Posts Tagged ‘aritificial intelligence’
I’ve been dipping my toes into Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The cover led me to believe this is all robot stories, but what I found was more a spectrum of cyborg, to disembodied AIs, to actual robots. As with all anthologies, some stories are forgettable, and some shine like supernovas.
I’ve not read everything in the antho yet, and maybe I never will.
But here are some stories that have already made an impression on me.
The Hurt Pattern, by Tochi Onyebuchi – What is this doing in a fiction anthology? Other than the “connect yourself to your computer at work, and then literally unplug”, the rest of this sure doesn’t feel like fiction. To pay off his student loans, Kenny gets a job sorting data. Obvs, his job is more complicated than that, but he’s good at the work, and he makes friends. He makes some dangerous connections involving why certain cities are more violent than others, and how the uptick in violence is connected to, well, that’s spoiler territory. This story gonna make you mad.
Brother Rifle, by Daryl Gregory – A Marine suffering from PTSD alongside his traumatic brain injury. He doesn’t understand how this therapy is supposed to work, and worse, he feels like he is imposing on his family. How exactly, is this implant supposed to safely let him start feeling emotions again? What’s the deal with the patterns on the cards? What’s the difference between a robot and someone who lost all emotion through a brain injury and now has no power of attorney over their own self? Story is a bit of a slow burn, that kind where you think you know where it’s going, and then that last scene hits you like a ton of bricks. Lots in this story hit close to home for me – how mental illness and PTSD is handled, how we expect people to magically get better after a few months of therapy. If i read this again, i’m gonna cry.
Bigger Fish, by Sarah Pinsker – quite the comfort read, which was sorely needed. A private detective is hired to investigate the death of a “gazillionaire water tycoon”. The man was home alone, with only his personal robots. This was a nostalgic Asimov-esque I Robot style story – obviously the robots killed the guy, but how to prove it, when a robot can’t harm a person? When you’re ready for a unicorn chaser, read this story.
A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jae-Min Prasad – super cute story, told entirely through online messages between two robots who become friends through a mentorship program. They have drastically different personalities, so it’s super adorable when the “killer” starts buying gifts for the young upstart. Sometimes even a teacher can learn a thing or two. This story is the perfect one to open the anthology – it is bright, optimistic, and laugh out loud adorable. Maybe it’s because one of the ‘bots mentions dogs right at the beginning, That i couldn’t help but view both of these characters as robotic dogs, the young one as a cheerful, floppy eared puppy, and the older one one as a grizzled guard dog.
Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar – just an absolutely beautiful story. As the protagonist spends one entire night telling fairy tales to her sleeping robot, she realizes how much fairy tales maybe do belong to robots, what with all the sleeping without dying, and the constant drudgery, and the ability to eat something poisonous and not die, and the oddities of how fairy tales allow characters to do superhuman things. We learn a few things about the narrator, how she sees herself compared to how the world sees her. And why shouldn’t robot children be told stories about impossible things? This story is buried in the back of the anthology. My advice is that you read it first.
I like this idea of there being a spectrum between human and robot. Does a pacemaker make you a cyborg? What if you have a steel pin in your leg? How about an artificial limb, or a wheelchair that moves based on your brain waves?
Based on the cover art, I was worried this anthology was going to be “Robot Adventures!”, luckily, it isn’t. It’s mostly about humans who are on the cusp of something, and choosing to deal with those feelings, or suppress them.
Robot Uprisings edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams
published April 2014
Where I got it: purchased new
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Robots are supposed to help us, right? they’re supposed to do the jobs that humans don’t want to or can’t do, right? and thanks to Asimov’s three (four!) laws, there’s nothing to worry about.
right?
wrong. Leave it to folks like Alan Dean Foster, Seanan McGuire, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, Ernest Cline, Nnedi Oforakor and others to remind me that robots do exactly what we program them to do, and in many cases this is fucking terrifying.
I just about every story in this anthology, we played God. We created something, typically in our own image, that would be able to do things we couldn’t. Our creations raise and teach our children, solve our computer programming issues, clean up radiation, do jobs that are too dangerous for humans to do, protect company assets, keep us healthy, etc. When we’re so sure our inventions will help us towards a better world, what could possibly go wrong?
But lets say we succeed. the computer programming issue has been solved, the kids are grown up, the asset has been protected, diseases have been cured, the radiation has been cleaned up. What do we do when our problem is fixed and our shiny tools are no longer needed? Robots are designs to work. they are not designed to stop.
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Posted on: December 4, 2013
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
published October 2013
where I got it: received review copy from the publisher (Thanks Orbit!)
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The mission of the Radchaai is to bring civilization to humanity. The word radchaai itself, means civilization, implying that anyone who isn’t Radchaai isn’t civilized. Their empire has always expanded, annexing colonies and planets, bringing civilization and culture to the far corners of the galaxy. Those who resist are taken prisoner, and either destroyed or turned into corpse soldiers, to become ancillaries for the massive AIs that run the Radchaai ships.
Breq is one such AI. Twenty years ago, Breq answered to the name One Esk, and was the ship AI for the ship Justice of Toren. One Esk controlled and embodied thousands of ancillaries who ran the ship and served the human officers on board. Twenty years ago an annexation went horribly wrong, The Justice of Toren was destroyed, and Breq was left alone with only one human body, one set of ears, one brain, no friends or allies, and a burning hatred.
Breq is still trying to figure out what happened on Justice of Toren. Yes, it’s true, that ancillaries of the Radchaai supreme leader Anaander Mianaai secretly came aboard and swore One Esk to secrecy, and then possibly changed something in the AI’s memory banks. For twenty years, Breq has been looking for the single weapon that can get past the scanners, get past the security that surrounds Anaander Mianaai. For the good of Radchaai, Breq is plotting to destroy the creator of their empire.
The blogosphere is much a-fire about this book. Author Ann Leckie should probably start looking at flights to London for next summer:
Ana: Dare I? I can’t really think of a single thing that is not right about the book. So Yeah: 10
Thea: 10 – Utter Perfection
– The Book Smugglers
This is a book to watch out for, and if it doesn’t garner the author a Hugo nomination, I’ll be very much surprised.
– A Dribble of Ink
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice does everything science fiction should do. It engages, it excites, and it challenges the way the reader views our world. . . . Ancillary Justice might be the best science fiction novel of this very young decade.
– Staffer’s Book Review
- In: Clarkesworld | Gord Sellar | Jay Lake | Kij Johnson | Matthew Kressel | short stories
- 8 Comments
I was lucky enough to get a copy of Clarksworld Year Four, which includes 24 pieces of original short fiction the digital magazine published during their fourth year of publication. Never heard of Clarkesworld? Please, allow me to enlighten you, because these people simply rock it. A digital magazine featuring original speculative fiction, interviews, and editorials, Clarkesworld published their first issue in 2006 and their original short fiction has been winning awards ever since. The magazine itself has even picked up a few awards along the way (can you say three Hugo’s!!).
So I don’t have to tell you how awesome this magazine is.
You know how usually when I review an anthology or collection, I only talk about a handful of stand-out pieces, my favorites? Not this time. The handful of short stories I’ve read so far (or listened to. Yay podcasting! I love you Kate Baker!) are some of the strangest, most out-there fiction I have ever come across. We’ve got McDonald’s terrorists, interstellar runaways, reincarnations of people who aren’t dead yet, the end of the universe, and an AI who thinks she’s a fairy tale. Because everything in here is just so damn weird, I want each piece to get some much deserved attention. I’ll review 3-4 short stories at a time, so you, dear readers and followers, can get the full treatment.
Want to make a comment on my review? By all means, comment here. I’ve linked each story back to Clarkesworld, so you can read the whole thing (or listen to the audio) and comment over there and give the magazine some direct attention.
Let’s get started:
Alone with Gandhari by Gord Sellar – Kenny used to work fast food. He used to be a fat guy. But now, after a therapy that finally worked, with his taut belly and his clown-like facial tattoos, he’s a high ranking follower of Guru Deepak. Like all the other followers, he answers to the name Ronald, even though he prefers Ron. This opening paragraphs of this story were completely off-putting and disorienting to me, which makes the story hard to get into, but I’m happy I kept reading because I really ended up enjoying it, or at least I enjoyed the mental mind-fuck aspects of it. Guru Deepak wants to help people change for the better, his followers will help him change the world. He is especially welcoming to people who need to stop eating fast food all the time. All are welcome, the blessings of Ghandhari are available to anyone who chooses to listen. The vegetarian lifestyle and meditation is probably good for Ron/Kenny’s health, but he’s unwittingly joined a cult. The hyped up Ronalds commit “Mac Attacks”, terrorizing patrons of fast food restaurants. Ron/Kenny has been chosen by Deepak to lead an important mission to a corporate farm. Far worse than eating a cow is abusing one on a farm, but what the Ronalds find on the farm isn’t exactly a cow. Is this a commentary on Fast Food or on food in general? A nightmarish satire? I’m not sure.
Madeline Ashby is the author of two of my favorite recent novels, vN and iD (links go to my reviews). In the Machine Dynasty series, Ashby envisions a near future world where Von Neumann self replicating androids have become an every-day part of our lives. They raise and teach our children, take on dangerous occupations, and were supposed to make our lives easier. Sounds easy, right? not so much, when you get the story from the vN’s point of view.
For more information about Madeline Ashby, her fiction, her travel schedule, and more, I encourage you to visit her website, and follow her on twitter. More than that, I encourage you to read her amazing fiction!
My question/prompt to Ms. Ashby for her guest post was:
Once upon a time we started with Asimov’s unemotional humanoid robots, and then we evolved to robots who could be tricked/programmed to believe they were human and robots who desperately wanted to be human, and now in the Machine Dynasty series we have robots who know they aren’t human, but tend to feel emotions even stronger and more powerfully than many people. What’s the next step for robot/AI fiction? Where do we go from here?
And here’s what she had to say:
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I think robot subjectivity is still a wide open space for science fiction writers. I think the challenge is to actually dig in to the reality of computer vision, and algorithmic detection of motion, affect, and identity. One of the things I beat myself up for is not digging more deeply into those things. There are other writers who just kill it when it comes to that kind of rigorous depiction of another’s consciousness. Peter Watts is probably the best at it — in his stories “The Things” and “Malak,” he’s able to write exactly the experience that an alien and a predator drone would have, from their perspective, without making any room for the human element. If you want it dumbed down or warmed up, well, that’s just too bad. He’s that disciplined in his approach.
The State of the Art (short story collection) by Iain M. Banks
published in 2007
where I got it: gift from a friend
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Iain Banks’ Culture novels were love at first page for me. I didn’t mind being thrown far into the deep end, I was amused by the silly names and dry humor, I adored the drones and the Minds. Succinctly, I love me some Culture books.
But. . . . they are long, and tough to get into, and being tossed in the deep end isn’t for everyone. The State of The Art isn’t entirely Culture short stories, but it’s enough to give someone an easily survivable introduction to The Culture universe and Banks’ writing style. Even better, there’s an entire chapter A Few Notes On The Culture, which is quite a bit more than a few and gives even more indepth info, including what someone can expect if they live in The Culture (and where they’ll live), body modifications, life span, interactions with other civilizations, why everyone has such a long name, and the reason why most Culture novels take place on the edge of their sphere of influence. In fact, I wish I’d read that portion first, even though it’s at the end of the book. Also, Banks insists on making it very clear that The Culture is completely fictional. Pretty telling that this is the 2nd scifi book in a row where the author felt the need to do that.
Short enough to be read in a few sittings, the first story, Road of Skulls, serves as a wry introduction and so should be read first, but other than that you can bounce around and read the rest in any order you please.
here are my thoughts on some of the entries:
The State of the Art – Featuring one of my favorite Culture characters, Diziet Sma, The Culture discovers Earth, circa 1978, and they are trying to decide if they should make contact with us or not. Along with other Culture people who can blend in and look human, Sma and her counterpart Linter are sent to Earth for one year to observe us. Linter goes missing and Sma is sent after him. Has he gone native? Did he fall in love with an Earthling and doesn’t want to leave? What could possibly make an Earth life more attractive to Linter than living in The Culture, where everyone has everything they could possibly want?
earlier today, my husband randomly asks me “Do you think people could really live with artificial intelligence? Not AI in computers, but real live artificial intelligence?”
So many angles of this question to tackle. I thought of the movie AI Artificial Intelligence (one of my favorite movies, by the way). I thought of Hal9000. I thought of Data from Star Trek. I’m in the middle of reading Use of Weapons by Iain Banks, so I thought of that, the drones, the Minds. I thought of Siri. I thought of Madeline Ashby, Ted Chiang, and every book I’ve ever read where someone began to care for an AI and something went sour.
And notice he didn’t say “will we”, but “could we”, which got me thinking about how people react when facing a very large change in their life that they have no control over. What about people who are very religious? Do AIs have souls? will it matter? What about the Amish? Will AIs only be for rich people, or will they be as cheap and available as a pay-as-you go cell phone? If AIs became commonplace, would people have the choice to interact with them or not?
“Sure”, I responded. “It’ll be just like smartphones. All the kids raised with them will think it’s second nature, but us grown ups will have a tough time getting used to it.”
That was a fairly pedestrian answer.
So now it’s your turn:
Do you think people could really live with artificial intelligence? Not AI in computers, but real live artificial intelligence?
Sudden, Broken and Unexpected (novella) by Steven Popkes
December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction
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Can music be broken down into ones and zeroes, bits and micro-bits? Can music be written by an AI?
possibly. sort of. maybe?
Which leads to questions of how would one program and AI to pass a musical Turing Test, where the music written by the AI is indistinguishable from the creative musical abilities of a human? Is such a thing possible? and if it were, how would the music loving public react?
In Steven Popkes latest short story, Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected, he takes the above and slowly turns it inside out, in the process creating a highly impactful story.
The story opens with musician Jake Mulcahey taking a job to revise and rewrite some fairly generic pop music. In his youth, Jake had gone on the road with his band as they chased the fame of their sole hit single. Jake is still haunted by his bad decisions, the fact that he is the reason the band broke up. Since then, he’s put out a few studio albums, and stays mostly behind the scenes in the music industry.
Besides, who would want to see an oldster like Jake on stage playing guitar, when instead they could pay to see a holographic Divaloid? Even better, Divaloids can be downloaded into your own home. They aren’t people, they are licensing and programming. There isn’t anything a Divaloid can’t or won’t do to please a fan. That’ll start to get creepy once that thought sinks into your brain, and it’s supposed to.
Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
published in 2003
where I got it: borrowed
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I used to read a ton of Charles Stross, I couldn’t get enough of the guy. Over a few years I managed to burn myself out, and recently I’ve really gotten back into him with his Laundry series. And then I realized, I’ve never read the man’s Hugo nominated debut novel, Singularity Sky.
First off, what the heck is a singularity, and why should you care? It’s important to know, if you’re interested in understanding the importance of Stross’s singularity themed science fiction. Broadly defined, a singularity is when the rate of change reaches infinity, it’s the event horizon, the moment when artificial intelligence reaches beyond human comprehension.Those graphs that show a curved line going up and up and up? when that line is perfectly vertical, that’s the singularity. When computers and nanomachines and AIs are crunching information at a speed that’s faster than we can measure, that’s singularity. Some folks are pretty freaked out about the idea of computational ability being stronger, larger, and faster than the combination of all the human brains on the planet, and Stross? He’s the guy dancing on the razor edge of the event horizon.
Singularity Sky takes place in the aftermath of a singularity event which caused humanity to be scattered among the stars. Martin Springfield, an engineer from Earth, has been dispatched to an out of the way star system called The Republic. Overly aristocratic and trapped in their neo-luddite ways, the common people of The Republic are ripe for revolution, and in fact, a small rebellion in a little colony on Rochard’s World has already begun, thanks to an entity that calls itself The Festival.
vN by Madeline Ashby
Posted on: May 31, 2012
vN by Madeline Ashby
published July 2012 from Angry Robot Books
where I got it: received review copy from the publisher
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I could so easily start every paragraph of this review with “but the best part of the book was. . .” because are just so many incredible aspects of this book – the characters and their lives, the surprising way this future came to be, the dark subtexts, and the easy to understand technology, just to mention the ones that quickly come to mind. With nods to Blade Runner, Ai, and of course Pinocchio, vN is for anyone who is sick of waiting for the future to get here already. I recently had the honor to interview Madeline Ashby, and if there is anyone knows what the future brings, it’s her. It wouldn’t surprise me if she edged out Cory Doctorow as my favorite futurist. She’s canny on the uncanny valley, and I think after reading vN you will be too.
First off, the vast majority of the book is from the viewpoint of the vN’s. Ashby immediately puts us behind the eyes of Amy, a five year old vN who has been raised by her vN mother and her human father. Her parents have chosen to raise her as close to a human child as possible, so along with all the other five year old kids in the neighborhood, Amy is in kindergarden at the beginning of our story.
But Amy isn’t a regular human girl. She’s a von Neumann self replicating humanoid. And it’s the “self replicating” part thats only the first brilliant thing in this book. By consuming the correct amount of feedstock, a vN can iterate – create a clone of themselves. Amy is a clone of her mother Charlotte, and every vN of their model has identical physical attributes. Conversely, should a vN want to stay child-size or not iterate, they must literally starve themselves. Amy has been starving since the day she was “born”. So when her grandmother threatens Charlotte, Amy’s first reaction is to disarm her grandmother by eating her.
Kindergardner eats Grandma is a bit of an opening shocker, no?
why yes, yes that was a bit of a shocker. But a brilliant one.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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