I was reading a BBC report on the ethics of mechanized automation in society and couldn’t help but notice two sentences that stood out from the rest. Although several paragraphs apart, somehow they seemed to encapsulate the whole story:

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

[…]

“Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” Park Hye-Young of the ministry’s robot team told the AFP news agency.

Attack of the Korean android wives? Or attack on the Korean android wives.

Are the Koreans as worried about how the human wives are being treated? And what about android husbands? Somehow I just don’t see this kind of warning getting the same kind of attention: “some androids may treat people as if they were their husbands”.

Anyway, the story reminds me of the love poetry that sometimes appears in/around science…perhaps we should soon expect to see more examples similar to Sharon Hopkins’ work (from over a decade ago):

The Perl programming language has proved to be well suited to the creation of
poetry that not only has meaning in itself, but can also be successfully executed by a computer.

For example, she wrote:

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:

listen (please, please);

open yourself, wide;
    join (you, me),
connect (us,together),

tell me.

do something if distressed;

    @dawn, dance;
    @evening, sing;
    read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
    study if able;

    write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);

        do*not*die (like this)
        if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.

                            accept (yourself, changes),
                            bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;

select (always), length(of-days)

# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995

What will androids call it if they get a buffer overflow from a love poem? How will they look at injection attacks?