Intelligence Loves Company

"I, Rowboat" by Cory Doctorow from his short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.

This story is chock full of cool ideas. The title, for starters, is super. Robbie the rowboat is one of the last of the AIs on earth who hasn't committed suicide. Why are all the AIs voluntarily shutting down their consciousnesses? The answer is that there are no humans left on earth to play with, anymore. Humans have all abandoned their meat puppet shells (Doctorow's terms) and uploaded their consciousnesses to the noosphere.

Robbie the rowboat keeps on chugging because he's a convert to Asimovism (an AI religion based on Asimov's three laws of robotics) and because he gets to interact with sort-of human beings from time to time. See, Robbie's in the tourism industry. He oversees two non-conscious meat puppets who rent their bodies to humans in the noosphere so they can have a vacation in physical form. The vacationers spend their time scuba diving near Osprey reef (the reef becomes a major character in the story).

Doctorow tackles some pretty big issues, like what is consciousness, what is intelligence, what is humanity. Ideas as lofty as this are expressed in the narrative:

“The reason for intelligence is intelligence...Intelligence wants to exist, to spread itself, to compute itself. You already know this, or you wouldn’t have chosen to stay aware...Why did humans create intelligent machines? Because intelligence loves company.”

The ideas in the story are embodied through the adventures of the sweet, self-effacing Robbie. His adventures live in a world that grows more complex and engaging in proportion with the excitement of the story, which is what makes for fun reading. Here's my favorite line from the story, near the climax of the tale:

"Robbie...was panicking, something he hadn’t known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like having a bunch of sub-system collisions, program after program reaching its halting state."

The only problem with the story was the denouement. In my opinion, it would be much improved by ending with the words: "Sorry, I just don’t see the difference anymore" (the transformation of character is so great, that the reader loses connection with Robbie after this point). But this small issue hardly keeps "I, Rowboat" from being one of my favorites in the collection, so far.