Lately, I’ve been seeing news reports about manlike, man-sized, autonomous, bipedal robots.  Such a robot in Poland chased a pack of feral pigs out of a neighborhood.  It wasn’t remotely controlled.  It perceived it’s target, understood its objective, and behaved accordingly.  It was able to chase the pigs around obstacles and, unlike a wheeled machine, it was able to negotiate such things as curbs.
In China, some robots ran against human competitors in a half marathon.  The robots were autonomous, not remotely controlled.  They correctly followed the course of the race.  They ran on two legs, not on wheels.  One of them ran faster than the human competitors, and won the race.
Back when drones first became available, people wondered if such drones would ever be weaponized.  They were weaponized.  Now, I don’t doubt that the robots will be weaponized.  That robot in China not only ran faster than its human competitors, it ran about 13 miles, which is farther than most people can run.
It’s possible and, in my opinion, it’s even likely, that in the foreseeable future, people are going to face an entirely new kind of enemy.
The robots are coming.

Russia and Ukraine are at war with one another.  Nevertheless, Russia is pumping oil to Hungary and Slovakia, through the Druzbha pipeline, which runs through Ukraine.  The pipeline was previously damaged by a Russian attack, but Ukraine repaired it.  Now, it’s in operation again.  The income generated for Russia, by the sale of the oil, is used by Russia in its war against Ukraine.  Some of the Russian oil that’s purchased by Hungary is refined into diesel fuel and sent to Ukraine, where it’s used in the war against Russia.  I wondered how such a strange situation could arise, and I recalled the Overcreature Theory, the origins of which go back to at least the 1990s.
As early as  the 1980s, I think, The Elusive One and I characterized corporations as overcreatures.  By that name, we intended to address the many life-like characteristics of corporations.  They seek resources and consume the things that they need in order to survive.  They produce things and generate waste.  They grow.  Sometimes they reproduce.  The form of reproduction is asexual but it’s nevertheless a form of reproduction.  They compete with others of their kind.  Sometimes, they die in the competition.  The winners might consume the losers or just leave them to rot.  Corporations have sense organs that enable them to detect and respond to stimuli from outside of themselves.  They communicate with one another.  The people who work within them serve functions that are analogous to the functions of cells in a biological organism.  Those people don’t have any more control over the corporations of which they’re a part than the cells in your body have over you.  Corporations have immune systems and will protect themselves from diseased cells or infections.  That is, troublemakers, whistle blowers, corporate spies, and so forth, will be resisted.  The various departments within a corporation are functionally analogous to the organs in a biological organism.  The board of directors is functionally analogous to the brain.  In almost every way, corporations behave as if they’re alive.  Thus, we coined the term overcreature.
In Proliferation, in the April 2008 issue, I proposed a distinction between living things and non-living things.   That distinction is that, in order to be regarded as being alive, a thing must have a form in which a process is under way that can be terminated without necessarily disrupting the form of the thing.  Granted,

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— editor

Betty Bottor bought a bit of butter to put in her batter and make her batter better.

But, said Betty, “This butter’s bitter!  If I put it in my batter, it’ll make my batter bitter!  But a bit of better butter would make my batter better!”

So Betty Bottor bought a bit of better butter, put it in her batter and made her batter better

A skunk stood on a stump.  The skunk thunk the stump stunk and the stump thunk the skunk stunk.

If it takes a woodpecker a week to peck a pack of shingles out of a board fence, then how long does it take a rooster to lay a doornob?

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