It’s not a surprise that he’s my favorite blogger- and new favorite author.

Partially, because he gets it.

Partially because he stretches my mind. I can read Kim Du Toit all day long- he’s bright and well educated, and well spoken; a joy to read even if only for the subject matter. Poretto, on the other hand, is the only blogger I occasioanlly have to open a dictionary to read. It makes it more of a challenge, and if you don’t seek out challenge in your daily life, stretch your brain, so to speak, you’re already dying. In the post I’ve linked to, he describes the skills good authors have, and how they use them to attract and capture their audience. mr Poretto is dead on, as usual, and gives excellent examples.
Here are a few of my own:

Isaac Asimov writes in “I, Robot” (A great story- I love Asimov, despite the sideburns) that there are three laws that govern robot behavior.

I am a robotic engineer. I probably know a thing or two about robots that Asimov never suspected.

Let’s back up for a bit of history: The term “robot” comes from “robota”, a czech term for “forced labor”. The word was first used by Karel Kapek in his play “Rossums Universal Robots”. The play had those very first robots leading rebellion against humans. Those robots were not mechanical constructs but genetically created living beings.
Since then a lot of things have been called robots; what we now know as “androids” are probably the closest thing to what Asimov considered a robot. An industrial robot looks most like a disembodied arm. Industrial robots are not autonomous; they must be connected to an external power supply and bolted to the floor to function. The very few fully autonomous robots, like Sony’s Aibo and Qrio are still little more than expensive sophisticated toys.

You can make an effective projectile weapon, for instance, with a bottle, a cork, some vinegar and baking soda. This simple mechanisim is impossible to make foolproof, and intrinsically safe, as are all projectile weapons. A weapon by it’s definition is as dangerous as the wielder, and the stupider the operator the more likely an accident.

Robots today are little more than articulated arms. They have a mechanical and electronic complexity the likes of which Asimov would have been incapable of understanding, and frankly, they become more complex every year.

My personal preference, of course, is for Fanuc Robots. They are tough as shit and flat out the best on the market, bar none. They have a projected mean time between failure of 60,000 hours. Think about that for a moment: That’s roughly ten years of 24 hour a day operation at maximum speed at maximum payload without a single failure. Maintenance is so slight as to be almost unnecesary. The computer which runs the robots is included in that number: ten years, no system crashes. Steve jobs merely wishes that were the case with his beloved machines.

And they will kill you in direct proportion to your own stupidity.

Robotic system guarding has become it’s own specific engineering discipline. A robot (as it is known today) has absolutely no ability to know, comprehend, and follow “rules of robotics”. If robots move away from disembodied arms and become humanoid androids, they will become ever more complex, and as logically follows, ever more complex to guard.

Asimov didn’t “invent” the laws of robotics because he felt he knew better, he did so because it made sense to him at the time. He used that invention as a basis of a futurescape that is flat out impossible. Another clear example is “City” by Clifford D Simak; an awesome work, always one of my favorites. It takes at it’s basis that killing is wrong, and it even consigns the heroes of the novel (the dogs) to their own deaths because they won’t kill the ants that are forcing them off the planet.

Robots will be as good or evil as the people who use them. Death is necesary. Killing will never stop. These are irrefutable facts. Suspension of disbelief makes the stories entertaining, but it will never make them true.