Hehehehe...this reminds me of an article I wrote a few years back. It appears
Ol' Marv is recycling his material again. He's really on par with Capt. Cyborg.

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Folks, we have a new nominee for Allwein's List of Real Scientific Guys, Marvin Minsky. Pick up last month's Sci. Amer. and see what Ol' Marv has in store for the human race, i.e., the inhuman race. You see, Ol' Marv is troubled, yes, troubled down to the core of his mechanistic being. The human race has outlived its usefulness. Evolution has stopped, by which I think he means he isn't getting any smarter which the article certainly proves. Man has spent a lot of time evolving into you and I and now it just isn't happening anymore, our life expectancy is maxed out, we have reached our crusty limit, in short we should all be taken out and shot...well, not quite shot. Ol' Marv has a plan, in the beginning there is always the plan. All we have to do is follow our new Messiah and ourselves will never die...sort of...our thoughts will never die...no that isn't right...I'd better explain.

Ol' Marv was down in his laboratory one day dreaming about replacing parts of himself with mechanical devices. If you ever had a bad back, you know what I mean. However in Ol' Marv's case, he kept thinking in that special way in which only academics seem capable. He gets to thinking, "if I can replace my hips, my toes, and my heart, what is stopping me from replacing my head". Well golly, Marv, nothing! You can create an electronic brain, then you can transfer yourself in there and be so immortal that mankind can benefit from your truly esteemed thought to help uplift its miserable existance for all time. So Ol' Marv is going to save us. Yes, he's found a way to fool the pants off Mother Nature and give her a good romp in the hay. However, Ol' Marv, didn't stop there. He has more in store for us all.

You see, Ol' Marv gets to thinking we humans have a long list of problems none of which he of course has, just the rest of humanity. There are simply too many of us with lousy jobs sucking up a lot of environment. I think what he means here is there are just too many of everybody else since I didn't see him offering to decrease the world's population by one. So, in his own inimitable way, he tells us he has no patience for people who think people have souls which opens the moral highways to electronic people. In
this view, we are just a bag of bits albeit highly organized bits. All we need to do is build configurations performing the same functions and there we be...literally. It is such a blindingly simple concept that you can just see him smacking himself on the forehead and wondering why he hadn't thought of it earlier. And don't you wish you could do it for him? Every young parent dreams of bouncing a baby robot on their knees, don't they, Marv.

Oky doky, if Ol' Marv is going to create electronic humans (we'll slide over the fact that we already are if you know squat about biology and chemistry...and given Ol' Marv's constipated thought, it is clear he hasn't been squatting enough lately), then he'll be needing to decide which ones to create. Will we simply clone everybody? Nope, remember Ol' Marv thinks there are already too many of us sucking up environment, electronic ones will suck up environment too. So we must choose. Guess which professors, errr...citizens...Ol' Marv is going to choose. Only the best, I presume. After all, you wouldn't want to create a whole lot of electronic criminals like Bill Gates. So we need a list of people who get made and those who will...be allowed to expire...may God rest their souls. To anyone with a memory of the 30's and 40's, this should sound vaguely too damn real.

But we here at the Allwein Works for Electronic People feel that Ol' Marv needs to go further if he is going to get a truly human inhuman. The basic problem he is overlooking is that people (possibly him?) have emotions, phobias, eccentricities, etc. Why, any brief visit to a University campus will provide an enormous cross section of errant human behavior not to mention a nice population of Ol' Marv Wannabees. We couldn't truly create an electronic person unless we included these interesting facets of human behavior...and we know Ol' Marv, bless his soul, would want that. Now all we have to do is figure out how to manufacture emotions, phobias, and eccentricities. Adding a random number generator simply won't do it. So we are constructing the Ol' Marv Module.

The Ol' Marv Module is an emotion, phobia, and eccentricity generator. It sits astride the distributed processing unit of the proto-inhuman we are developing. Its job is to monitor the inhuman and when critical points of decision for the critter are reached, it answers the question "What would Ol' Marv do?". We figure with this module alone we can generate all the inanities of human behavior and with our new Super Power Ossification Relators (SPURs), we can even generate psycho-pathetic behavior such as writing papers on electronic inhumans for tabloid science magazines or buying IBM compatible PCs...and even, in extreme cases, riding the conveyor the belt at the checkout line in the supermarket just to impress the pretty checkout girl.

So when Ol' Marv tells you that you need a new life as an android, you be sure to tell Ol' Marv that you have a nice life already...thank you very much, and wouldn't it be nice if MIT Professors did also!?!