Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.
There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.
She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.
… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.
…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.
Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.
Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.
I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.
That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.
Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.
Great series-I’ve read all 7 books so far. It’s also being made into an Apple TV series, coming out (I think) in 2025.
“The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.”
The brutal part is there are way too many soft minds who are happy to be bamboozled and converted into slaves.
I read the first two books and then gave up, even though I bought the first five in a box set. Her description is apt, but I found Murderbot to be uninteresting because he seems to have no interest in anything outside himself. All he wants to do is sit in a closet and watch the futuristic equivalent of TV shows. He’s certainly no Nelson Mandela.
I’ve been saying for years that most Robot Apocalypse stories are really just stories about slave revolts that cast the slave owners as the victims.
Christoph @ 1
Great minds think alike…
I can recommend everyone to read the Murderbot series. Apart from the good read, it is funny (something you rarely get in SF).
The big corporations that mostly control the outer reaches of settled space have nothing against multi-generational bonded labor aka slavery. Murderbot manages to bypass the control programming mainly because the company is so cheap-ass with digital security.
Apart from cheaping out on safety for everyone -including staff- the corporations also just pay lip service to the few laws and happily sabotage each other up to and including murder on the outermost surveyed worlds where eyes are few and far between.
moarscienceplz @ 3
Murderbot would prefer to just watch shows but is propelled to act when people he/it cares about are threatened. As a protagonist, Murderbot is not that different from your average antihero.
Remember the AI in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress which assists with a revolt of inmates in a lunar penal colony? I’m surprised they never turned that into a movie.
seversky: I suspect that that novel was never made into a movie because at least some of the things the rebels say sounded too old-time-radical-left and too pro-terrorist. Early on one character justifies killing an official and leaving no trace of as body as “terror — they send someone after us and nothing comes back.” It’s been a long time since I read (half of) that book, and I know Heinlein was never a communist, but I do remember at least some hints of a Leninist flavor of the rebellion or its rhetoric; sort of like the rebels were following a Leninist model of revolution.
I never finished the book. I’m not sure why, but maybe that’s another reason no one would want to make a movie out of it. I mean, Heinlein’s dialogue and characters tended to be pretty lame, and none of it would sound any better in a movie than they did in a book.
@birgerjohansson, #5: The books also have some great insults and cleverly worded threats that I’ll probably never get the chance to steal and use.