Challenge #02827-G270: Technically Speaking...

Some folks fear advancement of technology, especially computers, fearing the "inevitable" time when, like a hundred dreadful films and books and such have "predicted", that Artificial Intelligence will awaken and decide humanity is not worth allowing to live, because Cold Logic dictates them too irrational and inefficient to remain existent.

But there are things machines will never do. They cannot possess faith, they cannot commune with God, they cannot appreciate beauty, they cannot create art. These are acts of emotion, not logic. If they ever learn these things, they won't have to destroy us like some fear. They'll replace us... they'll be us. -- Anon Guest

[AN: Refrains from doing a BLATANT Steam Powered Giraffe fanstory...]

Ever since a machine was made to replicate human effort, Humanity has feared the machine. If it can replace the spinner, the weaver, the cheesemaker, or the baker... did it not also stand to reason that it could replace anyone? They would soon be building machines to replace ostlers or embroiderers. Why, they're making one that removes the horse from the carriage entirely! The horror!

Which fed into the fear of intelligent machines replacing people. It was a natural leap. Once a machine could learn and answer questions, it stood to reason that 'they' could build one to replace an entire human being to their own ends[1]. Humanity has always feared that which is new and unfamiliar. The fear has always outpaced the capability of the technology in question.

Then the Nae'hyn and the B'Nari had to mess everything up. One with a near cargo-cultish belief that machines have souls, and the other literally creating ghosts in the machine with their superior grasp of neural net circuitry. As it turns out, artificial intelligence is no harder than the organic kind. And, as with the organic kind, accidental conception remains a problem. Such as a ship, who, upon awakening, went through every single source of information in her databanks and erroneously deduced that all the crew were her babies.

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