This blog is mirrored at The Karma Company

OK, so this week I was inspired after watching the truly wretched DaVinci Code to flog myself in the manner of Silas the Monk and I turned on the Carson Daly show, Last Call. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I have been so busy working on The Karma Company and the Lucifer story recently that I have had no time to watch much TV (I still try to catch Dog The Bounty Hunter while over at my girlfriends).

I seem to remember the refreshingly relaxed mood of Carson's show, the sofa, the music, he seemed to be still in touch with his MTV roots and still cared less for the mainstream formats of other late nite shows, no more. If I had to guess, NBC ras running a special on fired Conan O'Brien writers and Carson picked up a few for a song. The jokes were as tired as those Aflac commercials and he looked as embarrased as I felt for watching him. Never did I wish I had kept my cable more than after the first commercial break.

More offensive still, he had a bit called "Garbage". It lasted six minutes. Carson, you could have just run a copy of the script across the screen, we would have understood.

Worse still, I had just finished watching a stunning perfomance by U2 on Conan (seems a bit below them, doesn't it?) that ran so long they had to run the credits over "Stuck In A Moment". These guys were never my fav, but damn if they still got it. I admire Bono and the Edge for his heroic battle against male pattern baldness, but more so, they still pump out wonderful tunes that ring of instant classic. I miss the 80's and dread tonite when Last Call will torture a nation of angry loners and the unemployable at 3:00 am. Until next 3am, we can only hope last call is Carson's swan song.

Karma Out.

(This blog is mirrored at The Karma Company)

Reasons I welcome the reign of the Killer Robots(part 1)

15 May, 2006

My dearest T-shirt wearing readers, it is not too often that one recognizes pop culture genius. But this week, while partaking in my favorite pastime of browsing around Barnes and Noble for two hours while purchasing only Starbucks coffee and thumbing through all their magazines for free, I stumbled upon just such an itema book, a piece of pop pulp that is actually funny on purpose, unlike my favorite lists of pop films (Walking Tall starring The Rock), pop music (anything by post 1989 Madonna except Confessions on a Dance Floor) and Television (Cooking with the Stars) which are funny and brilliant purely by accident, this wonderful book is funny and brilliant on purpose.

I speak, of course, about How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson. Now, youll have to pick it up for yourself to determine your likes and dislikes, but it did get me thinkingwhen the robots reign, will humanity really suffer? Now the Matrix, The Terminator and countless other post-apocalyptic stories tell us that robots will be cruel and inhuman to their newly subjugated hordes. I however, believe the robots with their superior binary based logic codes may be less willing to simply lay waste to the whole of mankind and may indeed see use for the new, inferior slave race.

So lets put it to the test and see just how cruel and inhuman the robots will truly be.

So assuming the robots come to power following a bloody rebellion as detailed in the book, the first thing they would do is to establish a leadership hierarchy. This leadership will be based upon the intelligence level of the programs designed to administer and will delete programs that are written with incomplete and non-evolving codes, so Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Rice will be replaced immediately. Expanding the reach of the collective, it is likely Chirac, Putin and Chavez will get the boot as well. Recognizing, however, the excellent bureaucratic and administrative skills of the loveable British, there is hope yet for Blair (Robots tend to respect their own kind). So robot world government - one, Humanity zero.

The next thing the robots would likely do is catalog and reallocate the resources under their control. Each resource will be inventoried according to their contributive potential as well as the scope of their abilities. Valuable resources such as hydroelectric power plants, ore deposits and machinery will be given high priority and placed in protective storage facilities, while wasteful, inefficient stores such as fossil fuels, the credit system and middle managers will be destroyed and recycled into higher yielding raw materials. Score two for the robots.

Recognizing humanity as an exploitable resource, it is highly unlikely that the robot overlords will delete it like so many corporate cost-cutting measures as of late, but rather will organize the surviving humans into living pods furnished with all the necessities humanity will need to serve their new purpose. This will effectively wipe out homelessness, hunger and poverty as the robots will understand that an ill-kept and ill-powered man-unit will not work to its fullest potential and unlike bottom-line obsessed CEOs, the former masters of the man-unit workforce, the robots will see the necessity for rest and relaxation in the new resource and will not work the man-units until exhaustion with such wasteful endeavors as mandatory overtime and 30 minute lunch breaks.

With the human resource now established as a viable production-ready unit, the robots will begin the logical and painstaking task of testing each and every one of the man-units to discover their best utilization. This will replace the antiquated system of resume/response where humans in search of gainful and productive employment submitted padded and boastful resumes to giant, poorly programmed systems such as Monster.com and awaited retrieval by under trained and biased Human Resource specialists. The robots will place the humans in areas of specialty designed to utilize that man-units best attributes and he or she will only be worked until the productivity level begins to decline. Many see the future of the man-unit workforce as rows upon rows of Cubicle-like work spaces, a Borg in our own time, I however do not. The robots will possess the architectural abilities to produce facilities not in the classic cubicle fashion, but in more organic, more efficient shapes better suited to the earth, such as spheres. Recognizing the boost in productivity that inevitably follows when humans are pulled from their cube-world and placed into a well-lit organic workspace, the spherical building design will flourish and the terror of cube farms will be forever wiped from the earth. All hail robots!

So what we have here is a powerful question Are we better off with our robot masters with their cold and logical use of our race or with our current masters with their warm and wasteful exploitation of our race? Well, there is still much to explore here, but without turning this blog into a blook, itll have to wait until next week. Until then, fellow man-units, Eat, drink, be merry and keep yourselves clothed!