spacetime coordinates:Set in the world of 2050, where communities have robotic helpers, a group of suburbanites are locked in for their own protection by their household robots, while a rogue, self-aware AI android revolt uprising outside.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.
Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
Murderbot Diaries – takes an intimate look into the inner life, hesitations, thoughts, emotions, desires, protocols and delights of being rogue cyborg security agent that calls itself “Murderbot” in the 1st person. Diaries have this almost voyeuristic quality of allowing one to pry from behind the shoulder of someone else. They offer some sort of schematic view of what is inaccessible and probably will always remain so about the inner workings of what we normally call “a mind”. There is countless historical examples that come to mind from The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo (written btw AD 397 and 400) to the The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (completed in 1769) and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (1821). The pre-modern novel rises as an intimate account of daily happenings being pioneered by two early Japanese woman writers Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon (at around year 1000) – keeping a close eye on the Heian court in their celebrated “pillow books”. If these examples easily come to mind, the challenge for such writers as Martha Wells would be to offer us glimpses into non-human minds, to translate their complicated circuitry and allow us to inhabit smoothly these minds via the science fiction idiome. The ways that AI process information at the current stage of development or evaluate existing data or even manage to hallucinate or what wr could call – ‘see’ are notoriously opaque. The merit of Murderbot Diaries is maybe to throw back at us, its readers, with unsettling, darkly funny and minute (even repetitive) detail – the farcical and even murderously unknown ways in which machines see themselves, of how they end up perceiving or scanning their environments, or how they might disparage their human counterparts or even enjoy the friendship of other sentient spaceships while outwitting hostile combat robots. Even more so – it allows us to see why a cyborg might enjoy having what we might consider an imagination. There is no such thing – or a thing lacking imagination. Imagination itself seems to be the prerequisite of enjoying media feeds, and these are feeds are themselves figments of an imagination that subtends the pleasure of the viewer, reader, fan, author. The Murderbot series does a great job at offering us a varied and exciting new way into what could be called (to paraphrase Martha Wells) an “artificial condition” of such a mind that has been able to hack its own governor module, to explore its autonomy, to challenge and change its own mission and safeguard (even without their knowledge) its human acquaintances while evading corporate vested interests and dangerous situations that include being perceived (or registered as it is) as what it is: a rogue saboteur, a cyborg element gone haywire.
It is clear that Murderbot is not just a diary but something that transforms the diary into a mental log – speculating about the trail of important events, turning points and decisions, calculations, risk-assessments as well as visible actions and effects of its ping backs and evasions altough they are do not make a sum-total of a mind, all of these allude to its composition. These are the invisible attractions, preferences and emotions that tug at the heart-strings of an “it”, of something that is never supposed to be bored or even passionate. This is what I enjoyed very much (not clear to me exactly why – because it grounds my or another’s own enjoyments of such science fiction and materials, series, comics, animations, movies, or our own guilty pleasure of binging hooked on netflix & chill?!) of what otherwise might be dismissed as ill-spent hours. Binging was there always, especially in the former East, and especially as a kid hooked on both Saturday evening documentary shows or Sunday afternoon anime/animation shows. Yet, nowadays binging is the rule – the one condition of Corona- quarantine that seems to not affect just the privileged (paying members of Netlifx and Apple TV) section and media omnivore classes of this world. Murderbot Diaries makes some interesting suggestions regarding pure enjoyment and even what artificial intelligence might consider enjoyable or even likeable or fictional as opposed to the ‘mere’ mimetic or realist. Not only Do Androids Dream but Androids Do enjoy fictions of various sorts.
Might it be, that being a robot or cyborg might pre-dispose one towards certain types of fiction, certain types of realism and not others? Binging comes to the rescue maybe in this case. Binging “Sanctuary Moon” cyborgs and Murderbots might offer us some unsuspected glimpses into this. Because binging might not only be universal affliction of the media bulimia syndrome but germane to artificial intelligence’s everywhere (maybe a sign of such delighted wasteful intelligence to start with) and so a thing to be enjoyed in itself even when one is on the run, a fugitive or when in hiding, when damaged or recharging or not having to do something, achieve something, or even NOT having access to the dreamed about hi-tech hi-end home entertainment system. During these weeks of quarantine lockdown in Berlin I have seen various people of various age groups, from my social housing unit sitting just in front of the house outside, or immigrant youth in the Nettelbeckplatz square in the Wedding hood watching stuff online their smartphones on benches, be it music videos or football or series. We are always keen on labeling this activity – as a loss, or as being exploitative, addictive, as damaging and keeping people from more relevant political self-realization and away from more socially valuable experiences or of just transforming us all into subservient slaves of the transmedia system. Yes, even if this may be so more nowadays than ever, even with Disneyification and media gigantism at every blink of an eye, at the same time we should never ignore the role of being hooked up on something, of wasting time, or of being open to carefree enjoyment at the most difficult moments. Although probably one never dares call them life-changing, such feeds can actually be enriching and even contribute to some measure of well-being in dire times.
Well, this series speaks volumes in this regard, and Martha Wells makes clear that this SecUnit enjoys media feeds as much as we do, or even more so, being able to download its favorite bulk space opera seasons during a transit loop or even to comment on why a certain soap opera is more appealing to itself as an artificial being. Martha Wells keeps us privy to the whole of the unseen, even impossible to follow blackbox AI chats and chittering between machines that never quite follow orders. There is a new vivacity and unpredictability to these recent machine- renderings that is highly attractive to me and others I guess. This is the actual crux I think, and this is why I think Murderbot makes strides across a wholly corporate universe (akin to ours), where you can feel completely subjugated, completely under equipped to dodge all the trappings, all the trackings and all the constant surveillance. This SecUnit invites us to inhabit it, to be on board this whole time, able to enjoy its camouflage, its ability to ‘fake’ the human, to ‘fake’ the enhancement, to cheat stronger and much more relentless machinery, and also to make mistakes, to err and catch itself during its ‘weak’ diary moments. We can literally sit back or run at incredible, impossible to achieve (more than human) decisional speeds or be involved in complicated strategic planning, while also see how such ‘fictional’ entertainment media content breaks bounce back, fill in the pauses, feedback on reality, multiply the enjoyments and even keep boredom at bay when hopelessness and depressive states abound. Murderbot rides on the rhythmically undulated inner lives of some things that are supposed to be coldly calculating, compulsory, wired, branded, labeled, governed and controlled by its corporate makers.
“Within the interior of the space traveler, queer creatures of metal labored at the controls of the space flyer which juggernauted on its way towards the far-off solar luminary. Rapidly it crossed the orbits of Neptune and Uranus and headed sunward. The bodies of these queer creatures were square blocks of a metal closely resembling steel, while for appendages, the metal cube was upheld by four jointed legs capable of movement. A set of six tentacles, all metal, like the rest of the body, curved outward from the upper half of the cubic body. Surmounting it was a queer-shaped head rising to a peak in the center and equipped with a circle of eyes all the way around the head. The creatures, with their mechanical eyes equipped with metal shutters, could see in all directions. A single eye pointed directly upward, being situated in the space of the peaked head, resting in a slight depression of the cranium.” (“The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones)
World Without Darkness a novelette by Neil R. Jones
Doomsday on Ajiat a Professor Jameson novelette by Neil R. Jones
Neil Ronald Jones (29 May 1909 – 15 February 1988) was an American author who worked for the state of New York. Not prolific, and little remembered today, Jones was ground–breaking in science fiction. His first story, “The Death’s Head Meteor”, was published in Air Wonder Stories in 1930, recording the first use of “astronaut”. He also pioneered cyborg and robotic characters, and is credited with inspiring the modern idea of Cryonics. Most of his stories fit into a “future history” like that of Robert A. Heinlein or Cordwainer Smith, well before either of them used this convention in their fiction.
Rating not even a cover mention, the first installment of Jones’ most popular creation, “The Jameson Satellite”, appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. The hero was Professor Jameson, the last Earthman, who became immortal through the science of the Zoromes. Jameson was obsessed with the idea of perfectly preserving his body after death and succeeded by having it launched into space in a small capsule. Jameson’s body survived for 40,000,000 years, where it was found orbiting a dead planet Earth by a passing Zorome exploration ship. The Zoromes, or machine men as they sometimes called themselves, were cyborgs. They came from a race of biological beings who had achieved immortality by transferring their brains to machine bodies. They occasionally assisted members of other races with this transition (i.e. the Tri-Peds and the Mumes), allowing others to become Zoromes and join them on their expeditions, which sometimes lasted hundreds of years. So, much like the Borg of the Star Trek series, a Zorome crew could be made up of assimilated members of many different biological species. The Zoromes discovered that Jameson’s body had been so well preserved that they were able to repair his brain, incorporate it into a Zorome machine body and restart it. The professor joined their crew and, over the course of the series, participated in many adventures, even visiting Zor, the Zorome homeworld, where he met biological Zoromes. The professor eventually rose to command his own crew of machine men on a new Zorome exploration ship. “The Jameson Satellite” proved so popular with readers that later installments in Amazing Stories got not only cover mentions but the cover artwork.
Being cryopreserved and revived is an idea that would recur in SF, such as in Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II. One young science fiction fan who read The Jameson Satellite and drew inspiration from the idea of cryonics was Robert Ettinger, who became known as the father of cryonics. The Zoromes are also credited by Isaac Asimov as one of the inspirations behind the robots of his Robot series.
Masamune Shirow paid homage to Jones in his cyborg-populated Ghost in the Shell saga by including a no-frills brain-in-a-box design, even naming them Jameson-type cyborgs.
Jameson (or 21MM392, as he was known to his fellow metal beings) was the subject of twenty-one stories between 1931 and 1951, when Jones stopped writing, with nine stories still unpublished. In the late 1960s, Ace Books editor Donald A. Wollheim compiled five collections, comprising sixteen of these, including two previously unpublished. In all there were thirty Jameson stories written (twenty four eventually saw publication, six remain unpublished), and twenty-two unrelated pieces.
TimeSpace Warps 