I saw Companion the other day. It’s quite good, but it falls into the trap that every… other… damn… robot… story… falls into. It makes the robot human. I don’t mean shaped like a human. That’s obvious. But it acts like a human in every way except for how it was created. It’s the protagonist. It’s the one who has to change. It’s the one who has all the obstacles to conquer. It’s making the hero’s journey. And it’s making all the mistakes. Human mistakes. But robots are not people. They’re robots. They don’t make mistakes. And they also can’t do anything outside their programming. Stories about robots are not…
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Some Thoughts About AI
You can’t go on a single web page without AI getting in your face, either it or something about it and how it’s going to doom us all, stocks are tanking, jobs are disappearing. But the thing is, the only people who care about AI are the ones shoveling it into everything. The CEOs and corporate executives who are investing so much into it because they took a pass on crypto and don’t want to miss the boat a second time. Who’s going to be the 800-lb. gorilla first? Who’s going to go under because of it? How will you be able to tell what’s AI-generated and what’s not? When’s…
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Gun Control Compromise: Treat Guns Like Killer Robots
Hey, how about we talk some more controversial politics? I know you all like that. We have a gun problem in this country. Both sides can agree on that. What they don’t agree on is what that problem is. We know that one side wants to restrict access to guns. The other wants them freely available. Never mind what their reasons are. Never mind the statistics, the motivations. Let’s just look at it as simply as possible. We can all agree that the purpose of a gun is to do harm to another person, right? First, let’s accept that as a given, regardless of what intent of the user. What…
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I Read the Short Circuit Novel So You Don’t Have To (and here are the differences)
Did you know there was a novelization of Short Circuit? I didn’t. And if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to this blog, you’d know that Short Circuit is my favorite movie. Has been since I was a kid. So when I found this on a used book site, I jumped at the shopping cart. Maybe I’d find some deleted scenes or altered information. Because novelizations are based on the shooting script, not the final product. For instance, the Independence Day novel includes more scenes of Randy Quaid and his family, endearing them to the audience. I’m sure these are deleted scenes on the DVD, but back in 1996,…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2020
Death of a Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery by Laurie Loewenstein I read this because my wife was reading it for book club. Plus the idea intrigued me–a mystery story set in a piece of history rooted in Americana. I had never heard of it, the author, or the publishing company before. But I thought I could use a break from the robots and aliens. The thing is, it’s just tedious. The characters are dull as dishwater. There’s no intensity to the mystery. There’re no stakes. It’s as dry as the dust bowl it’s telling about. The thing about a mystery book is that bad mysteries contain large swaths of…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2019
Year One by Nora Roberts This is the nicest apocalypse I’ve ever seen. It was advertised to me as a big epic story like The Stand, but with magic. It even has a mystery flu as the apocalypse-causing incident. But The Stand, this ain’t. Where’s the bleakness? Where’s the stakes? Where’s the beef? The blurbs and reviews made it out like the next best thing since Patrick Rothfuss, but really it’s just a standard novel that feels like it belongs on mass market shelves at the grocery store. I was hoping for a unique twist, but it’s underdeveloped. And all you get are a bunch of nice people doing nice…
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Robots vs. Fairies
So last month I read “Robots vs. Fairies”, a collection of short stories. I was a little disappointed because it wasn’t so much “versus” as “here’s robots and now here’s fairies” (except for one story at the end). But at the end of each story, the author declared whether they were “Team Robot” or “Team Fairy” and why. Even though the split is even, it felt like Team Fairy came out the winner. But I thought it’d be fun to declare my allegiance, even though I’m not part of the book. (They didn’t even *ask* me! *sniffle*) Even though I probably read and produce more fantasy than science fiction, I…
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Robots and Kill Switches
I’ve been reading synopses of Westworld episodes, thinking about robots. Why don’t people ever put in failsafes or killswitches in their robots? This seems like the first thing you should think of when you working with a complex machine that has potential to turn on you. They even got buzzsaws that can shut off when they detect your finger. Sure, you get a cut, but you get to keep your finger. But robots. No, they don’t need killswitches. We make ’em so perfect they don’t need ’em. Which leads to the cliche “moral of the story” about man’s hubris that we’ve been hearing about since Frankenstein (arguably the first robot…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2016
Rejected Princesses: Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics by David Porath I fell in love with this book immediately, which has never happened to me before. I am not an early adopter, and it’s the onus of every book to entice me. Of course, by the time I know that, I’m usually victim to time sink fallacy. But look at this cover. It looks like all the books in the old Disney movies. You know, like in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty where a live-action book opens at the beginning and closes at “the end”. Now I have a book like that. I can look like I’m reading an…
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What Went Wrong With Chappie
Okay, let’s talk about Chappie. Since I saw its trailer, I’ve been through months of indecision about whether or not to put it on my Netflix Queue. I love robot movies, but reviews were terribly mixed – one YouTuber put it on his best of 2015 list and another put it on his worst list. When one critic called it a combination of “Short Circuit” and “Robocop”, I couldn’t say no anymore. Overall, it’s a highly flawed movie. The concept isn’t original, but it’s not a cliche. The story has peaks and valleys, like it should, but it’s overshadowed by hammy actors. I can’t help but see it as a…
