I was getting a chuckle today reading an article posted on 6/20/02 at theage.com.au, titled Robot on the Run, about a robot that tried to escape from the experimental center it was housed at, when it occurred to me that the "future" I used to think about 20 years ago reading science fiction is here NOW. So many things I expected to have happened, as an avid sf reader, haven't happened at all (things like establishing a moonbase or space station for commercial enterprise). And other things, like the internet, the explosion of computer and information technology into our homes and daily lives, these were things I personally never expected to see. So much has developed technologically so fast we can barely keep up. Yet we still have age-old human problems plaguing us like never before. Horrific human rights abuses, wars/conflicts between nations, prejudices and discrimination, high levels of poverty in too many places all over the world.

I think there was always a feeling in reading science fiction that somehow the technology would make everything better. And I suppose there is now for me a bit of a sense of disappointment in that incorrect assumption. Surely we as human beings would develop right along with our science, but what I see instead is that we remain true to ourselves, true to human nature, fallible, petty, sometimes rising up to show our better natures, but generally self-absorbed and disconnected in many ways from each other.

I used to love reading the Robot novels of Asimov, thinking how great it would be to have robots in our lives. The fact that these early models mentioned in the article above are already trying to escape...well it makes you wonder. Was the robot escape just a programming glitch? Or was it fed up with its human masters? Probably just a programming thing, after all, even if the future is now, we don't really have thinking robots yet...that has to be in the realm of the far future, right? Yeah. Remember how the idea of a computer more powerful than the one that took us to the moon, a computer that sits on your desk in your home, was just a dream in science fiction? Look out future. Look out robots.