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as a movie in the recent low-budget badly produced,
and critiqued, film “Push” from Icon Productions and Summit Entertainment.
A similar social dynamic was portrayed in an entirely different setting in “Masters of Solitude”, a novel of war by telepathic primitives who want to peacefully gain accep-
tance from a technologically advanced and all powerful city, a lengthy and entertaining tome from science fiction authors Marvin Kaye and Parke Goodwin.
The primitives end up waging war and the different clans savage each other before attempting to deal with the city.
Asimov gave us a story with a happy ending where the telepathic robot decided to protect humanity even thought it became superior to humans and created an entire set of
robots that could have wiped out the species on several planets simultaneously - simply because of the repetitive nature of artificial replication and the ease of manufacture
versus organic human growth.
In Asimov’s fictional future universe the robot’s artificial intelligence develops a sense of ethics and responsibility that becomes gradually absent in Humanity and may
have provided a poignant comment from the author on the social trends he plotted and interpolated from his generation.
In reality we have no guarantee of a happy ending.
It would be easy to dismiss these issues, in fact we invite our readers to pretend they are flights of fantasy.
They are no where near being science fiction and we all know how science fiction is turning out?
The positronic brain from Asimov’s universe is almost fully, in all of its implications, upon us as scientists scramble to refine and improve on artificial intelligence, genetic
engineering, network grids, cybernetics and encephalographic technologies.
And we are only a handful of decades from the happy occasion when we all could be having a bard hair day.
In a day and age where Iran, North Korea and Pakistan own a nuclear device, the United States may seek to maintain global superiority by developing an entirely new layer
of technologies including genetics, artificial intelligence and psionics.
And the world, as portrayed on the album cover of musician and poet Jean Michel Jarre's only mega successful record, Oxygene, may become our world, a dead world.
Only the dead world may also include fallen victims such as privacy, autonomy, and the very definition of self, as thought barriers are breached on a massive scale.
Humanity as we know it and possibly the species may have been altered as never before, as these "things" may become a dead matter.
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