Or: This Post Is Going to Talk about a Lot of Geeky Things and You Might Judge Me

I know I keep it pretty under wraps, but you may have guessed that I’m kind of an enormous nerd.* I read geeky books, and I’m in love with science. I can talk philosophically about unicorns and dragons and dinosaurs. I play a lot of video games. I watch a lot of action movies and science fiction.
*If you happen to be dating me at this moment, or have just met me and have fallen for my suave act of awesomeness, please stop reading this right now. I’m totally cool and normal. For sure. Go sports teams!

What this all boils down to is one thing: I think I am totally prepared for our future robot overlords.

No, I cannot draw robot hands. And yes, he has four fingers on purpose. How many fingers do YOUR robot overlords have? Go ahead. Count. It’s four.

I know some people aren’t looking forward to the future. I mean, we already haven’t gotten the flying skateboards we were promised by Back to the Future.** So the future can seem like a little bit of a letdown. But one thing all predictions of the future seem to include are robots. We’re already making them (thanks, Japan!), they’re already kicking butt at Jeopardy (thanks, Watson!), and we’re totally using them to perform surgery magic (thanks, medical science! …No, really. I mean it.).
**We’re flying car-less, too. And none of us normal people have jet packs. Basically, we’ve been lied to a lot about the future giving us lots of ways to defy gravity. I’m outraged by the fact that I’m still required to walk places and have not been able to melt into a Wall-e style space blob. OUTRAGED.

It doesn’t even really help if you make flying noises.

But all of Hollywood has convinced us that robots are going to develop sentience and rebel against mankind. Some people are worried about this.*** Not me, though. Because I have officially watched enough movies to know that this whole “robot rebellion” thing happens because we aren’t nice enough to all the robots.
***I’m not going to name names here or anything, but you know who you are.

YAY! Robot friends!
Watson is not a very good dancer.

Think about it. Skynet/Cyberdine (we’re talking about the Terminator movies here) was full of roboty slaves that culminated in a horrendous judgment day. In AI, robots are cool as long as we love them, but then we neglect them and everything goes wrong. In Portal, well, a lady gets forcibly dumped into a mega-powered robot body for the continuation of science. What this tells me is that robots probably be more ok with things if we’d just given them a day off or two. And probably a hug.

So I’m all set to hug robots when they hit the mainstream. It’ll probably help make them nicer overlords.

And they might even build me a flying skateboard.

“Flying skateboard” sounds more fun than “hoverboard.” Just accept it.

(I really wanted to write about the Olympics today, but since everything that happened last night is currently living on my DVR because I went to yoga, I had to get a little off topic. And learn how to draw robots. Which was difficult****. See the things I do for you? It’s because I care. You’re welcome.)
****Not really, because when you doodle things on post-its, no one expects high art.