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Rule Zero…

April 23, 2004

First up this week. Dead-heads in the GTA should make plans this weekend to visit Fuzion Juice/Coffee/Bubble Tea on 1328 Danforth Avenue (Just East of Danforth and Greenwood on the North side of the street). Andy is a great guy who was super accommodating to let us shoot there, and it’s a great store. Firefox gets his frequent Bubble-Tea hook-ups there, and I’ve been known to swing by every now and then for a tasty large mango (perhaps with green apple jelly if I’m feeling particularly saucy). Tell Andy “hi” for us! It’s only through the support of folks like Andy that we can keep churning out the great new episodes.

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied,
flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster. -Adam Smith I’ve been thinking about robots a lot this week. Not because of a certain Will Smith movie which fills me with equal parts hope and dread, but more likely because of the strange synergies of Festos terrifying creation and the superbly well orchestrated viral ad campaign for either Mini Coopers or a new book (no one can quite figure out which). This got me ruminating on robotic projections of the past which, while remaining permanent pop-culture fixtures, rarely reflect the reality of development in the field. Certainly it’s the rare case when a exception emerges that is more fitted to life with George Jetson than being a piece of a Detroit auto-line.

So if we again look to the brightest minds of futurists and realists to suggest where we’re driving this crazy race called humanity, it becomes clear that perhaps it’s not the humble servants we should be worried about but what happens when we lose interest in forcing machines to do what we want, and go right to the root of the problem. From Information super-highway, to Information super-race in one easy step. I guess this week I’ve been struck with the obvious, but unsettlingly evident distinct impression that it’s rarely the “robot” that we have to worry about. Creating three laws for a robot’s creators should be a much more pressing concern. Perhaps Adam smith was right, he just wasn’t looking at the right ‘damn monster’.

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Did I mention we have a Shipping Sale going on at the store until the end of the month? Well we do!

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