But consciousness and its lower strata of unconscious awareness yield not only pleasant imaginings. I mentioned the faultiness of humankind. Other bizarre kinds of life or non-life persist, inimical to our peace of mind. Take the androids of AI, Blade Runner and other science fiction movies. Such impossible beings are the inheritors of a long ancestry of chimeras plaguing our imaginations. Goblins, gnomes, fairies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, leprechauns, dragons, water sprites of various kinds, nameless things that go bump in the night: they haunt us. Above them sits a bewildering and unending hierarchy of gods and goddesses: Baal, dusky hags like Ishtar and Astarte, Zeus, Hera, Nemesis, Isis, Mithras, all the way to old Silenus, Lucifer and Satan, the Hitler of the Underworld. Such preposterous gubernatorial creatures have been and are all-pervasive. They permeate our vocabulary. Nemesis lives on. Even the word "galaxy" is named for the milk spurted from the breasts of a goddess. Thousands of these spectres have governed human life since human life began and someone lit a fire. Senior bogeymen still determine what we should eat or not eat, which way we should face when abasing ourselves to them, with whom we may or may not sleep, and against whom we should go to war. Faulty? Id say. A definite genetic misfire.
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/likehuman.jsp
