To celebrate this week's big breakthrough in artificial intelligence — a chatbot posing as a 13-year-old passed the Turing Test — Stephen Colbert freaked out about the imminent subjugation of humanity by our cyborg overlord, with a hefty dose of minority resentment. Specifically, Colbert dedicated a good part of Tuesday night's Colbert Report to the under-covered push for human rights for humanoid robots — an idea being seriously promoted by billionaire Sirius satellite radio inventor Martine Rothblatt.
Colbert traveled to Lincoln, Vermont, to visit Rothblatt and her bodiless android creation, Bina — a (literal) talking head she created in the image of her wife, Bina Aspen Rothblatt. The Rothblatts want to upload human thoughts, memories, and beliefs into android bodies, and Colbert took mock umbrage at Martine's choice of model: "We've always known that robots are soulless killing machines, but now they come fully uploaded with centuries of minority rage and resentment." Absurdist fearmongering at its finest. Let's hope nobody takes Colbert seriously. --Peter Weber
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
5 educational cartoons about the Harvard pushbackCartoons Artists take on academic freedom, institutional resistance, and more
-
One-pan black chickpeas with baharat and orange recipeThe Week Recommends This one-pan dish offers bold flavours, low effort and minimum clean up
-
Merz's coalition deal: a 'betrayal' of Germany?Talking Point With liberalism, freedom and democracy under threat globally, it's a time for 'giants' – but this is a 'coalition of the timid'
-
Test flight of orbital rocket from Europe explodesSpeed Read Isar Aerospace conducted the first test flight of the Spectrum orbital rocket, which crashed after takeoff
-
Space-age living: The race for robot servantsFeature Meta and Apple compete to bring humanoid robots to market
-
Apple pledges $500B in US spending over 4 yearsSpeed Read This is a win for Trump, who has pushed to move manufacturing back to the US
-
Microsoft unveils quantum computing breakthroughSpeed Read Researchers say this advance could lead to faster and more powerful computers
-
TikTok's fate uncertain as weekend deadline loomsSpeed Read The popular app is set to be banned in the U.S. starting Sunday
-
Appeals court kills FCC net neutrality ruleSpeed Read A U.S. appeals court blocked Biden's effort to restore net-neutrality rules
-
Judge rejects Elon Musk's $56B pay package againSpeed Read Judge Kathaleen McCormick upheld her rejection of the Tesla CEO's unprecedented compensation deal
-
DOJ seeks breakup of Google, ChromeSpeed Read The Justice Department aims to force Google to sell off Chrome and make other changes to rectify its illegal search monopoly
