
SciFi Tech Talk
SciFi Tech Talk is the podcast where we look at a movie / TV show / book / short story and the tech involved and what it says about THE FUTURE. We may go through some older material and see how much has become reality and how far we have yet to go. And new material could be looked at from the standpoint of how long we think it will take to become reality and how far from the present does it stretch the imagination.
SciFi Tech Talk
SciFi Tech Talk #000195 - We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
•
Julie Kuehl, Jeff Syer, Mike McPeek
Julie, Jeff, and Mike discuss the 2016 book "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)": Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.
The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.