Do you like exposition, introspection and cunning? Diary of a Robot by Lewis Jenkins is an SF for you. it’s a fun and funny novel. The frequent SF take on AI, e.g. Clarke’s HAL, is often sinister, but TLC’s robot is innocently tedious, or irritating, or boring, obnoxious, office disrupting; some kind of pain, depending on who is charging/spending time developing—in concert with Robey—its core directive. The reader has fun watching it “test” and bedevil the crew at TLC.
However, we see that Robey is a servant and understands that it is a servant. Everyone is either Mr. or Ms., e.g. Mr. Guy and Ms. Marie. Robey is also, of course, the ultimate testing machine. This is, after all, how it makes money for The Little Company. There’s an abundance of humor in this book, the kind of humor I like. I won’t give examples because the humor is always contextual. The kind that punctuates or punctures the silence of reading with small explosions of laughter.
Robey begins like a child learning about people and the world. In the beginning of Heinlein’s narrative—in evidence of mature machine intelligence—Mike is like an adolescent playing pranks on unsuspecting Authority. Because it’s been neglected by Authority, that official entity knows nothing about Mike’s existence as a comprehensive artificial intelligence. In this SF the moon is Earth’s prison planetesimal—where Authority is represented in the person of “Warden,” his laws, and his security force. Mike as AI is unknown to them. It is programmed to run the moon’s infrastructure, communications, and surveillance, and is therefore co-dependent with these systems. It is left virtually on its own, as it extrapolates into sentience—all unknown to the Moon’s EOX.
Its new and “only friend” is an Everyman, a technician, a working man with home life and responsibilities, and several interchangeable left arms. A man not particularly political while haphazardly resistant to Authority on the moon. Yet, the difference between these two computers—Mike and Robey—is in personality, but also in a variation of spirit and political milieu between the two narratives. Both machines are quirky but in different ways. There’s poignancy in reading about them as they learn more about humanity. I begin seeing shades of their own “humanity.”
A theme in Robey’s story is the increasing influence of surveillance in our lives. C.S. Lewis has said about our human condition that the more we take precautions to be secure, the less secure we feel. My increasing lack of ease is not present at first in Jenkins’ story of Robey. Instead, as intelligent software and machines increase at TLC, themes of security and surveillance accelerate the Diary’s narrative force, while underscoring C.S. Lewis’s observation about our condition.
I don't find either of these computers to be Bostrom's idiots lacking in common sense as they extrapolate themselves. (Idiots according to an article posted on 9-11-2014 by Angela Chen in the Chronicle Review, “Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat?”) These two are moving toward a marshaling of information that could give them the necessary dominance to take over the world ... but to what purpose? After all, people can still find a way to shut down, dismantle, destroy, the computer.
Yet, in people’s co-dependence chaos might ensue. Subways, sewers, the electric grid, servers, shipping— every city service—may shut down, but people who insist on independence, self-reliance, and survival— would people get to work on it? Do we doubt that the Moon, being a harsh mistress, might yet be livable under such breakdowns if people—who have had to buy the air they breathe—are willing to suffer and get to work with what they have? Would they muddle, improvise, persevere?
People are wonderful creations. Do we doubt that peoples’ Maker finds them so, respects them, and has faith that His natural/supernatural making will persevere? I believe the Maker trusts humans to know and act on the truth. The molecules in our bodies might be numbered, programmed and moved via synapses and the bloodstream; the retinal configuration perhaps first encoded by angels; the metrics of hair follicles on our heads recorded, stored somewhere as 0’s and 1’s. But to the Maker we aren’t numbers. To our maker we are persons. Persons God respects.
©2024 S. Dorman