Catmachine

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh god, I'm so depressed." Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy Now that we have our thought experiment of me-as-robot fully set up in the Thought Lab, it's time to start playing with it. Settle down. There are any number of advantages to my new state. Instead of having to struggle with contact lenses and then having to hold small print documents at arms length, I can simply upgrade and get a new pair of peepers from eyeBay. And I'm sure once I get the mechanism calibrated I can do away with all that getting tired stuff and simply go onto standby at the end of the day; no more tedious insomnia. It's only when I start talking about it in this manner that it becomes apparent how complex the human machine is. How many of these things I think I could do without, or...

Sometimes I can't stand being made of flesh and bone. What with my current materialist reading material I've come to terms with the reality that I am in fact a machine. A highly sophisticated machine, it's true. A highly inefficient machine and yet at the same time an immensely, insanely complex one. But a machine nonetheless. What I don't understand is why they had to make it of such rubbish parts. I mean come on . The transportation mechanism is made of meat fer chrissakes. And bones. OK, they have that nifty self-repair process built-in (provided they're properly set after a break), but wouldn't it be better to just make them out of stainless steel in the first place and avoid the whole issue of breakage? If nothing else this is a compelling argument for evolution and against the ridiculous notion of Intelligent Design . Idiotic design more like. Still, as something arrived at by trial and error over the course of millions of years it's not bad ...