Learning from the Mistakes of Literature

One of the things that Man can do — or maybe that’s Woman, since I’m not sure men learn from their mistakes — is learn from the mistakes of others. We can even learn from mistakes that are just written and then read. The government calls these “lessons learned,” but I don’t think the past tense is deserved.

Over at Subtopia they remark on the trend toward automated mechanized warfare.

Did we learn nothing from The Terminator, nothing from Berserker? From “Second Variety”? Or, even, from the Greeks?