Confused

Yesterday I had a really good run. 2 miles (around the village and back) and it felt good, tiring but good.
I ate half a banana just before going and it really made a difference. Forget expensive energy drinks, it worked a treat, I felt like I had energy the whole way round.

I was confused by my run through. Like I said, it felt good, but according to my running app I was all over the place for speed. I'm hardly a fast runner, a sedate 5mph is good for me - nature made me a slow jogger, I get there eventually but that's all you can say really - but yesterday I was anywhere from 3.5 to 6mph, that's just silly.
I can't even blame it on the hills. The speed chart shows me up and down in speed no matter what the incline. I can't blame the music either, the tempo of the tracks doesn't match. I must have been really distracted by something.

For some of the route I was contemplating a plot line for a new story (too early for spoilers just yet), for the rest I was having trouble navigating my way through the news headline I saw about how it won't long before we have start worrying about the rights of robots.
We can't even get humans rights figured, how can we possibly work out the rights of artificial intelligence?
Are we going to end up with retirement homes for smart phones? Geek Nurses whose job it is to play games on them to stop them suffering from lack of use when their cruel owners disgard them for the latest model?
It reminded me of the episode of Red Dwarf, The Last Day, where they get round this by programming their robots to believe in Android Heaven, "So they don't get stroppy when it comes to turn off time".
Then there is the wisdom of Isaac Asimov (bow down before the Robotics Guru who brought us the Three Laws), who devoted a huge amount of time to this very problem.
But as a species who can't figure out what rights we have and what rights the other indigenous life have it seems rather presumptuous of us to go ahead with trying to create artificial life that will most likely be abused for a very long time before our laws catch up enough to provide them with protection. - You only have to see how UK laws have failed so spectacularly to keep up with technology thus far to figure that out.

All in all it's an extremely difficult and delicate problem, not one that can be solved during a 2 mile run, not even an extremely slow run.
I think this is ultra marathon territory and I have a really long way to go before I can manage that.


Is the question of robot rights premature or not? Are we really still trying to create independently functioning androids or has someone already done it and is keeping it really quiet? Think about it, all those people who survive when they really should have died, the ones who come out of such nasty accidents without a scratch, are we really supposed to believe they are just lucky humans? Or are they the work of a genius? Are they artificial life-forms hiding from view until we have grown up enough exist with them?


FraidyKat Runs - from non-3 laws robots