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The story I thought about while watching Matrix #1 was Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress. This is the most rollicking "reality=perception" tale that I've ever read. I'm tempted to share the twists and turns here, but that really would be spoiling it since it's an awesome mind f*** the first time through. Suffice it to say that Lem is such a good writer, you suspend your disbelief at the door. Funny too. For a taste, here's a riff about robots (and a brilliant piece of translation from Polish by Michael Kandel) from about half-way through the story:
If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And I found out what dissimulators are: they simply pretend that they're not pretending to be defective. Or perhaps its the other way around. The whole thing is very complicated. A probot is a robot on probation, while a servo is one still serving time. A robotch may or may not be a sabotch. One vial [[the means of ingesting information in this future -sm]] and my head is splitting with information and nomenclature. A confuter, for instance, is not a confounding machine -- that's a confutator -- but a computer that quotes Confucius. A grammus is an antiquated frammus, a gidget -- a cross between a gadget and a widget, usually flighty. A bananalog is an analog banana plug. Contraputers are loners, individualists unable to work with others: the friction these types used to produce on the grid team led to high revoltage, electrical discharges, even fires. Some get completely out of hand -- the dynamoks, the locomotors, the cyberserkers. And then you have the electrolechers, succubutts and incubators -- robots all of ill repute -- and the polypanderiods, multiple android procurers, with high-frequency illicitating solicitrons, osculo-oscilloscopes and seduction circuits! The history book also mentions synthecs (synthetic insects) like gyroflies or automites, once programmed for military purposes and included in arsenals. Army ants in particular were stockpiled. A submachine is an undercover robot, that is, one which passes for a man. A social climber, in a way. Old robots discarded by their owners, cast out into the street, are called throwaways or junkets. This is unfortunately, a fairly common practice. Apparently they used to cart them off to game preserves and there hunt them down for sport, but the S.P.C.A. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Automata) intervened and had this declared unconstitutional. Yet the problem of robot obsolescence-senescence has not been solved, and one still comes across an occasional selfabort or autocide sprawling in the gutter.