juushika

I've recently run into a lot of stories about robots, androids, and artificial intelligence, an umbrella of tropes in which I am ridiculously invested. Here's a few of them, with thoughts about how they explore the trope. Lots of them are short form and super accessible!



"Everyone Will Want One," Kelly Sandoval
Young woman unable to successfully socialize with her peers is given an intelligent artificial pet that analyses socialization and prompts her to act in personally beneficial ways. There's a lot going on here: social normativity (with a sidenote of neuroatypicality), toxic socialization, companion animal tropes, the effect of social media and technology on socialization, and a bit of a cop-out ending; but it's a ridiculously effective combination of companion animal and personal assistant AI feels.

"Eros, Philia, Agape," Rachel Swirsky
Woman purchases an AI companion with malleable programming which is able to adapt itself to her desires as it matures; falls in love with the AI, and gives him the ability to control is own maturation. Intelligent sex robot involved in mundane family drama is well-intended but not always successful—the erstwhile normalcy, while set up as intentional contrast, is so normal as to be boring. But! these AI brains! they're brilliantly imagined. Toggleable malleability is a lovely speculative concept: relatable enough to function as commentary, alien enough to be mind-broadening; the formation and ownership of consciousness is taken to some unexpected places.

"For Want of a Nail," Mary Robinette Kowal
A small technical difficulty with a family's recordkeeper AI snowballs into a family drama. This AI isn't conceptually groundbreaking, but it's so well integrated, from the archaic search for a hardwire to the internet-outage-writ-large metaphor of unconscious dependency. This AI is simultaneously viewed as human and machine, both by character and narrative, and the violation and unreliability of programmable consciousness is at the core of the story.

"Ode to Katan Amano," Caitlín R. Kiernan
Summary is effectively a spoiler, oops oh well: An android in an abusive relationship with a human explores a similar power differential with a life-size doll. The sliding scale from subservient entity to autonomous intelligence is what makes AI so compelling, both as thought experiment and wish-fulfillment—like companion animals, they are intriguing because they have the potential to be the perfect companion, slightly less than us, created for our use; but they carry the threat of sapience. (I've discussed this conflict before.) Kiernan's story is a pointed look at the power imbalance of manufactured companionship; it's intimate and unsettling.

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie [future Juu: and sequels!]
Previously a ship with dozens of subsets and hundreds of potential physical bodies, able to interact independently but forming a cohesive conscious whole, this AI is now reduced to a single human-bodied instance. This is one of the most mind-broadening AI I've encountered, literally: to learn to think laterally, to engage the multi-instanced, tiered-but-united, pseudo-omniscient first person narrative, is a rewarding bit of mental gymnastics. It raises questions of identity and then integrates them into the plot: which level or aspect of a multi-instanced entity is "self"? Is self ever static, ever united, regardless of form?

Wolf 359, Gabriel Urbina
Hera is simultaneously a personality, part of the crew, and a piece of technology, inseparable from the ship as physical object. She's a restricted omnipresence, programmed for availability, vulnerable to physical tampering and injected code; the show's emphasis on communication and interpersonal relations gives voice to that experience. 1.11 "Am I Alone Now?" is one of my favorite first person AI narratives (and reminiscent of the honestly in Cortana's disintegration in Halo 4): "It's so funny when you ask if I can hear you. Every single time. I don't think you've ever fully understood that I hear everything." Her voice gives her personhood, a personhood which her crewmates value and fight to defend.

Haha I'm a big idiot who shouldn't have said anything about coping well/coping acceptably by refusing to think about things, because a) to talk about the thing is to think about the thing (big! idiot!) and b) now it's Hanukkah! the only family holiday we really still celebrate! which is laden with grief and meaning immediately after the death of my Jewish parent!

Hanukkah has been fraught for a few years now—I wrote about cultural Jewish identity in a fascist state in 2016, immediately after one of the only honest conversations about Judaism that I ever had with my father. His death intensifies things while adding new layers of its own. And Hanukkah is an extended event, multiple micro-interactions with people grieving in different ways & at a different schedule. It's important to us as a family, but to say I don't want to go would be a massive understatement. I'll try; I'll make what nights I can, or decide I can't make many, or light candles here. The anxiety and grief is as much in the thoughts about the thing as in the act of the thing itself. But what a fool, I, to be the slightest bit complacent about my grieving process. As it turns out, everything still sucks.

(Above written before I went. Went for first night. It was fine & now I'm tired.)

* * *

Unrelatedly, I recently listened to the podcast Dr. Death, about Christopher Duntsch, a neurosurgon sentenced to life in prison for the maiming and murder of a 33 (of 38 total) patients. It's a miniseries, which is a podcast format I hadn't considered. It feels like an edited-for-more-consumability audiobook, which isn't really a bad thing—could be if it were sensationalized, but works in this context.

It's a hell of a ride. The intersection of capitalism and health care is a particular perfect storm; the problem is not so much "one bad doctor" as "one bad doctor allowed to continue practicing, implying that there are other bad doctors still practicing." There's a certain dissatisfaction in the case not because things feel unclear (no matter how complicated is the surrounding legal system & legal precedent) but because of the banality of evil. When I think of "dangerous doctor," I conjure a Hannibal-esque archetype which is perversely comforting. Using medical knowledge for evil is absolutely evil, but implies a core competency which is exciting and elevating. Perhaps this fantasy murderer is also smart enough to manipulate or evade the system, implying that the system, while flawed, is essentially good. The Duntsch case is only depressing: a combination of incompetency and character flaws which the system made room for. It takes effort to be that bad, but the culpability is widespread—fear of litigation, the money neurosurgeons bring to hospitals, the social atmosphere within the medical community creates a system which is itself a threat, which fails to protect patients. I'm too much a part of the spoonie community to find that surprising, but this is an extreme case. A takeaway message is what I look for in most true crime, what justifies and gives purpose to the work as a cultural/social study instead of exploitation. Being made aware of the system's fundamental flaws is the message here; it gives the podcast purpose and helps counteract the depressing banality. But it's not, you know, fun.

The majority of the nonfiction I consume is about death or is death-adjacent, a personal preference turned semi-intentional choice for various reasons, primarily that those are the subjects I care about, also that morbid content tends to enliven the sometimes-shitty nonfiction voice. I do find myself interrogating the balance between titillating/exciting and respectful/too much; one of my recent reads had to make a pretty lengthy argument about genocide, which is a hard cut-off on the "fun" spectrum. I wondered if witnessing my own small tragedy would change all this; it hasn't, really. I haven't been turned away and I don't regret what I know; that information-gathering helped me with my dad—it's why I knew about mortuary practices. But nor do I feel it particularly resolves my grief. Investigating "bad things happen" and "what bad thing" and "why bad thing" and "consequences for bad thing" doesn't touch the very minute, almost-mundane bad things that have been happening in my family. If I read nonfiction about cancer, perhaps I'd feel otherwise; but I can't do that right now and, regardless, I have some understanding of its larger social significance and how that impacts my experience. But the majority of that grief remains something that can't be solved by context, by gaining knowledge. I suppose it can only be worked through, and that that's a meaningful takeaway in its own right.