The Rest of the Robots.

 

Karli brought the Roomba home today!  It's a well-behaved early Model 800 Series, apparently too early in the product line for wifi access, but otherwise in excellent shape.

Ah, but I felt so bad the first time we pressed the CLEAN button! I'd put the charger in a quiet corner beside the wall unit in our dining area, and the poor thing was just confused - the table was right there, and the dining chairs, and Karli's mother had warned her that it got a little confused by things like that.  

It got frightened and hid under Karli's white chair, the one with the little fabric skirt, but then it got caught on the cord for the Christmas tree lights - it was SO SAD.  So tomorrow night we're going to let it start in the hallway, where it's nice and straight...hopefully that will makes things easier.

Jaq the Cat, who suffers a bit from PTSD for whatever reason, was surprisingly calm, although a little suspicious - I don't think he's going to be one of those cats that becomes internet famous by riding around on our new robot.

As you can see from the above, it's ridiculously easy to anthropomorphize Stabby* the Roomba as it trundles around the living room in an apparently random fashion, going back and forth in something rather like the pattern that a vacuuming human would use. Karli has suggested that we should get stick-on googly eyes for it, which I think is the best plan ever.

However, as with Opportunity, the defunct exploratory Martian rover, it seems like a bad idea to give robots like Stabby artificial intelligence.  In the case of Opportunity, it was due to the danger of its task - in the case of Stabby, it's the opposite: boredom.  

Stabby doesn't need to be able to calculate rocket trajectories or write Oscar-winning movie scripts, in fact, it would seem cruel to make Stabby too smart.  Ultimately, if it were possible to give Stabby some level of AI, it would make sense to make him about as smart as Jaq, and with similar interests:  taking pleasure in long naps, and deriving much excitement and enjoyment from chasing little pieces of dust around the apartment.  But no purring - Jaq needs something to maintain his unique status, and Stabby will never be quite as cuddly as our little feline friend.

- Sid

 

* Based on a somewhat obscure science fiction internet meme about a space Roomba with a knife taped to it - to quote the 12th Doctor, "Google it."

Victorious IV: "Allons-y!"

Most annoying thing about paradoxes, besides the impending reality collapse. 

They make conversations so repetitive.

The Tenth Doctor, Defender of the Daleks

Although some of my purchases in the Doctor Who Time Lord Victorious event weren't available at the time I placed my order, Indigo was able to immediately ship the two stand-alone novels, Engines of War and Combat Magicks, along with the first of the TLV purchases, the Defender of the Daleks graphic novel.  I've booked some extra time off for the holiday season, so I was able to immediately settle down for a leisurely read.

It took me a few chapters to realize that something was bothering me about the first book.  My initial reaction was that it was reasonably well written and that the plot was engaging, with some interesting concepts that fit nicely into the Whoniverse, but it was also somehow a bit flat, a bit lacking – what was missing?

The problem is that essentially, the books are an extension of the television version, which assumes that you’re an ongoing viewer – just as they don’t have to explain who Meredith Grey is at the start of every episode of Grey's Anatomy*, if you don’t know why there’s an obsolete blue police box called a TARDIS that’s bigger on the inside, you’re on your own. 

Obviously I have all of that knowledge, but my subconscious reading mind kept looking for the kind of explanatory exposition that a stand-alone novel would have. (Although, one of the novels breaks some new ground by dealing with the legendary Time War, which has never been fully documented – probably just to give writers some room to work in situations like this.)

The flip side of this coin is that, due to that existing knowledge of the show, it’s impossible not to compare the written Doctors with their live action equivalents – just how well does the character in Defender of the Daleks match up with David Tennant’s performance, or with Jodie Whittaker and John Hurt for the two novels? 

As you might expect, the results vary – there’s a fine line between accuracy and parody when writing someone’s verbal style, and the process is an odd inversion of the usual method, with an author attempting to recreate the actor’s style rather than the actor interpreting a script. In my case, I found that I ended up mentally delivering the lines in the actor’s voice to see if they worked. For the most part, the writers succeeded, although there were a few places in the graphic novel where it didn’t quite feel like David Tennant, and a few places where it felt a bit too much like David Tennant - if that's even possible.

However, all of this is secondary to the real question: WHY DON'T THE DALEKS IN DEFENDER OF THE DALEKS REMEMBER THE GREAT TIME WAR????  It may seem like a trivial time-travel thing to the casual reader, but as a fan, that may well keep me awake tonight. Let's hope they cover that off in one of the books that I'm still waiting for, I'd hate to have to hunt through the entire event in search of the answer.

- Sid

 

* Are there stand-alone Grey's Anatomy books?  Or is that sort of thing restricted to science fiction shows?

 

I, Robot.

One of Igor’s former masters had made a tick-tock man, all levers and gearwheels and cranks and clockwork. Instead of a brain, it had a long tape punched with holes. Instead of a heart, it had a big spring. Provided everything in the kitchen was very carefully positioned, the thing could sweep the floor and make a passable cup of tea. If everything WASN’T carefully positioned, or if the ticking, clicking thing hit an unexpected bump, then it’d strip the plaster off the walls and make a furious cup of cat.

 

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time 

I'm so excited - we're getting a robot!

Okay, it's a second hand robot, but still, it's a robot.  Karli's mother and stepfather are replacing their Roomba™, and they're letting us have their old model. 

Robots have been a mainstay of the science fiction vocabulary from the beginning, although they lacked their unique and distinctive name until 1920, when the word "Robot" entered the English language.  It's taken from the play R.U.R  (Rossum's Universal Robots) written by Czech author Karel Čapek: the word "robot" is derived from the word for "worker" in Czech, or perhaps a more accurate translation is "serf" or "slave", there's a sense of servitude to it.  

Čapek's play was a morality story dealing with the creation and oppression of an artificial race that eventually rises up and wipes out humanity.  In current science fiction terminology, I'd define Dr. Rossum's creations as androids rather than robots, they're artificial self-aware entities that resemble humans rather than programmable mechanical constructions. 

This is an important distinction: over time, the line between artificial intelligence and robots has become blurred to the point where they're considered to be synonymous, whereas in actuality, a robot is almost the opposite of artificial intelligence.  As per Terry Pratchett's tick-tock man, a robot is restricted to its programming. That programming can be very detailed and cover a wide range of eventualities, but ultimately, if something happens that isn't covered by the program, a robot can't extrapolate to a solution - and you end up with a furious cup of cat.

The company that manufactures the Roomba™ line is called iRobot, and I'm a little surprised that they haven't run into copyright issues - not from Apple, who have a pretty firm grip on the lower case "i" prefix, but from the estate of Isaac Asimov regarding his 1950 novel I, Robot.* 

If robotic science fiction has a patron saint, it's Asimov. Countless other science fiction authors have utilized robots in their stories, but Asimov is best known for having created a kind of mechanical morality for robots:  the Three Laws of Robotics, first used in his 1942 short story Runaround.

The Three Laws are as follows:

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It's an interesting attempt to create an ethical structure for machines, but in most of Asimov's robot stories, the result tends to be the digital equivalent of neurosis or insanity, as robot after robot is rendered inoperative by conflicts between the Three Laws.  (In the original story, a robot sent to get life-saving supplies from a dangerous location ends up running in circles when the Laws achieve mathematical balance in its programming.)

The Laws also have a strong feeling of  "slavery and servitude", as per Jean-Luc Picard's defense of Lieutenant Commander Data's freedom to choose in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Imagine being programmed so that self-preservation is only the third priority on your list!

- Sid

* To be completely accurate, it's not really a novel, it's a collection of previously published short stories combined through a loose narrative plot about the history of robots. And we're just not going to talk about the unfortunate movie version.