battlestar galatica killer robots and rationality
2012-12-02
okay. so I’m re-watching the battlestar galatica mini series/pilot.
what I don’t get it how willing the cylons are to sacrifice their robots. Like… that opening scene where 6 just meets the ambassador to die.
But. Um.
That just doesn’t seem very efficient to me. And isn’t the whole thing about killer robots supposed to be the fact that they are inhuman in their rationality.
And… isn’t that an interesting point?
I’ve said it a million times on here already about how computers (and the languages they are programmed in) represent the culmination of western/white logic and rationality. Computers run off of the almost 2000 year long history of white/western logicians attempting to remove all humanity for reasoning.
It is interesting that this is such a common trope in scifi: that robots or computers rise up and go out to destroy humanity. And, isn’t it even more interesting that the white men who run the fucking world and have shaped modern life and the global colonial society we currently live in, have pushed and pushed computational logic as the absolute perfection of human rationality?
That these dystopian visions of the future of robots trying to kill human beings, to a certain extent, is the actual fear of becoming what white people always say we should be. And… when you look at the horrors wrought by white societies (colonialism) and the genocides, death, and destruction…
The killer robots of the future are what white people have been aspiring to for hundreds of years. That cold, calculating rationality that prizes economy over emotion and humanity is the ideal they have been striving for. This is exactly why, when you look over the past five hundreds, this future fear of robots and their human genocides, is reflected in the waters of the past.
This is… just another reason why i constantly and continuously resist engaging white people with any of their notions of ‘rationality’ or ‘logic.’ Because… at the end of the day, I refuse to give up my humanity in this way.