klara and the sun

I read one of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels a few years ago, and it just didn't kick it for me.

Klara and the Sun did. I didn't love this book, but at least I got it. The story is solid, and looks at a potential future we may all experience at some point when robotics and artificial intelligence get to the point that they make it into the home, in much the same way that personal computers, and the internet did. Its not clear to me that Artificial Friends or AFs as Ishiguro calls them will make the leap from page to reality in our homes as quickly as the PC or the interwebs, but I do think its out there as a possibility.

In the future that Ishiguro has created, all AFs are a little bit different. This is what I'd call soft SF, so he doesn't get into why exactly they're all different, but I'm under the impression that its due to their brains. Perhaps they're manufactured in some kind of self-assembling process, which allows for variations? In any case, Klara is different than her peers: she is more observant of the subtleties expressed in the humans she interacts with. She does however remain naive about many of the basic things around her, regardless of how long she spends in the world. There is also a mysterious observational quirk Klara experiences, often when she is in stressful situations, and whether that is just part of what differentiates her from other AFs or if its typical for AFs is also a mystery.

This book was interesting, and the interactions between humans and AFs was examined in interesting ways, that reminded me a little of my post on the emotional ties humans may eventually develop for robots as they take on these important, supportive rolls in our lives.

machines like me

I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me is an alternate history soft-SciFi story that takes place in the 1980s. This is an interesting take in that it isn't set in a what-if future, rather its set in a possible past which may have been different for all of us if just a few things had played out a little differently. That premise, al by itself, is a fun thing to think about and is a little brain-bendy.

The main protagonist, Charlie Friend, tells the story first person, which is where the 'like me' comparative phrase in the title comes from. Mr. Friend sounds made up (scoff) is a little insecure, has some vague experience writing, and maybe some office-type work in his past but has given it up for self-employment. A venture he is not always successful at, but keeps at it nonetheless. Mr. Friend admits that he hasn't always made sound monetary decisions, but that doesn't keep him from pushing on. 

Just upstairs lives Miranda, Charlie's friend, who is also a graduate student and mid-twenties to his early thirties. Charlie's insecurity extends to his feelings for Miranda, which complicates their friendship, if only because Charlie is in his head too much and not really living. Into this complicated dynamic, Charlie brings a machine, and what he (and we) thought was complicated before, gets even more complex.

McEwan has spun an intriguing story here that reminds me of Asimov's I, Robot series in its examination of what it means when thinking machines become part of our lives, both for us, and for them.

price of duty

This is the first book I've by Dale Brown. Brown is a former U.S. Air Force captain, where he was a bomber pilot, so in the tradition of writing what you know, Brown writes military fiction. Altho it may be more accurate to say that Price of Duty is military science fiction, as the tech the fighting forces are using is pretty advanced.

It took a few chapters for me to catch on to Brown's writing style, but that may be true for many writers, I guess I just don't keep track. Once I got into it, the story moved right along. Even though the military tech is extremely high-tech, the story seems inspired by today. The Russian president is a ex-KGB man with dictatorial control over his country and has begun a cyber-war against a group of European allies (read NATO) who have been left out to dry by the American President. This is particularly ironic given that I think Brown has based his character on Hillary Clinton* (as he has based his Russian dictator on Putin) and he has her leaving the European's to fend for themselves, even though she isn't a fan of the Russian president, who has a habit of denying involvement in actions that are clearly and demonstrably his responsibility. But who knows, the American president could be inspired by a combination of Clinton and Trump, or created wholly in the mind of Brown.

This book is a follow-up, or one of a series of books about this special force called Iron Wolf. This isn't the first in that series and I don't know where it falls, but I didn't find it listed on the author's website, so it could be that his site hasn't been updated in a while. The Iron Wolf secret weapon (and I don't think I'm giving too much away here) is a fighting robot, or exoskeleton, piloted by man who is on board rather than remote. This is not the first story with big fighting robots, and its not the first military story with big fighting robots, but this one does seem to view the exoskeleton idea in a more practical sense than some of the other visions out there.


* Its my impression that Brown was writing this during the run up to the election, and his choice for president was based on the polling at the time.

clockwork three

The Clockwork Three is the first book by Matthew J. Kirby, who describes himself in the backmatter bio as a school psychologist, who was encouraged by his wife to get back into writing. Clockwork is his first endeavor. So that worked out pretty good for Kirby; since this book was published in 2010, Kirby has written a handful of additional young adult books, and now lists himself as a former school psychologist.

Clockwork follows the trials of three young people in what seems like the mid- to late-1800s, in an unnamed American city, that could be New York. Kirby notes in the backmatter that this story was inspired by a boy who was kidnapped from Italy and sold into slavery as a busker in New York, who eventually escaped from his padrone, and testified against him, which led to the outlawing of padroni and the freedom of the kids enslaved by them.

So this kid is the inspiration for one of the trio. The second is a girl who had to leave school and go to work to support her family after her father suffered a stroke and could no longer work. The third is an apprentice clock maker, rescued from an 'orphanage' which was really a sweatshop using child labor to manufacture fabric. So you can see that these three teens have come from similar, difficult backgrounds, they meet one another individually, within a few days, and soon strike up friendships, and then discover they all know one another. They quickly band together to help each other overcome their diversity, in ways that are frankly impossible for any kid to dream of.

I think is basically what sets this book apart as the work of a novice: Cinderella stories are fun to read, and its fun to suspend disbelieve for the duration. But asking us to believe that three separate kids can meet, put their heads together for a few days, outsmart all of the mean and evil adults in their lives, disobey, lie to, fail to trust, and even steal from, their fairy godmothers (the good people that suddenly appear in their lives) and then be not only forgiven, but each is transformed into the metaphorical princess for their trouble, is asking a little too much. But I guess this story is for middle schoolers.

The writing is a little telly rather than showy, which makes it read a little flat, but if you have a tween that likes this kind of thing, they may enjoy it.

baby steps

I just listened to a Science and Creativity podcast by Studio 360; the episode is called "Becoming the Bionic Man." Producer Jonathan Mitchell talks to MIT professor Hugh Herr about his new prosthetic lower limb program that he has also spun off into a company called BIOM.*

Herr is a double amputee himself, and using his own prostheses he is able to return to the sport that first cost him his limbs: climbing. "I was actually able to climb at a more advanced level, with artificial limbs, than I'd ever achieved, before the accident, with biological limbs." Dr. Herr is obviously a talented and driven scientist, but he doesn't see prosthetic limbs as the ultimate solution for amputees, he sees them as the ultimate solution.

This field is called biomechatronics, and its come a long way from hooks and peg legs. The Studio 360 piece is chock full of Dr. Herr's dreams for the future, and some of those dreams aren't too far away from the Singularity idea that others are touting. "We're rebuilding humans, from the ground up," says Herr.  "The artificial part of my body is actually a blank palette for which to create."

Herr is also looking forward to the future of bionics: connecting the limbs to the brain. Maybe even sensory feedback. You know...touch. steve austin style, baby. And what's beyond that? There's plenty of room for speculation, but Herr and his team have some ideas:

"The next step is to say, well, maybe we shouldn't be cell- and tissue-centric, maybe we shouldn't view our biological hand as the end-all. Maybe that bionic hand is also okay, and acceptable. And perhaps beyond that, when we experience the biological hand being stiff in the morning, and maybe even being painful and arthritic, maybe that bionic hand over there may actually be attractive." Yeah, that's right. Grandma may get sick of not being able to lift a pan off the stove, or  have trouble getting up the stairs. Just pop down to the media lab for an upgrade, Grandma! jus' chop them ol' limbs off granma, and get you some new ones!

But it may not just be for the old, infirm, or those with birth defects. Herr adds, "People with quote, normal minds and bodies, will volunteer, I predict, to use these technology, to go beyond what nature intended."

Dr. Herr says that he gets limb upgrades every few years, and its no big deal; He doesn't weep or feel a loss of any kind, but speculates that this may not always be true. "I can imagine that when my bionic limbs are more intimate with my biology... when my nervous system is completely interfaced with the bionic limb. I can imagine that I will have a deeper relationship--emotional relationship--with the synthetic part of my body."

Jonathan Mitchell then adds, as a closer, "And maybe one day, our machines will be so good, that we'll love them, as though we grew them ourselves."

I told you: robot love. < go ahead. click. its a good one.



* BIOM was formally called iWalk, but I guess that name wore off. Click on the BIOM link above. There are some cool videos of the limbs in action. The ankles are amazing.

And yeah, that's Luke Skywalker up there. Who should I have used? Anakin? Pfff

working theory

A Working Theory of Love is Scott Hutchins's first novel, and if things continue along like this, Hutchins has a bright future.

A Working Theory of Love imagines a time in the very near future, maybe 20 minutes from now, when the next phase of intelligent machines is being developed by a small private corporation with an eye toward beating--or maybe more accurately, meeting the requirements of--the Turing Test. The Test itself is offered annually at the Loebner Prize Competition, altho the competition isn't named specifically in the book that I recall, and is essentially Turning's own Imitation Game in which a computer has to imitate human conversation with a human judge, who must be fooled into believing that he or she is conversing with a human being, at least 70 percent of the time. Alan Turing, who developed these ideas in 1950, felt that this could be achieved in about 50 years time, but 2000 has come and gone, and artificial intelligence isn't there yet.

The small group chasing the prize in Working Theory has developed a method of building an artificial personality by adding the diary information of a real person to the basic response algorithms and general knowledge database components that make up an artificial intelligence. Its obviously more complicated than that, but this is essentially a story of people, and the artificial intelligence is one of the characters in the story. The crux of the story is that the small band working on this particular AI consists of a retired AI professor, and young, southeast Asian coder, and the son of the deceased diarist used to create the AI. The son is not a computer programmer, but was hired on to help debug the system, by essentially talking to... an emergent virtual copy of his dead father.

The premise is fascinating, and the story leaps from there, becoming a very complex and introspective look at the relationships of adult children to their parents, with a somewhat spooky peek at the possibilities of a second chance to interact with loved ones who have died. A very real look at what the idea of the Singularity may mean for people, you know... if we still have people in the Asimov tradition of setting the scene in which the technology exists and then exploring what happens.

Read this book!

And Scott Hutchins, I'm talking to you son, get your ass busy and give us another one!

robot love, part ii

Spike Jonze made a short film a few years back, but I've only just heard about it. Its called I'm Here. Its a science-fiction romance story about robots in love. Jonze didn't go too far on the robotics budget, that's for sure. His robotic lovers are human actors with bad Hallowe'en costumes, and what looks like old PC towers on their heads. But what really comes across--shines through the crummy costuming, you could say--is the personalities of the robot characters.

I wrote about robot love a little while ago, after hearing and reading a few things within a short time that all seemed to be focused on this as a future we need to be prepared for. Those stories focused on human-robot relationships rather than the robot-on-robot action in this short film, but the ideas are the same.

Jonze depicts robots at a stage in their development when they've become ubiquitous in society to the point of being ignored, but not to the point of acceptance. The robots in Jonze's portrayal are discriminated against in a heart-breakingly heartless way, by their very insignificance. They are tripped over, stepped on, and broken [accidentally] in their encounters with humans, who don't even turn their heads to acknowledge the damage, never mind apologize. Or help.

Their feelings are portrayed as real, if new, and somewhat adolescent. But that only makes the tale sweet. Tale is the right word, I think. Its a sci fi fairytale of love.

The whole thing is on youtube. Its about 30 minutes long. Check it out.

i, robot

Me, Robot? I don't know, maybe its a Roman numeral one. I didn't find any compelling evidence for a first person reference to robots, unless Isaac Asimov is saying that he's a robot, or that we're ALL robots, and that robots are essentially like us. OR maybe he's saying that robots are man's offspring. Our Singularity-esque next generation. Yeah, maybe that's its. Asimov is probably smarter than Kurzweil anyway, 'mIright?

Okay, so I guess we covered the title. Onward!

I read I, Robot years ago--its safe to say decades ago--and I didn't remember all of the details, and some of the stories I didn't remember at all. I, Robot, like Foundation, is a series of short stories, when read together, make a up a whole. The short stories are set as a series of anecdotes told by the leading robopsychologist working for US Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation, to a young reporter who has come to see her late in her career. She's all: robots are awesome, but they're tricky, tricky.

I'm not really sure how you get the Will Smith movie* from a few years back after reading this, other than to say that they did rip off some of that tricky behavior that robots exhibit in these stories, and put it to use in different ways to move the story of the movie. Maybe 'inspired by the book' would have been a better way to put it.

And okay, here's the last thing: this copy was full of typos. So I'm not sure what the deal is, but I don't remember seeing any in the first part of this volume when I was reading Foundation, but there were some screw ups in I, Robot. Maybe its was originally released with the mistakes and this copy is being true the original? Sounds lame. I mean, one typographical error in a printed book is odd; I, Robot had like three! The word 'no' was used instead of 'not' and a whole paragraph was tacked on to the end of a scene that should have been the first paragraph in the next scene, after the double carriage return. I don't remember the others. Not a big deal, but as a reader, I end up tripping out of the zone. [pop!]

All in all, I liked it and I'm glad I read it again. Thanks for the book loan Tom!

* IMDB says there is a sequel in the works for 2015.

what is a library[an]

I think we can all agree on what a library was, and we may even be able to agree on what a library is. I think the trickier question is: What is a library going to be in the future?

Image: GlobalWeb snagged w/o permission from Futurist.com

This question goes beyond the bricks-and-mortar buildings, that have traditionally housed what we consider to be the modern library, to include other questions like: What forms will knowledge media take, and how will we access those media? Will some, or all of our research and learning be done remotely, or will there still be a place for a library, that is still an actual place? And as knowledge media becomes more complex, interconnected, and diverse, how will librarians provide their much needed services to help us navigate?

According to Jedi Master and Chief Librarian of the Jedi Archives, Jocasta Nu "If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist!" Not exactly the answer Obi Wan was hoping to hear, and I'm sure librarians the world over, gnashed their teeth, and rent their garments as one, when they heard it. But another thing that scene tells us: George Lucas, for one, believes that there will be a 'place' called library in the future, where librarians work to help people navigate the vast amount of data they will eventually help to catalog, organize, and annotate. We are going to need professional help.

When I'm looking for information, my first and quickest route is now online, but in all the Google searches I've done, I have ended up with results from inside a library's collection only a few times, and that's probably because I'm occasionally searching for things like old books. I bet there are some who never get information from a library's collection returned in a Google search. That information is searchable, but only if you go to, or log into the library.

In a blog entry, three days ago, Seth Grodin posits: "the library ought to be the local nerve center for information... The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian..." I like that. The Next Library.

And yet, just three days earlier, LA Times reporter Hector Tobar, reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to fire their school librarians, and because the librarians are under contract, the LAUSD has them in a courtroom, answering to the District's lawyers about whether or not anyone actually learns anything from them. Asking them whether they take a attendance, or pass out grades! Man, I learned to walk, talk and brush my teeth from my Mom and Dad; all without grades or attendance. I hope that isn't the benchmark, counselor.

According to the ALA, public school libraries account for nearly 82,000 of the 122,000 odd libraries in America. If these libraries don't have librarians, who is going to teach our kids how to manage the information overload? Will it be the librarians in the 17,000 public libraries in America? Seems like a tall order to do alone. Even if you are a Jedi Master.

The University of Chicago's new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is designed as a big ol' reading room, sous cloche. But no stacks. You can get a book, you just can't get it yourself. You'll need a robotic librarian for that.*

Look at this blog entry at theory.isthereason, by Dr. Kevin Lim, who states that is his goal to be a " 'social cyborg', where the meshing of human and networking technology would allow one's presence to be augmented by the minds of many." He's gone to visit a place in Singapore called Geek Terminal. Check out the video. They got some stuff we need in our library y'all. And this was 4 years ago! How will these folks/cyborgs interface with the library?

In a short film featuring interviews with librarians at the 2011 ALIA Information Online Conference in Sydney, Australia, Infoventurer (real name: ehmmm...?) got some great answers to some of these questions. According to these librarians, the new librarian: needs to meet users where they are, connect people with information or other members of their community, act as facilitators and guides to the new media, and be what their users want them to be.

This was echoed in their descriptions of the new library (or Next Library, shhh). They see the library as still a physical space, complimented by online space, a place of connections; between people and information, and between people and community, a community gathering space, and a social, cultural and learning hub, where people can find information, or create their own information.

This last thought is an exciting one. Libraries have always been used for research to support studies and the development of new ideas, but more and more, they are becoming places where the actual creation of new information and media happens. From writing, to video production, to web pages and image editing, all with help and instruction at the library.

So what will the library of the future be? Sounds like it will be, what we want it to be. According to Herbert Samuel, "A library is thought in cold storage." In the digital age, this may be an even more fitting description, but if "Your library is your portrait", as Holbrook Jackson said, we should be careful to insure that our library doesn't become a portrait of closed-mindedness and lack of foresight.

We need to make our libraries as we want them, because no one will do it for us. And if we let them try, they may just unmake them altogether.

* - For thoughts on whether or not robotic librarians of the future will fall in love and get married, click here.

robot jr

What does the future hold for man and his mechanical helpers? Maybe a better question is; how will the relationship between man and machine evolve? When man's machines were confined to things like stone axes, levers and cotton gins, our 'relationship' to these tools was a simple one, but as man's mechanized helpmates become more and more sophisticated, so too will our interactions with them.

Image "AmalgaMATE" by Michaelo

In a recent podcast, the folks over at Stuff You Should Know, asked "Will robots get married?" Early on in the podcast, the answer was rather matter-of-fact: anytime people start having sex with something, they're bound to start developing feelings for it.

Pardon me? What's that?

As lifelike robots begin to become more accessible, even mainstream, there are some smart folks who believe that people who interact with them will eventually begin to have feelings for them. Especially, as the emotional range robots are able to convey and articulate become more complex. And once you've got people falling in love, and advocating for their loved ones, the next logical steps, according to what I'm reading, is advocating for robot rights and their integration into the society of thinking beings.

Over at Time magazine, Lev Grossman has been chatting with Ray Kurzweil, who still favors the ideas he put down in "The Age of Spiritual Machines"; man and machine will join in a more complete way, by a melding of minds into complex computer systems, potentially leaving our physical bodies--and our mortality--behind.

Are robots just cool tools? Gadgets we'll use to sweep up, put away the groceries, or walk the dog. Or will we someday be talking about human-robot hybrid 'children' that are made up of the combined consciousness of their human and robot parents, and installed in android bodies? And will this kid be nice to your kid on the playground?

I hope Asimov got it right in I, Robot. Just looking around on the internet, there is a boat-load of crap about this stuff. I just read a great review of a crummy book called We, Robot get it? which includes about 50 examples in the subtitle alone.

I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to have the microwave oven making eyes at me.