Well… more or less, yes. But a great reading, they're still within my fav. over the top sword & sorcery books
It likely wouldn't be more than an overly sophisticated Therac-25, really. The danger of machines, even learning algorithms, isn't that they might rebel against us, but that they will faithfully do exactly what we tell them to do without question like a literal genie. All it would take is a poorly-written line of code or poorly-stated command, with nothing to say of physically abusing the poor thing, and the butler robot goes from serving you faithfully to serving you for dinner with not a hint of malice.
I think that is indeed a very real danger. If we were to create true AI, it would surpass us very quickly. Then, thinking on its own, who knows what will happen.
This may be so, but insofar as such an AI hasn't been developed yet (our current learning algorithms are actually pretty dumb for all the hype given about them), our more immediate concern should be the very real dangers associated with bad programming in general. If you think an AI is bad news, just imagine what it would be like if it was as buggy as a Bethesda game.
btw, regarding Worcester, the C is silent, so it's pronounced as "Wooster" locally. It's a pretty major town in Massachusetts.
*ahem* I think there’s a rather more significant town with that name: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester And it has its own sauce!
Pretty much, yeah. I did enjoy them, but you notice that they were written in the 1930s. The author was a fan of race theory, and in contrast to later fantasy authors he used human races. Quite stereotypical and he often writes things like "a member of a lesser race would have died instantly, but the Cinmerians were of superior blood so Conan lived". In fact it was so obvious in some stories (actually the books are not books, but short story collections) that some weren't published for years, or quite heavily edited. IIRC the author once also had an article published in which he explained that his stories are supposed to be set in a forgotten chapter of humanity's history, and the cimmerians are the ancestors of the aryans, made to rule the earth. Such stuff. That being said: the stories themselves are really interesting and IMO decently written. Relatively dark and gritty.