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.

Doctorow's "I, Robot"

The fourth story in Cory Doctorow's new science fiction anthology, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, really gets the attitude Asimov's human detective, Elijah Baley, has toward his robotic colleague. Doctorow puts an interesting twist on robopsychologist, Susan Calvin, by making her the disreputable wife of the protagonist detective. References to Asimov's I, Robot series are sprinkled throughout the story, including naming one of the "Calvin" character's robots Lenny.

Of course Doctorow puts his own spin on the scenario, posing questions about who owns the rights to what, and why the answer to that question is so important to society. He again shows an uncanny knowledge of twelve-year-old girls, though in this story we get to know Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg through her father's eyes. Single Dad Arturo is struggling with the aftermath of his wife's flight to Eurasia to build illicit robotech. She's left him to keep his chin up for Social Harmony approval so he can keep his job, and struggling to get Ada Trouble out of bed, in school, and still win her love.

A fun, detailed world awaits the reader in the beginning of the story, though as the overly-long tale drags on, the concreteness of the world drops away. Large portions of the action take place in a generic mall that, as I had no details about it, read like a typical, present-day American mall. Aside from setting issues, the father-daughter relationship so well set up in the opening lines of the story loses power when, in a moment of action-adventure, Doctorow pauses to remind us how important Ada Trouble is to her dad. We already knew that, and the reader can see the strings as Doctorow tries to tug our hearts.

But don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun reading this story. It's jam packed with cool ideas and futuristic car chases. The references to the I, Robot world will tickle any Asimov fan. And, by the way, if you haven't read the originals, check out the core stories of I, Robot and my favorite novel in the I, Robot universe featuring Elijah Baley, Caves of Steel.