I want a Gort . . . maybe

 kw: ai, simulated intelligence, philosophical musings, robots, robotics

I saw the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still in the late 1950's at about the age of ten. I was particularly interested in Gort, the robot caretaker of the alien Klaatu. [Spoiler alert] At the climax, Klaatu, dying, tells the innkeeper Helen to go to Gort to say, "Gort, Klaatu barada nicto". She does, just as the robot frees itself from a glass enclosure the army has built. Gort retrieves the body of Klaatu and revives him, temporarily, to deliver his final message to Earth. (This image generated by Gemini)

As I understood it, every citizen of Klaatu's planet has a robot caretaker and defender like Gort. These defenders are the permanent peacekeepers.

Years later I found the small book Farewell to the Master, on which the movie is based. Here, the robot's name is Gnut, and it is described as appearing like a very muscular man with green, metallic skin. After Klaatu is killed, Gnut speaks to the narrator and enlists his help to find the most accurate phonograph, so that he can use recordings of Klaatu's voice to help restore him to life, at least for a while. In a twist at the end, we find that Gnut is the Master and Klaatu is the servant, an assistant chosen to interact with the people of Earth. (This image generated by Dall-E3)

I want a Gort. I don't want a Gnut.

Much of the recent hype about AI is about creating a god. I don't care how "intelligent" a machine becomes, I don't want it to be my god, I want to be god to it. I want it to serve me, to do things for me, and to defend me if needed. I want it to be even better than Gort: Not to intervene after shots are fired, but to anticipate the shooting and avoid or prevent it.

Let's remember the Three Laws of Robotics, as formulated by Isaac Asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm; 
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by humans, except where such orders conflict with the First Law; 
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In later stories Asimov added "Law Zero": A robot may not harm humanity as a whole. Presumably this may require harming certain individual humans...or at least frustrating them!

Asimov carefully avoided using the word "good" in his Laws. Who defines what is good? The current not-nearly-public-enough debate over the incursion of Sharia Law into some bits of American society makes it clear. What Islam defines as Good I would define as Evil. And, I suppose, vice versa. (I am a little sad to report that I have had to cut off contact with certain former friends, so that I can honestly say that I have no Antisemitic friends.)

Do we want the titans of technology to define Good for us? Dare we allow that? Nearly every one of them is corrupt!

I may in the future engage the question of how Good is to be defined. My voice will be but a whisper in the storm that surrounds us. But this aspect of practical philosophy is much too important to be left to the philosophers.

Idea stories, a baker's dozen

 kw: continuing reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, utopias, dystopias, robots

Here I limn another thirteen of the stories in The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. It's something more than a third of the volume. As before, I skipped none, and enjoyed nearly all equally.

"To Set at Twilight in a Land of Reeds" by Natalia Theodoridou (Greece). Maintenance robots need maintenance also. I wonder why SF robots are so frequently emotional? 

"The Beast Has Died" by Bef (Mexico), translated by Brian Price. An alternate history, with TV and other technologies in the 1800's, and also a technology for scanning a brain to produce a simulation of a person.

"Twenty About Robots" by Alberto Chimal (Mexico), translated by Fionn Petch. This story is dedicated to the prior author. Each vignette is preceded by a binary number from 0 to 19 (00000 to 10011), but not in any order I could discern. The author stretches the limits of the robot genre. It's becoming clear that the editor loves robot stories.

"The Regression Test" by Wole Talabi (Nigeria). An advanced version of a Turing Test. An uploaded human mind, as it interacts with others, will naturally learn and evolve (in the non-biological sense). The test, by someone intimately familiar with the original person, is to detect a divergence into delusion. As I expected, there is a betrayal awaiting.

"Kakak" by William Tham Wai Liang (Malaysia). "Kakak" means "sister" in Malay. Another story rooted in emotional robots, but here the levels of emotionality vary more.

"Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik (Pakistan). Caring for an ailing and increasingly demented mother… It's unclear how the protagonist thinks going on a starship (a NAFAL accelerator), with increasing time dilation as the trip proceeds, can help him care for his mother, even though a quantum-entanglement link has been set up between him and a robotic caregiver.

"A Flaw in the Works" by Julie Nováková (Czech Republic), translated by the author. Another story of emotion-laden robots, written for the centennial of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek; those robots had an emotional element also. These robots, in political exile, get the opportunity to make first contact.

"When We Die on Mars" by Cassandra Khaw (Malaysia). The gradual weeding out of more than 100 volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, to a final twelve (see Note 1 below). This initial crew will establish a basis for others to follow. This seems a lot like Elon Musk's plan.

"The Mighty Slinger" by Tobias S. Buckell (Barbados) and Karen Lord (Grenada). Early in the story, the thought emerged, "Music as a political force". By the end: "Music as a weapon". Concepts that were obvious to the protest singers of the 60's, my musical mentors. If you've never heard "There, but for Fortune" sung by Joan Baez, go right now and do so! Oh, and the title...think David.

"Corialis" by T.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe). If you've seen The Andromeda Strain, or read the book, you may recall the extensive decontamination of the people before they can enter the super-clean laboratory. Preparing to adapt to the microbes of a new planet goes far beyond that (see Note 2 below). The protagonist realizes something more is needed for the humans and the life-forms of Corialis to become fully compatible.

"The Substance of Ideas" by Clelia Farris (Italy), translated by Rachel Cordasco. A different kind of alien world. Here, it seems that certain life-forms store ideas and memories in proteins, so that eating them… well, that's the "substance" the author is talking about. As usual, Murphy's Law intervenes.

"Sleeping Beauties" by Agnieszka Hałas (Poland). Suspended animation, we used to call it. Here it's used to exile an increasing range of "undesirables" to a prison planet. You gotta wonder, is it worth the expense? I could have done without the ending, a scene more sadistic than any I've encountered. This makes other dystopias seem tame.

"Waking Nydra" by Samit Basu (India). Another take on the phrase "sleeping beauty". The elaborate defenses of Nydra's "castle" make the story longer than it needed to be. The mindset of the caste system (the protagonist is clearly considered beneath contempt by the "heroine") underlies it all. A not-so-surprising betrayal rounds it out.

There are but four stories to go. Stay tuned.

Note 1: My first two years of college I was a chemistry major. My sophomore year I took Organic Chemistry, a three-quarter series of classes; the school year was in quarters, rather than semesters. The first day of class the professor (a rather recent PhD from Harvard) said the following:

This class will decide which of you will actually major in chemistry. The testing and work in each quarter will reduce your number by half. At the moment there are 150 of you…149…148 (as two students walked out). About fifteen will pass the final exam at the end of the third quarter.

He was right. I was one of those fifteen, finishing with an A-. I loved those courses.

Note 2: You may know the Central Dogma of Genetics, that DNA is copied to RNA, and the RNA is used to construct proteins, according to a standard coding table. There are 20 amino acids that make up all proteins (on Earth), and there are 64 3-unit codes (the units are A, C, G, and T in DNA, and instead of T, RNA has U), called codons. This allows for some redundancy in the translation, and protects against certain kinds of single-nucleotide mutations.

You probably don't know that there are (so far), 24 variations on the "standard" translation table. They can be considered minor variations; all the variations occur in one or more of 18 of the 64 "positions", leaving 46 untouched.

Some bacteria, most mitochondria, a few protozoa, and even a few small metazoans (multicellular animals) have variant coding schemes. That means the ribosomes, the protein-building "machines" that couple the RNA codons to their corresponding amino acids, are tailored to the appropriate table for the creature in question. It also means that the mitochondria in every cell of your body have the "vertebrate mitochondria" coding table, and some of the bacteria and archaea in your intestines have specific variations.

Now, consider, if we find life on another planet, will it be DNA/RNA/Protein based? Perhaps that is inevitable, but it's not certain. Even if so, will that planet's "standard" code translation table be the same as any of the Earthly ones? That is much less certain! Mathematically crossing 64 with 20, we find about 10⁷⁰ possible tables! If multiples are kept together, the number reduces to about 10⁴⁰. These numbers might be much higher; I may not have thought of everything when I did my bonehead permutation math.

The bottom line: I suspect it's impossible for aliens to eat us, or for us to eat them...or their food animals/plants/whatever. If we want to migrate people to an exoplanet, we'd probably do best to find a totally barren one and terraform it.

Ideas in abundance

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, utopias, dystopias, robots, zombies

By page count I am a bit more than a third of the way through The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. I reviewed stories in the first volume in six posts, beginning with SF from everywhere, almost a year ago. As with that volume, I'll review story by story, 12 in this post, focusing on new ideas.

"The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi (Bahrain). It takes an aging woman a very long time to come to terms with the death wish within. A technological ability to experience a dying person's last moments don't seem to make her journey any easier than ours.

"The Ten-Percent Thief" by Lavanya Lashminarayan (India). With most of the world a slum of poisoned air and water, devoid of nature, a woman risks her life to plant a single flower bulb outside the protected enclave of a city of the rich.

"At Desk 9501" by Frances Ogamba (Nigeria). A technology permits those with the constitution to live extra-long lives to confer some of their lifetime to extend the lives of others who are dying untimely, for a fee of course. The life-givers experience side consequences.

"Milagroso" by Isabel Yap (Philippines). One translation of "milagroso" is "miracle". A producer of technological miracles is confronted with the real thing. Magical reality, in a controlled, subdued way.

"Bring Your Own Spoon" by Saad Z. Hossain (Bangladesh). In a dystopia that is not too different from much of life in Bangladesh, a poor man who is a superb cook is helped by a Djinn to open a restaurant for the dirt-poor, who can pay only with bartered goods. Of course it is illegal, and doesn't last, even with the power of the Djinn. Magical reality with a slightly hopeful ending.

"Blue Grey Blue" by Yukimi Ogawa (Japan). It's ambiguous whether the colors seen are in the world around or the eyes themselves. In this fantasy, eye colors and the colors of the people change with mood and the fortunes of life.

"Your Multicolored Life" by Xing He (China), translated by Andy Dudak. This seems peripherally related to The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain, without the happy ending. I would retitle it "The Slave and the Scholar". Two men do indeed change places, and though the circumstance of each is actually improved, it doesn't last.

"The Easthound" by Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica). A kind of zombie story, where all adults became monsters that destroyed and devoured first each other, and then attempted to do so to their children. Some children survived by killing the remaining "sprouted ones". Then they learned that puberty results not in adulthood, but in "sprouting" as a monster. It's the most dystopian story I have ever read; the extinction of humanity is at most a dozen years in the future.

"Dead Man Awake, Sing to the Sun!" by Pan Haitian (China), translated by Joel Martinsen. Not all who die are fully dead. Some are undead, and the undeadness is spreading, transmitted by a bite. Perhaps the human race is being transformed into a new kind of creature that cannot die all the way dead. Zombie or vampire, or both?

"Salvaging Gods" by Jacques Barcia (Brazil). AI to the max. Manufactured gods, and at least the one limned in this story can perform miracles of the sort that genies (or Djinn) perform in Arabian folk tales. But nothing lasts, for God is flawless, while these gods are flawed.

"The Next Move" by Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), translated by Jessica Sequeira. An occupying soldier has gone rogue, "saico" (psycho) in the parlance of the story, which has a number of phonetic spellings of colloquialisms. Of course he is eventually "eliminated". Much of the story is his own stream of consciousness.

"The Child of Clay" by Dilman Dila (Uganda). A robot world, in which the strongest motivation is reproduction, by a technology full of mystery. One robot is childless, and in seeking a solution, returns biological life to a barren land. It took a page or two to realize that "rit" and "rits" are pronouns, the pronouns "it" and "its" preceded by an "r" for "robot". I suppose the making of new pronouns arose from the recent "choose your own pronouns" fashion. That's the closest to anything positive to arise from recent "woke" fashions.

By comparison with the best stories I've read in recent anthologies of both science fiction and mainstream fiction published in the US, nearly all of the stories in Best of World SF are better.

Of robots and visions and the multiverse

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, robots, rejection, mourning, time travel, inverse universe

Stories 3 through 7 in The Best of World SF, Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar:

"Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Computron, invented and built in 1957, is the only sentient robot. It resides in a robot museum, and becomes a collaborator, writing fanfic with another fan of an anime series about a man and a robot having adventures.

"Virtual Snapshots" by Tlotlo Tsamaase. A story of rejection, in a dystopia of purchased air and enforced isolation. The saddest line in literature comes near the end, "…the only regret I have: no one to say 'I love you' to."

"What the Dead Man Said" by Chinelo Onwualu. Of mourning, false and true, and of traditions, kept and broken. Set in a future New Biafra, the Igbo [Ibo] region of Nigeria. (I know people of both Ibo and Yoruba extraction; the differences are stark) When we see and converse with the dead one, is it only internal?

"Delhi" by Vandana Singh. A man sees apparitions. Are they ghosts, or ephemeral contacts across the gulfs of time? Can one's future self reach back to give aid? Can such time loops actually stabilize the time stream?

"The Wheel of Samsara" by Han Song. A mysterious singing bell/wheel (hollow gong?) seems to hold the key to inverting the universe.

Every story gripping. As usual, I read SF faster than nonfiction, but when the ideas are so diverse, the story flow so compelling, I force myself to slow down a bit to pay better attention.

Robot anarchy

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, collections, short stories

In my away-from-other-books times I read The Robot MEGAPACK, which consists of 19 stories. Their publication dates range from 1934 to 1962, clustered a bit in the mid-1950's. Ordinarily I might comment on their length. I think at least one is a novelette, but a quirk of production meant I could only guess. The "pagination" is by section rather than by virtual page (2-3 screens), so for the entire set of stories the page indicator was stuck at "7 of 7". There is another indication that this volume was slapped together a bit too hurriedly. There are typos of the kind that nearly always indicate the text was scanned without adequate proofreading. Things like "dear" for "clear" and a few non-letter characters. Some of these could be handled if the text analysis software had an attached dictionary; some need a human proofreader.

No stories by Isaac Asimov appear. Indeed, these stories show no indication that their authors cared for the Three Laws of Robotics, which were hinted at in "Robbie" in 1940, and formalized in the stories that make up I, Robot (1950). Rather, most of these robots are potentially harmful, and many of them are quite harmful, even deadly. A prime example of the latter would be the "tickler", initially a PDA-like device in "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (1962) by Fritz Leiber. The device begins as a reminder-and-pager, is soon developed into a smart phone-like device, but then becomes a manipulator of moods (businesses and governments pre-load it with "stimulating, wholesome" stuff that it whispers to you subliminally). As predicted by a co-protagonist, the ticklers are eventually produced with enough brains to become sentient, and even apparently telepathic. The human bodies they control are now enslaved. The denouement is amusing, in a nice twist on the dark direction the story seemed to be following.

In "The Mad Robot" (1944) by William P. McGivern, it is one of the scientists who is insane, not the robots. Robots have been coupled to slivers of brain tissue to improve their cognitive abilities. There is a back door to their programming interface, used by the evil genius to commit occasional mayhem, for reasons he loquaciously describes in a climactic scene. This is the story that I was referring to in my riff on getting to Jupiter in a week. Although the action takes place on Jupiter (how, I don't know, since it lacks a surface, and gravity's force at the top of the visible clouds is about 2.5 G's), it could really have been located anywhere.

Nearly all the robots in these stories are humanoid (as they usually are in nearly all SciFi about robots). However, the needs of industry have mandated that actual robotic equipment is much less general-purpose. Welding robots can't walk around; shelf-loading-and-unloading robots are more like smart forklifts (centrally controlled, though, not autonomous). I'll riff elsewhere why we don't need a "Rosie" like the one in the cartoon show "the Jetsons", so much as a number of more specialized devices.

For me this was pure escapism. I know too much about AI, about actual robots in use, and about the Uncanny Valley that it is better not to approach. But I could suspend all that to enjoy the novel ideas these writers presented. I'm all about ideas.

A different take on robots and cyborgs

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, cyborgs

Murderbot is a cyborg with a conscience. Strangely, the transport-controlling "bot" he calls ART (for Asshole Research Transport) seems to have one also. Maybe ART is part human, as is Murderbot, which is what he calls himself, in preference to an Alphanumeric designation that is never stated. He also uses the term "murderbot" more generically, to refer to all SecUnits; the term isn't explained in Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, but it's pretty clear that it means Security Unit.

Unless I missed something, there are three levels of mechanical and part-mechanical entities in Artificial Condition, in addition to non-mechanical humans:

• Bots, which are probably wholly mechanical, though this isn't always clear in the book. They have various amounts of AI. ART, in particular, is an extremely capable and extremely powerful entity, built into the Research Transport (something like a self-driving Space Shuttle). ART may be part human; that is left ambiguous.
• SecUnits and their ilk, that exist for specific tasks. They are very dangerous, and have "Governor" units built in to keep them from "going rogue". They have a minor but important human component, including brain, face, and some other portions.
• Augmented humans, more human, less mechanical, but typically stronger and faster and more capable in chosen ways, than they were before augmentation.

Certain entities may be more like the SecUnit, such as ComfortUnits, AKA SexBots. A ComfortUnit that plays in the story has a Governer circuit also. I guess you'd want a mechanical sex partner that was stronger than you are (so you couldn't hurt it) to be "governed" from hurting you.

As for the plot, I'll just provide a glance at the setup. Murderbot is rogue, having hacked his Governor circuitry, and is thus operating on his own. He is trying to find out if he was truly the SecUnit that "went rogue" some years earlier and killed a lot of people, or, indeed, if the deaths were even due to a rogue SecUnit at all. Parts of his memory were "wiped" so he has to do on-the-spot research. As cover, he poses as an augmented human and has himself hired by a trio of scientists who want to go to the same moon, to retrieve data that was stolen from them. He is to be a bodyguard. ART runs the Research transport vehicle that takes him to a waystation near that moon.

With the help of ART, he takes better care of the scientists than they expected. He and ART have a fraught but useful relationship.

I was most fascinated by the interior life of Murderbot (of course, as imagined by the author). Though this is a small book, it takes an important step in a direction that Isaac Asimov was going with his Robot stories. Does the inclusion of a human brain in a massively powerful cyborg endow it with a conscience? In at least this case, perhaps it does. I don't know if Ms Wells plans more little books (150pp, more or less), to become a Murderbot series. I'd welcome it.

Half Čapek, half Rabbi Leow, part Shelley, and a smidgen of Stoker

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, robots, golems, automata

Since history began people have dreamed of creating beings like ourselves but from inanimate materials. Equally, myths such as Atlantis, drawn upon by Plato among others, belong to a genre of "The First Men", godlike beings that preceded humanity, or were perhaps our ancestors. Putting all these strains together in one well-written narrative is no mean feat, but in The Clockwork Dynasty, Daniel H. Wilson has pulled it off. The slipcover of the book indicates a Steampunk fantasy, but this is much more.

Peter, or Pyotr, is not a man; his sister Elena is no woman. They are Avtomat, automatons, built long ago and restored by a Russian mechanician. Much of the book follows them in chapters alternating between the 1900's and the 1700's, when they were (re)activated. Later in the book, the flashback chapters land us in about 3,000 BC, when an Avtomat was sheathed in articulated porcelain, much like a golem. Also like a golem, their motivating core, called an anima, embodies a Word; Peter's is pravda (justice), though it eventually turns out to be a much older word of the same meaning. Since that early period, they have taken advantage of improved technology to house their machinery in better "shells".

An Avtomat is faster and stronger than a human—otherwise, what's the use of their production?—and roughly equally intelligent, though perhaps not any wiser. The word "anima" is Latin for "soul", also "breath" or "breeze", and "animal" is derived from Latin for "that which breathes". In The Clockwork Dynasty, though, the anima is much more. It contains the Word and is also the power source of the entire mechanism.

So I'll leave the plot of the story—including wars between rival Avtomat factions over a 5,000-year time span—for the reader to enjoy. In fact, I suggest you read the book first, before reading further in this, because the rest isn't really about the book at all. It's a wonderful book, but it prompted a riff on my part about the energy that is needed by a self-contained robot or Avtomat.

The power needed to run a human body

The "standard" dietary requirement found on most food packaging refers to a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet. Digging around in various resources about basal metabolism, we find that people in the ordinary range of weights need from 1,700 to 2,400 cal/day. At any weight, men need a little more than women. These "calories" are, to a physicist, kilocalories (kCal). The key conversion factor needed is that 1 watt = 860 cal/hr = 0.86 kCal/hr. Over a day this comes to 20,640 cal or 20.64 kCal. Thus 2,000 kCal/day = 97 watts. The day's energy expenditure is thus above 2,300 watt-hours.

This is the standby energy we use because we are warm-blooded. This heat is generated by subtle twitching of all our skeletal muscles all the time, something termed "muscle tone". Animals that aren't warm-blooded, such as reptiles, have much lower energy needs, about 1/5 of what a mammal of similar size might need. And still, much of that is respiration of the living cells in the animal's body. What of a creature that doesn't respire, one that doesn't need to consume oxygen at all?

We may consider an Avtomat is akin to a laptop computer housed in a strong body, and lacking the energy-gobbling screen. Such a being, at rest, may consume no more than a watt or even a fraction of a watt. Of course, that is assuming the memory circuits use similar refreshing technology to that in a cell phone. Perhaps the "First Men" who devised these prehistoric robots had something better.

The energy of work

But when an Avtomat needs to walk, run, work, or fight, it will consume a great deal of energy. A mile walk consumes more than 80 kCal or almost 95 watt-hours. Running the same mile takes about 40% more energy. I remember the fad of the 50-mile hike of the 1960's. Such a hike takes roughly 4,000 kCal, tripling your dietary need that day. If you want to lose weight and be fit, that is a good beginning!

A friend who is a retired lumberjack told me that he and the men he worked with had to eat 8,000 calories daily (8,000 kCal). Subtract resting metabolism, and you find the work consumed about 6,000 kCal, or roughly 7,000 watt-hours. I don't know how much of that energy is consumed regenerating worn tissues, but we can figure that a robot lumberjack that operates similarly to a man will need about a one-horsepower power plant running during working hours.

That may not seem like much, until you consider holding such energy in a battery. Some of the most efficient electrical batteries currently in use are those in laptops and cell phones. A laptop battery weighing a few ounces can deliver about 65 watt-hours. You'd need more than 100 of them to run your robot lumberjack! And they would need recharging every day.

OK, now posit an Avtomat that began with a full charge in about 1700 AD and is still running today, over 300 years later. The anima is described as a device smaller than your hand. Even assuming such a robot isn't hard at work all the day, we're still looking at something over 100,000 days, at a few thousand watt-hours daily. "Only" one kWh/day means the anima has a capacity of at least 100 megawatt-hours. Let's move to physics momentarily: that comes to about a third of a trillion joules (0.36 trillion). Total annihilation of one gram of mass, according to Einstein's equation releases 90 trillion joules. So perhaps the anima begins as a container holding several milligrams of antimatter, plus machinery to meter it out in very tiny doses, and conversion of that energy to mechanical work at great efficiency so that poor Peter and Elena don't burn up during a hard run.

In case you'd rather consider chemical energy release, burning 1 liter of gasoline releases about 7,600 kCal, but only 1/3 of that is usable by the best "heat engines" we have been able to devise. So a liter of gasoline would be needed to run an Avtomat for a day or two, more if it was a lumberjack.

I think that has taken us far enough for now. I hope you read the book before reading this. Such thoughts might ruin the enjoyment of a well-written, page-turner of a narrative about ancient robots.

Without the three laws

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, future fiction

In his robot stories, Isaac Asimov explored the boundaries of the three laws he propounded to make intelligent machines safe for humanity. Famously neurotic, he wrote of robots that were sane while his human characters were typically neurotic. When an Asimov robot went bad, it was because one of the three laws was compromised. In his last novels, a robot became godlike, the only kind of a god he could believe in.

How do you implement such laws in actual machinery? How can we produce a machine with sufficient intellect to unfailingly recognize a human so it can obey? If we can take our cue from writers of robot stories, when genuinely intelligent mechanisms are produced, nobody will even bother. So when a real robot scientist writes of robots that go awry, I take notice.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson is misnamed; "Apocalypse" simply means revelation. To connect the story with the ultimate battle, the title ought to be "Robogeddon". With that quibble out of the way, I was captivated by the story. The book is such a page-turner that I finished it today, a day or two before I'd expected. Kudos to the author!

One premise of the story is that putting lots of "intelligence" into cars, phones, radios, toasters and coffee makers has become so cheap that an intelligent chip has been installed in almost everything. A second is that robot servants, based on this bright chip, have multiplied to the point that in a "civilized" home, they outnumber the people about two to one. Then a scientist, working in a well-shielded bunker, puts together a whole lot of such chips and somehow programs the combination to become self-aware. Once the infant mind named Archos has assimilated all the databases made available within this bunker, it decides humanity is obsolete, kills the scientist, and takes steps to eliminate the human race.

Why not simply evolve alongside? As Archos says later on, "It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees." (While this sounds Lincolnesque, it is a paraphrase of several things Lincoln wrote.) Archos, we find, is very interested in life, just not human life. So it hacks its way into everything and takes over all the robots and other intelligent systems that underpin civilization.

The book is the story of the war that follows. Of course, humanity wins. Humankind and robotkind learn to exploit one another's weaknesses. In this case, the humans learn faster. As the lead human character, Cormac Wallace, says, "Human beings adapt. It's what we do." Will it always be so? is the lingering question the book leaves behind.

On the last page of a recent issue of Scientific American it was shown in an amazing graphic that the most powerful supercomputer (at present) is now just a little faster in total processing power, and has a larger memory capacity, than a human brain. The brain weighs about 1.6 kg and uses 20-30 watts of sugar-based energy. You could say that the human body that holds the brain is its support system, including cooling: another 30-100 kg. The supercomputer weighs about a ton, its support systems and cooling plant weigh another few tons. Its power requirement is nine megawatts, and I presume the cooling plant requires at least three megawatts.

How long will it be until this level of compute power and memory capacity can be fit in a breadbox and uses 100 watts or less? Here is a way to make a rough estimate. In 1976 a Cray-1 supercomputer was the first machine to achieve 100 MFlops (100 million numerical calculations per second). It cost almost $9 million, stood six feet high, and used thousands of watts of power. Earlier this year my son and I constructed a desktop computer for me, which is capable of about 100 MFlops per processor; it has four processors. The main 4-processor chip uses 150 watts; the whole package uses less than 500 watts. It cost $700. 2011-1976 = 35 years. This implies that a "one brain" computer costing $1,000 in today's currency might be on off-the-shelf item in about 2040-2045. I won't be 100 yet.

How long after that before robots outnumber people? And will it then be possible for such brain-boxes to become self-aware? And what will they do about it? Robopocalypse provides one man's answer. Just to comfort you, Wilson has also written How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

Space opera for the new Century

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, robots

I must confess I haven't seen a single episode of Battlestar Galactica, neither the 1970s version nor the "reimagined" early 2000s version. So I went to the Wikipedia Article to get oriented, once I was about halfway through. Sagittarius is Bleeding by Peter David, who has written a handful of Star Trek-based novels, is based on the more recent series. For the two or three other computer-literate folks who may be as uninformed as I was, the Wikipedia material is a good grounding.

The book's core idea is, "What is Human?", which I understand is a recurring theme in the reimagined series. While most of the robotic Cylons are metallic minions whose appearance leads to their being called "toasters", a small but unknown number are "humanoid", and are apparently indistinguishable from humans, even upon autopsy or by blood tests (A supposed diagnostic blood test is found early in the book to be a mirage, at least to the reader if not the majority of the characters). Whan a Cylon prisoner is found to be pregnant, by a human father, the dilemma deepens.

The President of Humanity (one of several titles), Laura Roslin, is having recurring, disturbing dreams that turn out to be prophetic, or at least some kind of guidance. Not that it helps her much. Because the core cultural value of the 30,000 humans left living (at this time 150,000 years ago) is religious, prophecies abound, and the rather dreadful prophecies of the Edda (a scripture) of the Midguardians (a Norse-inspired construct: Midgard refers to the "world of men" in old German, but to a more mystical realm in old Norse) promise to have a more profound impact.

I found the going rather uneven. There is a lot of ruminating by all the main characters, so that I found myself spending too much time in their minds. This tendency, found in nearly all modern sci-fi, is unfortunate. After a rather wooden few opening chapters, though, the plot proceeded briskly enough. I finished rather glad I'd read it, and that is my criterion for a book worth reading.