Robots

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’). It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’.

They didn’t call Diogenes ‘the Cynic’ for nothing. He lived to shock the (ancient Greek) world. When I’m dead, he said, just toss my body over the city walls to feed the dogs. The bit of me that I call ‘I’ won’t be around to care. The revulsion we feel at this idea tells us something important: that the dead can be wronged. Diogenes may not have cared what happened to his corpse, but we do; and doing right by the dead is a job of work. Some corpses are reduced to ash, some are buried, and some are fed to vultures. In each case, the survivors all feel, rightly, that they have treated their loved ones’ remains with respect.

In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes. Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire.

The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is arranging traumatic memories into comprehensible order. She is a robot, an Artificial Friend or AF, purchased as a companion for an ill teenager named Josie. Klara’s speaking voice, in a C3PO-ish way, is endearingly off-kilter: ‘I was instructed to ensure against hanky-panky.’ ‘I’m sorry. It’s my error. I don’t understand yet the rules about forgiveness.’ There is no backstory explaining when the robots were invented, and no metaphors except the one shining in the title. When Klara has been bought, she wonders what emotions she might experience if she ever meets an old AF companion again.

We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a plush animal toy with camera and wifi implants) that creates a private but silent connection between its owner anda single, remote watcher.

What kind of loyalty do we owe a robot we’ve paid for — one who exhibits a convincingly human kind of consciousness? Less loyalty than we owe to our own children? But what about to someone else’s child? And do we commit murder if we destroy him? These are the questions facing Charlie when he spends his inheritance on a robot called Adam. Charlie is a trained anthropologist with an enthusiasm for computers who hopes to give his life meaning by experimenting in ‘electronics and anthropology — distant cousins whom late modernity has drawn together and bound in marriage’. He and his girlfriend Miranda join forces in programming Adam with a personality, playing at parenthood as they create a new quasi-human.