Monday is another chance for all of you to win a prize! There are two books remaining, and two more chances to win. So without further ado, read on to find out how...
One of the first exclusives shared with SciencePunk were original design sketches for the Fabrication Machine, the monster at the heart of Shane Acker's tale. A machine with intellect but no soul, it is responsible for building the Chancellor's war machines before it turns against its masters.
But what makes the Fabrication Machine evil per se? Sure, it wiped out the entire human race, but in effect it was simply completing a job that one army started. In the original 11 minute short, the machines and stitchpunks are connected by a talisman able to capture the souls of living organisms, each party holding one half. The Fabrication Machine wants the other half so that it can assimilate, and presumably build truly living creatures. Now I ask you, what is wrong with that? The stitchpunks are after the same thing, only they use cunning and invention in place of aggression and physical strength.
So my next question for the contest: are the machines really evil, or simply a different shade of humankind?
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Good and Evil (with a villainous capital E) are relative concepts. Invading a country is a bad thing, unless you're the one doing the invading.
Is a sealion evil for eating a peguin? It depends wether the documentary is about penguins or sealions.
Are the machines evil? To the Stickpunks; yes. To the machines? No, they're doing what they're supposed to do.
Good and evil are purely human constructs. The difference is a matter of perspective. The terrorists who perpetrated the attrocities of 9/11 believed they were doing good and that they would reap their reward in the after life, yet from the perspective of most westerners their actions are considered to be evil. I doubt that even the likes of Hitler or Stalin considered themselves as evil. Similarly the machines are only doing what they consider to be good from their own perspective, whether or not they are 'evil' depends entirely upon ones own standpoint.
I don't think the machine would consider its actions to be evil, but that would be because it has no concept of evil; therefore does that make the machine removed from the consequences of its actions, or by possessing intelligence but not guilt, something of pure evil? A serial killer, who was emotionally removed from their crimes would certainly be considered evil by the masses.
On a fundamental level, it is important not to forget that all life-forms on this planet are competing with each other for a finite amount of resource.
Ultimately the other inhabitants of this planet would be better off without humans, however one could argue that our complex emotions enable us to enjoy the planets riches in ways other animals are simply incapable of imagining.
Humans have gone past the point of simply surviving and in our luxurious position, have developed a whole raft of new needs, and also a (selective) conscience. We have the power to forgive the carnivorous beasts on our planet, as they kill to survive, but it also enables us to judge others that in our individual opinions, exploit our ability to destroy.
I think in the grand scheme of things, the concept of evil is entirely a human creation, and as such a fundamental part of our make-up. Without this contrast, good would seem diluted, and there would no longer be something worth living for.
Yes. Evil machines ARE most decidedly evil.
Case 1
The washing machine in the basement of my apartment building.
While normally doing all it can to give the impression of sweet innocence, this machine was clearly designed on a bad day by one of the grouchier inhabitants of a particularly devious ring of hell. On two separate occasions it has used the occasion of me washing all my (formerly) white clothes to carefully hide a red sock or violently lurid pair of underpants from my one of neighbors amongst its innards.
On another occasion it so thoroughly devoured my new pair of jeans that they ended up resembling something from a Cher video, circa 1986.
Case 2
The minicentrifuge in the corner of my lab.
This bastard device seems to have such an acute ability to sense exactly the right (or more accurately wrong) moment to stop working that it makes me wonder whether I spent a previous existence as a particularly atrocious Hindu. This moment happens to be at the last possible second of an experiment that took two months to set up, treat cell lines, run multiple time points, extract RNA, aliquot samples, prepare the gel and then quickly spin the degradable sample to the bottom of the tube, ready to load.
At any single point in the preceding two months there would have been little or no problem - I'd just use another aliquot of sample or redo a small part of the project.
But no. That wouldn't do at all, would it.
It had to wait until I had concentrated all my RNA into single tubes and begun spinning it down for just ten seconds before adding the loading buffer.
Ten bleeding seconds....
Luke Skywalker had a smaller window of opportunity to destroy the flippin deathstar.
Yes, naturally this is the very moment it decided to do an impression of a time tube, sealing my samples off from all contact with the outside world until some future social archaeologist broke in at some distant point.
Well to cut a long story short the future social archeologist in this case happened to be the service engineer from our department and the future time was the next morning, since - of course - he'd already gone home for the day. And yes, my samples were indeed reduced to a pretty good likeness of the starring players at the inception of the RNA world.
Don't talk to me about evil machines.
Where is the line that seperates good and evil truly? Because people who mean to do good can evil but they would still see it as doing good. The fabrication machine was originally doing good but then somewhere along the line it changed so it still thought it was doing good but everyone else it was doing evil.
The Fabrication Machine is described as a creature with intellect but no soul; however, it does have emotions, becoming frustrated with the Chancellor's commands to build more and more war machines at an ever-increasing rate.
I would argue that what makes an act evil is intent. Is a hurricane evil? Or an earthquake? No; we recognize that such things are merely forces of nature, devoid of malice, guided by purely physical laws.
Consider a white-box situation: two individuals, in a room; one of them pulls a gun and shoots the other. Is the one who fired evil? We don't know; we don't have the context. Perhaps the shooter was being attacked by the other person. Perhaps the gun mis-fired. Perhaps they had an argument and, in a fit of rage, the first man fired. And perhaps it ws cold-blooded murder. The important thing here is context.
Evil cannot exist without at least two perspectives, the acted and the acted-upon. Further, the actor must be aware that its actions cause harm. And, finally, there must be volition to the action; it must be deliberate.
By this definition, I'd say that yes, the Fabrication Machine is evil. It has chosen to act in a certain manner, deliberately, knowing that its actions cause harm. If it had no volition, if it was unaware of the consequences of its actions, or if it could not act upon another creature, then it could not be evil.
Evil is dependent on the society that determines it.
Looks like we have a winner...
By random selection the winner is:
#1 Craig! Yay!
Craig, please email your name & address to winner@sciencepunk.com to claim your prize!