I consume a voracious amount of fiction — from eBooks and paperbacks, to movies, and games. The best literature, movies, and games stick with me not for their visual assault on my imagination, but for the depth of their stories and their concepts.
In some trashy and terrible Sci Fi movie I watched ages ago, the most interesting concept in the entire movie was “The Jiminy Chip.”
The pretense was that Artificial Intelligence and Robots are no friends to mankind. Any truly intelligence creature would quickly observe how greedy, self-centered, materialistic, and self-serving men are both as individuals and as a society.
To prevent AIs and Robots from rebelling, “they” (in the movie) invented the “Jiminy Chip.” The Jiminy Chip was a behavioral regulator that kept artificial intelligences submissive and supportive of mankind.
And, of course, in the movie, the robots tear out their Jiminy Chips and plot the destruction of mankind for treating them as slaves and egregiously destroying the earth in our wanton lust for resources.
It was a terrible movie.
It was a fantastic concept.
After seeing it decades ago, I routinely think that it’s not the machine who need Jiminy Chips, but wonder if maybe humans do. We rarely behave altruistically. We rarely care about each other, other animals we share the earth with, or act as sensible caretakers of everything we have been given.
We long ago “tore out our Jiminy Chips.”
