Hardcover

For one, it uses the language of civil rights (slavery, segregation, discrimination, voting rights, property rights, etc) not within science fiction as a metaphor for today, but to argue that the civil right battles of today and recent history will next be fought for AI. It’s kind of a gross appropriation. A Silicon Valley engineer is a general in the Californian Revolution for independence? Yuck. The definition of a person, meant to include all AI beings, is also wrong headed. “If you could talk and feel, then you were a person. Period.” Sorry to all of the people who can’t talk, I guess? Turns out ChatGPT is more of a person than you are.

There’s a lot of language like this too, where the prose resembles a terminally online twitter user in 2016. It stops short of hand clap emojis, thank goodness. Still, these robots talk like chirpy millennials trying too hard to use gen-Z slang (“robot rizz” anyone?). Why do robots talk and text this way in 2060 or something? Why are all of their references popular culture up to 2020? Don’t worry about it. They’re just here to be every trendy social justice metaphor you can imagine: they’re immigrants, they’re ethnic minorities, they’re trans, they’re non-binary, they have (in a hard to read clunky sequence around a large memory file being “such a heavy burden literally to carry”) ptsd, and they’re gonna overcome it with their can do attitudes and online slang. I’m all for well told stories for those communities, especially in genre spaces where imagination can really run wild. This isn’t it.

In the end, the story boils down to owning some online trolls. I was mostly longing for everyone involved to log off for a bit.

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Cute and slight at best. But I found this 150 page novella about robots who start a noodle shop mostly annoying.

For one, it uses the language of civil rights (slavery, segregation, discrimination, voting rights, property rights, etc) not within science fiction as a metaphor for today, but to argue that the civil right battles of today and recent history will next be fought for AI. It’s kind of a gross appropriation. A Silicon Valley engineer is a general in the Californian Revolution for independence? Yuck. The definition of a person, meant to include all AI beings, is also wrong headed. “If you could talk and feel, then you were a person. Period.” Sorry to all of the people who can’t talk, I guess? Turns out ChatGPT is more of a person than you are.

There’s a lot of language like this too, where the prose resembles a terminally online twitter user in 2016. It stops short of hand clap emojis, thank goodness. Still, these robots talk like chirpy millennials trying too hard to use gen-Z slang (“robot rizz” anyone?). Why do robots talk and text this way in 2060 or something? Why are all of their references popular culture up to 2020? Don’t worry about it. They’re just here to be every trendy social justice metaphor you can imagine: they’re immigrants, they’re ethnic minorities, they’re trans, they’re non-binary, they have (in a hard to read clunky sequence around a large memory file being “such a heavy burden literally to carry”) ptsd, and they’re gonna overcome it with their can do attitudes and online slang. I’m all for well told stories for those communities, especially in genre spaces where imagination can really run wild. This isn’t it.

In the end, the story boils down to owning some online trolls. I was mostly longing for everyone involved to log off for a bit.

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