I am what I am

This is a very short story that I wrote for the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild.  To be honest, I don't know whether they used it.  I include it here to show that it is possible to write micro-fiction in 124 words.

      When I was first switched on, people often asked me “How does it feel being a robot?”

      My answer was always “When my operational parameters are close to their optimal values, I could say I feel good.”

      They didn’t seem to be entirely satisfied by my answer, and kept asking questions like “Are you happy to be a robot?”

      Bios are very much interested in what they call feelings. Robots are not. When I do what I have been built to do, the potentials in my positronic brain are in balance. Whether this condition could be called happiness is irrelevant.

      Now that they have become used to me, the bios have stopped wasting time with useless questions. It is better so.

Of Soft Brains and Software Brains

An uninterrupted flood of information constantly bombards our senses: images, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, temperatures. We can only cope with it because our brains only make us aware of a fraction of that information. We blissfully remain unaware of the rest.

Machines that can think

Only a few decades ago computers filled up entire rooms and only accepted inputs via switches on their front panels or punched cards. The continuing increase in processing power and decrease in size has made possible to fit computers into smaller and smaller packages. In two decades we have gone from the size of a small suitcase to something comparable in size with a pack of cigarettes.

Homo Novus

We are entering a new phase of human evolution. The next couple of decades will mark the end of humanity as we know it today.