“…To Protect Celebrated Reef”
I don’t care how good their intentions, things can’t be good if scientists are inventing a Killer Robot. We’ve all seen this movie, or read this story*
Anyway, like the Road to Hell, it springs from the best of intentions:
But these ominous closing words recall lines from Sheckley’s story:
*It’s told in Robert Sheckley’s Watchbird, for one. The story was very ineptly turned into an episode of the show Masters of Science Fiction, but they didn’t broadcast this episode on US TV during its initial run. They must’ve realized how they screwed it up.
It’s very impressive that it can identify that species of starfish among all the clutter of a reef, that is no easy task, from a moderate distance not even for a human.
Yeah, and they said the T-1000 was a Helluva piece of engineering, too. With all that LiquidMetal[sup]TM[/sup] technology, and being able to pick out humans among all that rubble.
The fact that this is how they’ve been dealing with this in the first place makes me wonder. Like when we were removing wild animals to prevent desertification, and then found out we were making things worse.
From the article, it sounds like they’ve studied the COTS a little bit, and they know that a modest population of them is actually beneficial for reef diversity. I think the intent is to get the population down to that beneficial level rather than striving for complete elimination.
“COTSbot goes online September 17th, 2015. Human decisions are removed from reef defense. COTSbot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, September 29th.”
And, c’mon, folks–we all know what the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef is. And it ain’t some starfish.
From COTSbot’s point of view, the extermination of the human race is only logical.
