either.  But Robert J. Sawyer, who wrote\nthe article, seems to be saying (in the entire article) that the\ncompetition between robots and humans is an evolutionary one which must\neventually lead to a war of annihiliation, or the more merciful option of\nslavery (of humans by robots).  How much of this is to promote his own\nbrand of product, I do not know.  How much he may be, in fact, distorting\nthe source texts to make his case, I do not know (but I do relish his\nunusual interpretation of Kubrick's \"2001: A Space Odyssey\").\n\n(Yeah, yeah, we can trivialize such meat vs. metal megadeath match by\ninvoking the Terminator series of movies, trotting out our Ahnold\nimpersonations, etc.  But it has been in genre since long before those\nmovies and seems to be still going on.)\n\nTo that end, I found the revelation of Dr. Calvin's elimination of Elvex to\nbe quite shocking, based upon what I remembered of Asimov's Robot stories.\n(Then again, I find second-hand details of what Asimov did to expand his\nFoundation series beyond the original trilogy even more shocking and\ndisturbing.)\n\nAnd Roy seems to understand this Sawyer platform quite well.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}