What will stay with you most powerfully are the words, “God was with us,” etched by the miners on the wall as they get ready to board, one by one, the ascending capsule-on-a-pulley; a kind of moon-landing capsule-recovery, in reverse. It was certainly a moonscape, 2,300 feet down under, that these men inhabited for an unthinkable 69 days.
Ever thought Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were too complicated? Happily, the ROC robotics corporation has distilled them down to two prime directives. Essentially, all robots are hardwired to cause no harm and to never alter themselves in any way. However, there seems to be a handful of rogue ’bots, self-repairing and maybe even self-upgrading. An insurance investigator slowly starts to suspect that singularity may really be nigh in Gabe Ibáñez’s “Automata.”