Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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Smart robots have populated fiction for generations, but now with artificial intelligence exploding around us, we’re seeing more titles than ever that grapple with this technology. In the following novels and stories, authors delve into personal relationships between humans and A.I. consciousnesses that may or may not inhabit bodies. Themes of loneliness, love, personhood, and power are inescapable. At the heart of these works, we’re invited to consider what combination of attributes makes a person truly human, assuming that’s the bar. Compassion probably tops the list, but intelligence, a capacity to love, and the ability to suffer or enjoy life also come into play. When A.I. becomes another creature altogether, we run into our speciesist suspicions, but I would argue that the qualities we value in a person still hold. From a craft perspective, writing about a robot feels fun and new, and it also provides a device—a strangeness or “almostness” (a term found in Powers’s Galetea 2.2 ) —that we can hold up to ourselves like a distorted mirror. Like Pygmalion, we long to see our own creations come alive, and in fiction, they do. For instance, in my novel, Annie Bot , Annie is custom-designed to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner, Doug. As her A.I. evolves and Annie becomes more human-like, her growing complexity upends her relationship with Doug and her relationship with the reader. We’re compelled to wonder what we would do in her shoes, and that makes for a neat little mind game. If you dare to bring some A.I. home with you, check out these titles. * I, Robot – Asimov, Isaac Isaac Asimov, I, Robot In “Robbie,” the introductory story in Isaac Asimov’s collection I, Robot (1950), eight-year-old Gloria is distraught when her parents dismiss her wordless robot playmate, Robbie. Asserting that Robbie is not a machine but a person and a friend, Gloria pinpoints the essential paradox of the robot conundrum. If an entity is merely a machine, it can be dismissed as insignificant, but once we love this entity, it merits our respect, and in turn, this expands […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
