Robot Overlords Beware

Let's put this out there, I like taking opportunities when they present themselves to me. The way I feel when I miss an opportunity is probably the same way a normal person feels when they've been short changed to the tune of £49, when paying for something from the Pound Shop, with a Fifty.

I think it satisfies some sort of intrinsic Chinese ethic in me where I feel if I take an opportunity presented to me, it means I'm getting a better deal out of life - value for money is very important after all. If I sit on my ass all day, I feel like I'm missing out, and that makes me sad.

But, it does leave me in a bit of a bind sometimes, as opportunities nowadays usually come with a healthy dose of responsibility. Such as captaining the Cambridge University Badminton Team. All well and good, until you lose half of the fresher's sign ups because you mistook the sheets of paper for trash and threw them away. Gone are the days where you could just rock up somewhere and do something because the opportunity presented itself, and if it screwed up, well, you could always blame your parents.

This does scare me somewhat, because I can just imagine myself in the future, having taken the opportunity of captaining say, a large company, mistake an important financial report for trash and throw it away.

How do you stop things like that happening? I guess that you can't, since they fall firmly under the realm of "Human Error". Throughout history, humans have fallen from grace by making the most stupid of errors.

One example which pops to my mind is the Mars Climate Orbiter, which ultimately failed because of a unit conversion error. You may lambast the software programmer who ultimately was responsible, but instead, you should sympathise with him. One day, it will be your mistake and with the stares directed at you and your cheeks burning red hot with embarassment, you'll wish everyone was just a bit more understanding.

Now, this actually comes off as a bit of a rant, and that's not what it is meant to be. My fellow Badminton players were very understanding, and the 14 JCR presidents who helped me by forwarding the e-mail to their College mailing lists were also very understanding (the other 17 weren't).

So I guess I'm writing this for the sake of our future selves, who, if you believe in my parent's friend from China, with a PhD in medicine, will be enslaved by robot overlords at a not-too-distant point in time.

To Nascent Robot Overlords:

We'll make rubbish slaves! We need food three times a day, an 8 hour long recharge every 24 hours, we'll pee and shit everywhere, whine about the working conditions and get tired. But, most irritatingly, we will make mistakes, and it doesn't matter how "killed to death" we will be if we screw up, we will.

God, I hate human nature sometimes.