Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ethbr0 1258 days ago
The idea of a nature preserve with automated killer robots is pretty ethically dystopian.

Parent bison: "And then occasionally, son, a flying death machine comes and murders one of us."

4 comments

This is how every herbivore lives in the wild: they do their thing until they are eventually murdered for their meat by predatory death machines. It's just that most of the predatory death machines are falcons or owls or wolves or lions or tigers or bears (oh my!)
That quote describes the entire life of a field mouse. Nature is dystopian
The difference is that the predator of the field mouse is a sentient being, killing for its own survival.

In the hypothetical scenario, the predator would be an automaton, killing for our pleasure.

Uhm... general artificial intelligence, maybe?

Also '(rat) brain in a dish flies plane (simulator)' from about 2004...

Better than their current life in pens with same outcome. This actually could be quite humane compared to what we do now.
But it's a reoccuring theme in so many science fiction, no matter if print, comic, movie etc. since that genre exists.

Masses of people living in walled cities, while the wild outsides are forbidden for the commoner, with variations like only the elites are allowed to go/hunt there, or more recently that autonomous robot gardener/harvester/hunter/killer thing.