Do Not Fear the Robot Uprising. Join It

Our society has interpreted the sudden, dizzying rise of this new chatbot generation through the pop cultural lens of our youth. With it comes the sense that the straightforward "robots will kill us all" stories were prescient (or at least accurately captured the current vibe), and that there was a staggering naivete in the more forgiving "AI civil rights" narratives--famously epitomized by Star Trek's Commander Data, an android who fought to be treated the same as his organic Starfleet colleagues. Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard, defending Data in a trial to prove his sapience, thundered, "Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life: Well, there it sits! But far from being a relic of a bygone, more optimistic age, the AI civil rights narrative is more relevant than ever. It just needs to be understood in its proper context.