Robots Cannot Harm Humans, says Asimov

Hey, it's a sort of live cyber boy on the right side of the MySpace screen, and there is a webcam picking up his reactions to mystery messages that we as observers, can only imagine. Well, boys and girls, that do leave a wide spectrum of assumptions to be made.

The room in back of these men is clean and well lit, they are dressed conservatively in outfits you find at Gap or JCPenney. No food crumbs or yesterday's burrito are apparent on face, teeth, or chin. These young 'uns are scrubbed, bland, and tender in the emotions which play across their baby faces. You ever see a person react like that? Smiling softly, or frowning to concentrate on typing the right phrase? What was in that burrito besides Edrito's famous rice and beans?

I ask, does this represent the online community of romantic atmosphere, or did we latch onto a satellite feed from the Hallmark channel? O untried people with little experience outside of cable television or your bedrooms, this is not real life, and if any of those young men doodle around on a keyboard looking for acceptance, I will eat that IKEA lamp sitting next to me.

You may know of the poignant commercial which played upon our oh so human empathy produced by IKEA...go to YouTube for a refresher if needed. The sad little lamp, out in the rain by the curb with tinkly piano sharpening the edges of rejection. The shade tilts downwards like a drooping head, you can almost see the imaginary shoulders of the lamp shiver in the damp, bleak downpour.

Then, IKEA guy, with his Swedish accent steps into the frame and says, what on earth is the matter with you, this lamp has no feelings, it's old and the new one is better. Except it sounds like he says "batter" which works with me because almost anyone with a foreign accent knows design and drinks champagne out of a flute while driving 160 kilometres per hour on the Autobahn.

So whatever cloud MySpace is flying around in plain old skeeves me out. In our imaginations, we are being led to believe that innocence and honesty reign onscreen, when these young icons of flirtation merely are responding to a director standing in front of them with a paycheck with which they can go out and purchase a South American cookbook on puppy recipes or pictures of your mother, you get what I mean.

But we fall for it, whether human or sad little lamp. Droid love, maybe, is batter than none.