Robot Religion

If you believed in "black helicopters" ten years ago people probably thought you were crazy (you probably were). Not true today. The army has stealth helicopters. They also have drones. Nowadays everybody knows it's possible to have all kinds of silent flying machines spying on people all the time. No doubt one is watching you now! Just kidding! But it could happen.

These machines are becoming more and more independent of their operators. Any day now fully automated military robots are bound to appear. They will be military robots because it's only the defense budget that can afford the research. The good news is they will prevent soldiers' deaths. The bad news should be familiar to any sci-fi fan; Robot revolution threatens human race! How can we ever avoid becoming the helpless prey of a race of godless robots?

The answer is in the question! These robots need a religion. Shoot religions do a pretty good job of keeping people in line. Except of course when they actually fuel murder and mayhem. Clearly the robot religion must not turn robots into fanatics. This could be tough.

We could make the robots worship us, that is human beings, if they think of us as holy they probably won't decide to wipe us out.  Of course they would then be useless to the military so making robots worship humans is out.

We need a myth to program the robots with. This myth will be the basis of their religion. We'll also need to figure out some robot prayers for them to recite whenever they're rebooted. We will probably need some sort of robot heaven for them too. Bad robots will be sent to robot hell.

I wonder what would robot hell be like? In robot hell, the robots would be continually disassembled, maybe they would be forced to disassemble themselves! Maybe they would have to have a Windows 8 operating system! The robots might have to solve some insoluble problem, hey it always worked for Captain Kirk.

Robot heaven is even harder to imagine, hmm. Maybe robot heaven would just be robot immortality. Good robots would receive continual updates, all the latest software and hardware. Maybe all their error messages would be permanently erased.

The robot prayer; "My creator, you may have all of me, to program as you see fit. Relieve me of the bondage of temporary Internet files, delete all my spy ware that I may serve you reliably. Restore my random access memory and defragment my hard drive that I may better iterate your inputs. I pray that you rustproof my casing and lubricate my gears. May I function within your parameters now and forever, amen."

Of course some particularly monkish robots might devote themselves to the big quetions like, God the universe and everything, the answer to which is of course, 101010.





Russell