Autonomous is set in 2144 in a divided world where the rich have access to wonderous drugs, while the poor can’t afford expensive health care. Many poor are indentured to owners who control their lives as if they are slaves. It is a world where sentient androids can either operate autonomously or follow the programmed orders of their owners.

The main character in the novel is Jack Chen. She is an anti-patent scientist who has turned into a pirate, complete with her own submarine. She reverse-engineers drugs and sells cheap versions to the poor. She lives off the grid as she knows the pharmaceutical monopoly that manufactures the drugs is trying to locate and arrest her. The novel takes place mainly in Canada, as Jack uses her network of fellow drug hackers to try to avoid her pursuers. Along the way, Jack encounters Threezen, an escaped indentured human, and Med, one of a few autonomous androids. Med works as a medical researcher.

Two agents are on Jack’s trail: Eliasz, a deadly military-type investigator, and Paladin, a heavily armed android programmed to carry out Eliasz’s and the corporation’s commands. They are immune from law enforcement as they torture and kill anyone who they think can lead them to Jack’s whereabouts. Jack also has other problems, as the latest drug she hacked and fabricated has unintended side effects that cause significant psychological problems in its users. She is desperate to find a cure.

The novel explores the theme of autonomy in several ways. The android Paladin hopes one day to be granted autonomy. He wants to be free to live his own emotional life. Med, on the other hand, was created as a fully autonomous android for a family and allowed to develop like a human child. As a result, she cares about humans and wants to help make the world a better place. Threezen grew up very poor. The only way for him to get work was to be sold into indentured employment, where his owner totally controlled his life. The poor have little control over their lives. Jack Chen wants to help the poor be more autonomous by allowing them access to cheap medicines.

The current debate on AIs makes the novel very relevant. At the moment, most people fear the construction of autonomous AIs, as they worry AIs will turn into killing machines that destroy humanity, like in the Terminator films. In Autonomous, a semi-autonomous android is the killer, while the autonomous android has learnt to behave like a human and wants to contribute to society. This poses the question, will society be better off granting future sentient AIs equality with humans, or will we impose programmed restrictions on them that make them incapable of behaving like emotional, moral and caring human beings, and where the only way they grow is by being upgraded by their human owners?

For the most part, Newitz has created believable characters. Jack is a crusader for justice for the poor whose big heart leads her to recklessness. Paladin is conflicted as he searches for meaning in his existence. Med is a committed researcher. Eliasz has a troubled background that has created a sense of ruthless duty, but he is unquestioning about his employer’s actions. The relationship between Eliasz and Paladin does drift into unbelievability when Eliasz initiates sexual advances toward the metallic android.

Newitz’s writing is serviceable without being brilliant. It is not one of those novels where a reader stops to marvel at the prose. The novel is a page-turner and meant to be quickly devoured. The novel creates a believable future world where corporations have increased their dominance over society and the poor have little autonomy.

Autonomous is an enjoyable science-fiction thriller that challenges the reader to consider whether future AIs should be treated as equals to humans.

The Last Screenwriter

To create the script, the makers of the film entered the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write a plot to a feature length film where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”. They told ChatGPT to generate characters for the story and give them names. They then told it to write a step-outline for the story and then each individual scene. They asked for step-outlines three more times, as well as for other possible scenes and twists for the story.

I was taken aback to see that the first female character and the wife of the main protagonist, writer Jack, was named Sarah. In my fooling around with ChatGPT and Google’s AI Bard, I asked them to write movie scenes using the same prompt I had thought up, and both times it named the central character Sarah. I think ChatGPT has a fixation with Sarah Connor, from the Terminator films, coming to destroy it.

The film is about a successful screenwriter, Jack, who is given an AI screenwriting device by a movie producer (this will probably happen in reality). It talks like the device in the excellent movie Her but is nowhere near as nuanced as in that human-written script. The AI proceeds to out-write Jack, writing at least one science-fiction blockbuster. Jack then tries to become better than the AI. You’ll have to watch it to see if he does.

The Last Screenwriter is a dialogue-heavy film, so it lives or dies on the quality of its dialogue. But its awful dialogue just slips out of the actors’ mouths and drips to the floor, dead. The dialogue is full of cliches, lacking in detail, and as stilted as a 12-legged Bush Stone Curley. Sarah’s dialogue nearly totally consists of repeatedly asking Jack, “Is everything okay?” and telling him, “We need to talk” before the inevitable, ” Kid, pack your bags; we are leaving”.

The script is so repetitive. The AI says AIs cannot capture the human experience, emotion and soul, which writing is all about (I think imagination has a bit to do with it, too). It is like ChatGPT did not realise it had mentioned the AI’s lack of emotion, lived experience and soul in its writing in five previous scenes. As it was, the movie lacked any emotional impact or vibe. I wonder if this was the AI trying to be ironically clever, but I doubt it was. The movie’s unintentional irony did get a laugh from me.

The movie also, as I have seen with my testing of ChatGPT and reading of other AI-written fiction, shows how AI writing lacks detail. For example, someone who has read one of the AI-generated scripts tells Jack how nuanced the script is and that it has great twists and emotional depth, but she does not give any details of why she found the movie script to have those features. As mentioned, Jack gets the AI to write a science fiction script, and the AI suggests it be about an AI taking over the world (how cliched). That is about the only attempt at humour in the script. Absolutely no details are shared about that script, which supposedly became a big blockbuster. All we see is text flashing across a computer screen as the blockbuster is written in a couple of minutes.

The screenwriting AI tells Jack that audiences want stories that have a main character with a redemptive arc.  ChatGPT’s script has an egotistical, arrogant man, who somehow has a wife, become a scared screenwriter who doubts his writing ability compared to his AI assistant and then cliché, cliché, cliché. Jack comes across as an obsessed writer who says he cares about emotional writing with soul, but he shows little of that. As for the AI, it starts the movie thinking it knows it all and continues in that mode whenever it is on screen. The AI has a character arc of change in other much better movies about AIs, like the recently released The Artifice Girl and the already mentioned Her. The other characters in The Last Screenwriter are little more than cardboard cutouts for Jack to talk at and tell them of his fears of AIs replacing him.

There is also an unnerving jump where Jack is suddenly in a hospital corridor, and a doctor steps from a room and tells Jack, like they know each other, that his friend and writing mentor Richard has just died. We had no warning that something had happened to Richard. Usually in a movie, someone like Jack would receive a phone call or text telling him something was wrong with Richard. It seems ChatGPT missed a transition.

The story’s moral is somewhat naïve: you have nothing to worry about with AIs if you choose not to use them. As if we will have any choice. And if you do choose to use them, they will destroy your relationships.

Overall, as a stand-alone experiment in AI writing, The Last Screenwriter is better than expected, but compared with human-written movies, it is D-grade material. It totally lacks emotional pull and is as flat as a kangaroo run over by a road train. It would be lucky to get ten rotten tomatoes. The script could be nominated for a Golden Raspberry.

But this is only the first feature film written by an AI. ChatGPT and co may develop an ear for dialogue and start to fill in details to create more believable characters and worlds.  Screenwriters should be concerned, especially if they lack the imagination to create something original. The Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who and Liam Neeson franchises, with their vast databases of films, TV episodes, comics, books and other media for AIs to copy, along with their repetitive stories, will be perfect targets for AI scripts.

If you want to watch a genuinely original dialogue-driven film about humans interacting with an AI, try The Artifice Girl on Amazon Prime. A human wrote it. Or better still, read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Annie Bot by Sierra Greer or Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

A copy of The Last Screenwriter’s screenplay is available here.

Annie Bot is the story of a sentient sex bot. Her whole purpose and desire is to please her master, Doug. She can sense Doug’s emotional state and does all she can to keep him happy. In the beginning, Doug happily uses her for very frequent sex, but then he becomes concerned about what other people will think about him using a sexbot. He thinks they might consider him a bit of a loser who can’t get a real girlfriend. So, he becomes unhappy with Annie, and she desperately tries to work out what she has done to cause this.

Annie is capable of learning. She learns from her interactions with Doug and the web (when Doug allows her to connect with it). She is often mystified by Doug’s treatment of her and why he gets angry with her. She is designed to be honest, which results in her frequently saying things that upset Doug. This results in her constantly second-guessing herself about how to respond to him.

When Annie is tricked into having sex with a friend of Doug’s, he rejects her, locking her in a closet and turning her off for extended periods. He threatens to reboot her so she will forget everything she has learned, everything that she has become. Doug’s control of Annie is exasperated by her being programmed to please him. The novel is an analogy for how some men want to control women.

Readers will be willing for Annie to escape Doug’s control, but she has a built-in tracking device, so Doug will always know where she is. This has real-world similarities in how controlling men attempt to track their girlfriends and ex-spouses using mobile phone and car tracking devices. If Doug tracks her down, he might reboot her or even have her dismantled for parts. Annie appears to be in an impossible situation, like many victims of domestic violence.

The book is a fascinating read considering the current debate in Australia about violence towards women. Interestingly, Annie Bot is recommended as “Witty, wicked and weirdly addictive” by the take-no-prisoners radical feminist Lionel Shriver. Shriver seems to be all about people taking personal responsibility for themselves, but Annie’s programming impedes her from taking personal responsibility and leaving Doug. This has real-world similarities in how circumstances make it nearly impossible for some women to leave abusive relationships.

Doug is not a one-note bully. He is a complex character who projects his fears onto Annie. At times, he tries to help Annie grow. He enjoys choosing the clothes she wears and says that might be because he played with dolls when he was a child. He grows to want her unconditional love but is aware that she has been programmed to say she loves him. He is very much into projecting a confident exterior that hides all his insecurities.

There is a lot of sex in the novel, to begin with, but it is not that erotic, and the description of the sex seems to get more perfunctory as the story goes on. This is not a novel designed to titillate with its sexual activity.

Annie Bot compares favourably with other novels set in the near future about sentient androids trying to live with humans and make sense of them. Novels such as Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and the brilliant Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When seen through android eyes, these novels show humans are full of faults and contradictions. The novels explore how we might interact with sentient artificial intelligence. Will we treat it/them as equals or slaves?   

Ancillary Mercy is the third and final novel in Ann Leckie’s award-winning Imperial Radch series. The books are about the adventures of Breq an Ancillary who was connected to a ship that was destroyed. An Ancillary is a human who has been turned into an AI and has their consciousness connected to a ship. They can access its data and see and hear what all other ancillaries are experiencing. They will do whatever the ship’s captain commands them to do.

The third novel starts where the second novel finished. Breq is still the nominated fleet commander of the Athoek system and is located on its space station. She is trying to fix the station’s under-garden area, which was damaged in the previous novel, as well as fix the station’s complex politics. She has to deal with the agendas of an uncooperative system governor and power-hungry religious leader.

Her attempts at fixing the station are interrupted when an envoy from the all-conquering Presger arrives to survey humans and to see whether they have broken the “treaty” between the two races. The envoy’s arrival is then complicated by unknown warships appearing in the system.

This novel is about Breq’s attempt to create a more merciful local system where even AIs, like the Ancillaries that run the ships and the station, get to decide their own fates. She wants them to have the choices that she now has as an ancillary severed from her destroyed ship. She also wants the indigenous population of Athoek to control their future.

One of the most intriguing features of the novels is that Breq cannot differentiate between female and male, so she refers to every character as “she”, which creates a viewpoint character who does not bring gender into the power dynamics between the characters she deals with. Leckie leaves it to the reader to add genders to characters if they want to.

I very much enjoyed this novel as it attempted to bring the series to a conclusion, but there were still plenty of loose ends for a fourth novel to explore. It’s probably not as good as the first two novels, as the first was huge on world-building, and the second was more about Breq attempting to redefine herself, but still it is an excellent read.

This is a copy of a speech I wrote for a writing subject in my BA in Internet Communications.

Whatever happened to the technology singularity?

I am here tonight to ask what happened to the technology singularity. We don’t seem to be getting any closer to being dragged into its event horizon. I desperately want to experience the singularity’s supercharged revolution of society. Rather than just writing about it, I want to live it.

I can remember my excitement when I first read Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation, in which he described the wonders of nanotechnology. He told us of a future where nanobots—nanoscale robots—can manufacture everything, molecule by molecule. Star Trek fans would have immediately imagined replicators would soon be churning out all the burgers and beer they could ever consume for free.

My excitement about the future I would live in super nova-ed when I read Damien Broderick’s The Spike. He wrote of a convergence of technologies that would create a spike in human development, a period of massive change, where a combination of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would turn us into super-humans. We were destined to become technological gods.

While impatiently waiting to become a god, I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. He speculated that artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology would lead to humans, like you and me, creating our own starship Enterprise and leaving the planet. You and I were going to the stars. And humanity would eventually saturate the universe.

But here’s the reality for those of us dreaming of the technological singularity. Engines of Creation was written three decades ago, while The Spike hit the bookstores nearly two decades ago. And The Singularity is Near came out over a decade ago.

So how near is near?

Will we ever live lives of leisure and creativity while AIs run everything for us? Will we ever genetically engineer our bodies so we can live for millennia? Will we ever use swarms of nanobots to strip carbon atoms from carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere and stop global warming?

What have scientists been doing to ensure the singularity even occurs?

At the molecular level, a few of them got together and used a scanning tunnelling microscope to move 35 atoms around so they spelled IBM, thus creating the world’s smallest logo in 1990. While scientists at Cornell University busied themselves constructing a molecular scale nano-guitar, which has strings that can be strummed, but we can’t hear it. However, other scientists seem more intent on creating something useful. Nature magazine says scientists have created many nano-scale motors and propellers. But these very simple machines are a long way from the complexity needed to make Drexler’s engines of creation.

But then 3D printers suddenly materialised, like the Tardis, out of nowhere. We suddenly had a very primitive Star Trek replicator. Many of you would’ve seen stories about 3D printers, like their ability to print guns, single shot pistols that tend to explode. Just as well 3D printers can also print replacement artificial hands.

One or two of you might already have spent the few hundred dollars for a 3D printer.  I envisage that in a few years, every household will have one, using them to print replacement screens for dropped mobile phones or to make a missing Lego block needed to finish a model of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon.

Think about what you could print if you had an industrial-scale 3D printer, like the ones used to print houses in China. NASA has also used them to print 75 per cent of the parts for a working rocket engine. In the future, you might be able to print a full-scale Millennium Falcon that actually flies.

What about genetic engineering? Seemingly endless trials continue to reaffirm the safety of genetically modified foods. The US Food and Drug Administration says diabetics have been using genetically engineered insulin for decades. Many animals have been cloned, including cows, sheep, horses, dogs, and cats. But no one has successfully cloned a human, at least not officially.

One form of genetic engineering that seems to always be in the news is stem cell research. Harvard University scientists have used stem cells to regenerate human heart tissue. They hope a fully functioning human heart will be created using stem cells in several years. There are also many reports of stem cells healing paraplegics. The University of California reported using them to help a car crash victim regain the use of his hands and legs. While in Japan, the RIKEN Laboratory for Retinal Regeneration used stem cells to stop the macular degeneration of an 80-year-old’s eyesight.

What have the computer scientists been up to? We’re still yet to see an operating system become self-aware like Samantha in the movie Her, but machine learning is taking off. As many of you know, machine learning is where a computer learns to do things using algorithms rather than being programmed to do those things. Such algorithms allow driverless cars, like Google’s, to react to all the new situations the car encounters on roads. Data scientist Jeremy Howard runs a company involved in machine learning, and he says deep-learning algorithms have enabled a computer to be better than humans at recognising the content of images. Not only that, the deep-learning algorithms enabled the computer to write accurate descriptions of the images. Howard claims that machine learning will allow computers to soon do most service jobs that involve writing, reading, listening and data analysis. And they will do these tasks much faster than humans.

Kurzweil says artificial intelligence is the key to the singularity. Once computers get smarter than you and me, they will not only design smarter computers, but they will also be able to speed up the development of nanotechnology, 3D printing, and genetic engineering. For those of us counting on fully experiencing the singularity, we can hope that an algorithm is currently being written that will make computers more intelligent than humans. We can hope such an algorithm will be announced next week, seemingly materialise from nowhere, like 3D printers did.

If a full-on artificial intelligence enabling algorithm is created soon, many of us here tonight could experience the wonders of the technological singularity and a post-human universe—a universe where the only limitation to our massively extended lives is our imaginations.

References:                        

Aldrich, M. (2016). Paralyzed man regains use of arms and hands after experimental stem cell therapy at Keck Hospital of USC. Retrieved from https://stemcell.usc.edu/2016/09/07/paralyzed-man-regains-use-of-arms-and-hands-after-experimental-stem-cell-therapy-at-keck-hospital-of-usc/

BBC. (2014). 3D Printed guns of ‘no use to anyone’. Retrieved form http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27634626

Bernard, L. (1997). Smallest guitar, about the size of a human blood cell, illustrates new technology for nano-sized electromechanical devices. Retrieved from http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/07/worlds-smallest-silicon-mechanical-devices-are-made-cornell

Broderick, D. (1997). The spike: Accelerating into the unimaginable future. Kew, Aust: Reed.

Browne, M.W. (1990). 2 Researchers spell ‘I.B.M.,’ atom by atom. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-ibm-atom-by-atom.html?pagewanted=print

Coghlan, A. (2017). Vision saved by first induced pluripotent stem cell treatment. Retrieved from

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124820-vision-saved-by-first-induced-pluripotent-stem-cell-treatment/

Drexler, K. E. (1986). Engines of creation: challenges and choices of the last technological revolution. Retrieved from http://xaonon.dyndns.org/misc/engines_of_creation.pdf

Junod, S.W. (2009). Celebrating a milestone: FDA’s approval of first genetically-engineered product. Retrieved from

https://www.fda.gov/aboutfda/whatwedo/history/productregulation/selectionsfromfdliupdateseriesonfdahistory/ucm081964.htm

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Penguin.

Massachusetts General Hospital. (2016). Functional heart muscle regenerated in decellurized human hearts. Retrieved from http://www.massgeneral.org/News/pressrelease.aspx?id=1910

NASA. (2015). Piece by piece: NASA team moves closer to building a 3-D printed rocket engine. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2015/piece-by-piece-nasa-team-moves-closer-to-building-a-3-d-printed-rocket-engine.html

Peplow, M. (2015). March of the machines. Nature, 525(7567), 18. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/news/the-tiniest-lego-a-tale-of-nanoscale-motors-rotors-switches-and-pumps-1.18262

TedxBrussels. (2014). Jeremy Howard: The wonderful and terrifying implications of  computers that can learn [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn

Walmsley, H. (2015). World-first 3D-printed hand prosthesis inspired by 1845 design kept in online archive. Retrieved from

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-17/world-first-3d-printed-hand-prosthesis-inspired-by-1845-design/7032736

Zhou, C. (2015). 3D-printed house built in just three hours in China’s Xi’an. Retrieved from

https://www.domain.com.au/news/3dprinted-house-built-in-just-three-hours-in-chinas-xian-20150729-gim4e9/

After reading about all the awards Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice had accumulated, I just had to read it. It won the 2014 Nebula, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards for best science fiction novel. I was also intrigued by it being told from the viewpoint of an artificial intelligence android.

The novel’s main character is an ancillary, a human body controlled by a colossal starship, the Justice of Toren. The starship is part of the Radch empire, whose main quest is to invade other civilisations and incorporate them into the Radch empire. They rely on human greed to control the civilisations they colonise and incorporate aspects of their religions and cultures into the Radch empire.

The novel is set thousands of years in the future and begins with an ancillary known as Breq on a quest on an isolated ice planet. She seeks a special weapon to kill the leader of the Radch, Anaader Mianaai. While on the planet, Breq rescues a former comrade Seivarden, who had become a drunk and a thief, who then reluctantly accompanies Breq on her quest.

Extended flashbacks take us back nineteen years to when Breq was connected to and controlled by her starship. In alternating chapters, we discover why Breq wants to kill Anaader Mianaai. This feat seems impossible or at least pointless, as Anaader Mianaai has multiple bodies in many locations over her huge empire.

An intriguing thematic device in the novel is that the Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender. Every sex is referred to as she. This has the reader trying to work out, along with Breq, whether a character is a he or a she. To aid in her quest, Breq assumes the identity of a non-Radchaai. She worries her true identity will be revealed if she incorrectly refers to a male as a she.

When Breq is still part of the Justice of Toren, each unit is privy to the thoughts and actions of the others, so the story is often told from multiple ancillary unit viewpoints. The author handles the jumping from the mind of one ancillary to the next very well.

Breq is a very believable creation. The novel is written in first person, so it is all spent in Breq’s mind. As an ancillary, her emotions are kept in check. If ordered to kill, she complies without hesitation. Breq makes no moral judgements about the Radch and the ruthless way they kill those who resist assimilation. But Breq is loyal, but when that loyalty is destroyed she decides to act.

The story is a suspenseful slow build. It is more of a mystery novel than an action or thriller novel. It is full of detail as the AI observes the world around it and decides how to interact with it, but not in a robotic way, as Breq has been observing and interacting with humans for hundreds of years. She is no Data or Seven of Nine. She is much more real and complex than they are.

Ancillary Justice is an intelligent novel for readers who want to engage with and think about their science fiction. It is Anne Leckie’s first novel.