robot desires -- Jonas tells a joke

Alice K. Turner · 16 Oct 2002, 01:55 · from urth-v0210.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Alice K. Turner" <aturner6 at nyc.rr.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) robot desires -- Jonas tells a joke
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 21:55:23 -0400
Message-ID: <urth-v0210-1865 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0210/1865.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Mused mantis:

> In the joke that Jonas tells, a woman interviews three sailors to find out
> what each one wants the most.  The first says power, the second says
> (social) polish, and the third says love.
>
> The woman laughs and says that they are all robots.  The first sailor says
> that is true, and he can see how she figured it out from the first two
> answers, since power and polish are things all robots look for, but he
> couldn't figure out how she detected a robot in the third answer.

[snip]

> Now this joke does a number of things.  It establishes a hierarchy, almost
> like Mazlow's [sp?] hierarchy (which starts with food, then shelter,
etc.),
> but for robots: "power" becomes "food" in addition to "recognized
> authority" (because robots run on energy); "polish" becomes "physical
> appearance" in addition to "social graces" (because the robots have skins
> that shine -- the Tin Woodman becomes nickle-plated on his elevation, and
> he is always getting polished, getting new accessories, etc.); but what is
> "love" in robot terms?
>
> Well, in addition to that answer, love is also love, and something which
> some (perhaps not all) robots can desire.

But aren't you forgetting that the TW desired love too, as well as
polish--his first desire was a heart, to love but also to be loved. And he
became Emperor of the Winkies, so he got power too.

Mark, Edward !IV was 6'3" and "broad-breasted," a giant of his time. Richard
III at probably about the norm, 5'7" or so, would have been dwarfed.

Also, just curious, does Smart own a cat?

-alga

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net