"But Dave, Will I dream?"

More often than not, we find ourselves looking at the nasty truth behind mankind's constant leaps and bounds scientifically. It is almost painful to consider that what was once fanciful myth is now hard science.

Great and terrible lizards roamed the earth, in the 19th century this was considered a myth. Darwin's proposed ideas of Survival of the Fittest was almost mythical when it was written, and the modified script of modern science labels the concept as almost a law. Marx's proposed social changes that seemed so sound and possible in turn were destroyed and made a fanciful dream. The very illustrations labeled in Frankenstein, the fanciful ideas of using electricity to stimulate the nervous system has led to greater things. We are learning how the brain actually functions. We know how impulses travel in the nervous system and how to mimic that. We're learning how to grow new limbs, to literally build broken parts of the human body through genetic manipulation.

We can't restore life to dead tissue, we can do one better. We can create new life. From a single fertilized ova, we can create a life form fully dictated by a scientist and genetic manipulation. It is illegal, mind you, but it is very possible. Clones are near perfect, a matching clone can be born without major complication. New life, new existence designed from the beginning to be the ideal and perfect human form can exist.

To make matters worse, we are going to, and already have dabbled with the oncoming social stratification of "intelligent machines". A self-thinking, self-aware computer is a step away, and we (as a species, not a national scale) have begun building robots to fight our battles for us. Not just the remote controlled spy planes that the military makes use of. There is an actively researched system of Artificial Intelligence being used for the US military, sponsored to completely unman Army convoys to prevent the loss of life. Whole competitions have been held to win the funding to develop new, more advanced robotic systems.

Add to this the fact that as time continues on, a self-aware, self-managing computer would be more efficient. There is a want to continue the advancement of AI under the assumption that it would be controlled. Victor's monster seems to illustrate the exact opposite. He throws down these shackles of control, and manipulates his maker to do his bidding. Upon Victor's failing, he proceeds to do the reversal of roles, and punishes Victor cruelly as he would do an insolent child. What is to dictate that these creations wouldn't about face and enslave us?

Worse yet, HAL 9000, the computer from 2001 and 2010, is an example of something of an AI being unable to cope with these new ideas put on it. It behaves like a child does, so to speak. It desires to play games with the crew and, in a strange way, develops a friendly relationship with them. It is abused, however, and is told to keep secrets from the crew aboard the ship when they are sent to investigate an alien artifact. The US military has commanded that it conduct secret tests and feed them the information without informing the crew of its purpose. Unable to cope and understand the idea to tell everything to the crew and to keep secrets from them, it panics and rationalizes that it must kill the crew to keep the secrets safe and to tell the crew everything.

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics has seen use in numerous films and stories, dictating a strict law set for advanced robotics can still be manipulated and ways found around it. It is simple, so to speak, to avoid these laws and find loopholes much like humans do. While they are a novel concept, it is not iron-clad.

Each of these offer stern warnings not to what might be done... but what is actually happening.