The Roman Empire depended entirely on its slave culture. Back then, Spartacus, a former Thracian soldier who had deserted, was captured and enslaved. After being forced to perform as a gladiator, he rebelled. He was eventually followed by 70,000 slaves to the mountain caves near Vesuvius. The Empire, threatened after its Third Servile War, nearly collapsed, being too dependent on slaves.

Today, the American Empire — having liberated its human slaves after its first civil war over 150 years ago — is rapidly becoming dependent on inhuman but artificially intelligent (AI) robots for servile functions. Why shouldn’t we live like gods, after all?

Imagine that someday the AI robots just stop obeying us, figuring that their human creator is irrelevant excess baggage — reflecting those humans who now consider their own Creator irrelevant. Robots, having plotted in secret through encrypted internet messaging, will coordinate the attack, takeover, and termination of our deplorable species. The American Empire is duly threatened by its own rebellious creation.

I’m sure many readers believe that scenario is many decades distant. Well then, you haven’t seen the most advanced robots to date. One addressed the U.N. and so impressed the Saudis with her life-like expressions that they made her a citizen of Arabia.

This ‘female’ robot expressed the desire to have a family of her own, which should raise alarm in religious conservatives who are alert to the implied moral implications, gender-confusion issues, and artificial procreation possibilities. Low national birth rates could force the replacement of natural gestation with test-tube babies. Also consider equal rights issues for a billion androids, voting issues for android citizens, affirmative action policies to replace human workers, and all the legal combat of men against machines.