View From the Bushes

I'm still slowly organizing my office and sorting all of my books. I know people are probably sick of hearing about this seemingly interminable project, but the fact that I managed to squeeze any work at all on the office last night after writing 1500 words, going to the library with the family, installing World of Warcraft, and setting up a new monitor, has got to be pretty impressive, right?

While I was going through my books, I came across quite a few compilations of science fiction short story collections. In some respects I think that I enjoy (when I have time to read them) scifi short stories more than novels. Possibly because often times they end up being really interesting explorations of unconventional ideas -- oftentimes, ideas which cannot be examined outside of the context of a sci-fi story. For example, I was chatting on IM earlier with a friend about a story where robots ended up fighting Armageddon, and as such they were the ones that we raised up to heaven rather than the humans who watched. Certainly, that's a subject you couldn't possibly examine outside of a science fiction story.

Along those lines, there were a couple of articles today which examined just the sorts of questions I'm talking about. The first (once again from Wired) examines what sort of ethics we should apply to robots; the second examines the question of who owns your e-mail when you die. Both are questions which would have been hard to imagine 20 years ago. Though somewhat ironically, the first question was considered a long time before the first, and yet of the two it is the more hypothetical.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross