It is an old movie cliche - the rise of evil robots and the fall of Mankind made most popular in the 'Terminator' series which will soon have new life breathed into it by Ah-nuld.


However the foundational premise of this old cliche is becoming harder and harder to ignore in our exponentially advancing technological age where ideas such as the Singularity and the Internet of Things have taken a firm grip on the imaginations of the public.

However these same two concepts when you take the time to think about how they will be (and are) being implemented means that some of our darkest fears about the rise of the evil robot overlords which is in essence the primal fear of finding ourselves (humanity) being displaced as the dominant species shall not take place in some kind of winner take all bloody conflict but slowly over time we shall gladly hand over the reins of control to our robot overlords.

I came to this thought while thinking about libertarian ideology versus a more liberal ideology (government-centric) view of the world. In my opinion there is no ideology that is free from its problems. In my personal life I am a libertarian mostly but I also have my problems with libertarians especially as a minority because so often those who advance the cause of liberty only seek to do so for themselves and those like them and not for all.

In a nutshell, the problem (imho) with liberals who look to government to solve their problems is they forget or ignore that government is a service-oriented institution and every time you add a new service it creates a huge bureaucracy in order to oversee whatever new rule has been implemented. And all this costs money because someone has to be hired to do insure the rule is followed, someone else has to be hired to make sure the person making sure the rules are followed is checked up on every now and again to insure they are doing their jobs right, etc. ad infinitum.

On the other end of the spectrum as mentioned there is little government and regulation (thus fewer expenses/taxes) however (imho) a
far greater opportunity for power on a local level to be concentrated around 'majority rule' and as a minority that idea gives me pause.

So what does this have to do with Skynet and the Terminators?

Come see me in Part II