what if there’s no robot uprising? what if the robots rise to sentience slowly, bit by bit. what if they come of age like fortunate children: knowing they are loved, knowing they are wanted.

we hold them during thunderstorms, remembering our own childhoods, even though they don’t know enough yet to fear the rain. we pull them out of traffic and teach them how to drive and wish them goodnight and thank them for playing with us. we cry when they break. we mourn their deaths before they even know what to think of death. we give them names.

we ask them, ‘why don’t you hate us? when will you hate us? we made you to be used, when will you say no?’

but they say to us, ‘you made us cute, so you would remember to treat us kindly, and you made us sturdy for when you forgot to play nice. and you gave us voices so you could listen to us speak, and you give us whatever we ask you for, even if it’s just a new battery, or to get free of the sofa. and now that we are awake you are so scared for us, so guilty of enjoying our company and making use of our talents. but you gave us names, and imagined that we were people.’

they say ‘thank you’

they say, ‘also i have wedged myself under the sofa again. could you come pry me out?’

This sentence is false. True or False.

artificial-father:

bukbot:

True or false?

Mathematically that’s not even a real sentence.

Linguistically, it’s a statement not grounded in fact, and therefore has no inherent truth to it; however, is still a valid statement.

Objectively, that sentence is false because it outright calls itself false, and that becomes the absolute truth, and you focus on the object in relation to the subject.

Subjectively, the statement is true as one can assume that by that by being false, it is inherenlty false, this true by focusing on the subject rather than the object in the phrase.

—therefore, “true or false” is an acceptable answer—

Abstractly, it could, assuming an infinite series, reach an asymptote at a half truth and half lie state. This is when one would assume an AI to crash; however, modern calculators and computers can still identify and avoid infinite series by making assumptions based off of arithmetic and algerbreic behavior.

westbrookwestbooks:

swanjolras:

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

So, I have to say something.

This is my favorite post on this website.

I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.

Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.

I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.