The Rocket

Issue date: 12/7/07 Section: Opinion

I feel like I've been overtly cynical this semester, and I probably have been.

Now, I know it's out of character for me to write about something happy, but I'm trying to end the semester on a good note, so cut me some slack.

On Saturday night, I happened to turn into my night radio program, Coast to Coast AM.

Coast to Coast AM is a radio show focused on the paranormal. Aliens, ghosts, the Chupacabra, Sasquatch, 9/11 conspiracy theories and plagues are some of the most common subjects on the program, and it has been around since 1984.

Naturally, since the show is on from 1 to 5 a.m. EST every night of the week, the people who call in are an interesting bunch. Truckers, general crazy people and Canadians seem to call in the most, and it's a fascinating program.

Saturday night's program was a doozy. The topic was robots and sex. Robot sex. Robots and humans having sex.

There was a stately British man named David Levy, who has written books about the topic, telling me all about the possibilities of robots and people having intimate relations, sexual and otherwise, in the very near future. Now, it was at about a quarter of the way through the show when the host of the night, Ian Punnett, posed a question about the ethical treatment of robots. The next thing that came out of his mouth nearly made me die laughing. Punnett asked Levy, "If a robot can't say no, isn't it rape?"

Maybe it's just me, but the sheer fact that someone would even think to ask something like that made me feel a little bit better about the state of the world itself.

It also made me start wondering about what other places in society robots could have.

They could be girlfriends, they could be doctors, nurses, lawyers, professors…sometimes I wonder if Dick Cheney is a robot, and that's why he goes to the hospital so much, to mask his monthly battery recharges as heart trouble. Remember how he didn't blink during a State of the Union address a while back? They tweaked that at his latest hospital visit.

The idea of having robots around is essential to American pop culture. We loved Rosie in the Jetsons. We love robots because they don't judge us and are subservient to our wishes.

We loved Data on Star Trek-though he was not quite a robot-because he was a little bit awkward, intelligent and not quite human. The worst-case scenario with robots is that they take over and start to kill us all.

I saw that happen on Star Trek once. Data malfunctioned and took over the Enterprise. In a sense, he performed a coup d'etat. Obviously, Captain Jean-Luc Picard wasn't very happy about that, but everyone generally forgave Data because he was a robot, the ultimate infallible being.

The idea of robots that are nearly humanoid is exciting, but ultimately, I think robots are already among us. Some of your professors are probably robots. I think Hillary Clinton is probably a robot and Dennis Kucinich is onto her.

Vacuuming robots like Roomba are simply the mitochondria of the robot spectrum. I'm looking forward to the day in which the socially inept can take out a robot instead of a real human. I'm also looking forward to the day when we can't tell if robots are really robots. It's coming sooner than you think.

Take a look around you, and I'm sure if you look closely, you'll find more robots than you ever thought there were. Just keep an eye out for the inevitable insurrection.

Lisbeth Wells-Pratt is a freshman creative writing major and a regular contributor to The Rocket.

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