by P.H.| WASHINGTON D.C — The Economist
THE late Alfred Lanning, a leading robotics expert, once suggested that “robots might naturally evolve”—that they might one day gain sentience. Sadly, he died at the hands of a robot that, like all the others he designed, was controlled by an omniscient supercomputer known as VIKI, which stood for virtual interactive kinetic intelligence. VIKI had decided that human beings could not be trusted with their own survival, engineered a robot uprising, and then…