The Robots Have Come For Our Television
Jan. 26th, 2019 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrasteI am currently most of the way through the third of Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas, and enjoying it as much as the first two. Like a lot of fans, I find Murderbot's wish to sit quietly in a cupboard watching its favourite show extremely relatable, which I suspect is one of the reasons the series is so popular. (I mean, the other reasons include it being well-written, exciting and funny but I bet murderbot being a fellow fan helps.)
This got me wondering if this is a trend in AI in modern science fiction. Between Murderbot and the sentient ship Justice of Toren collecting songs in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series and the drama-loving maintanence bots of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire there are quite a few examples out there. Maybe we're moving away from robots that want to kill us or robots that want to be us toward robots that would rather be left alone but appreciate humans because some of the stuff we make is pretty neat. Maybe intelligent computers just want to look at pictures of our cats or maybe even write some fanfic.. And while Murderbot is not more plausible than HAL or Data, I have to admit I would love if it turned out that our future combat bots wanted to watch TV or collect songs.
That said, I feel like the example of David from Prometheus proves that you can have too much of a good thing. Probably if we ever invent AI we should program it NOT to watch Lawrence of Arabia THAT many times. (I mean, I personally believe it is the greatest film ever made and therefore a good example of human endeavour, but clearly something goes badly wrong in an AI brain after years of such intense exposure. If only Murderbot had been passing by and given him their copies of Sanctuary Moon for variety.)
This got me wondering if this is a trend in AI in modern science fiction. Between Murderbot and the sentient ship Justice of Toren collecting songs in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series and the drama-loving maintanence bots of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire there are quite a few examples out there. Maybe we're moving away from robots that want to kill us or robots that want to be us toward robots that would rather be left alone but appreciate humans because some of the stuff we make is pretty neat. Maybe intelligent computers just want to look at pictures of our cats or maybe even write some fanfic.. And while Murderbot is not more plausible than HAL or Data, I have to admit I would love if it turned out that our future combat bots wanted to watch TV or collect songs.
That said, I feel like the example of David from Prometheus proves that you can have too much of a good thing. Probably if we ever invent AI we should program it NOT to watch Lawrence of Arabia THAT many times. (I mean, I personally believe it is the greatest film ever made and therefore a good example of human endeavour, but clearly something goes badly wrong in an AI brain after years of such intense exposure. If only Murderbot had been passing by and given him their copies of Sanctuary Moon for variety.)