Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

Happy birthday, Turing!

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. (Of course, at birth he was probably very bad at abstract reasoning and proofs, like most babies, but he overcame these difficulties and grew up to be truly excellent at math.)

Just in case you haven't seen this yet (HT: I saw this on Twitter several times, then on slatestarcodex), it is amusing and recursive and cultural and involves computers:

Humans often post on the website reddit, which hosts many, many different message boards and oodles of subcultures and conversations on specific topics. Each specific message board is called a subreddit and has its own adherents, community standards, topic(s) of conversation, style, level of activity, etc.

There is a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where the posts claim to be written by humans, but are written in all-caps and a style suggesting that they are actually written by robots. Redditors writing these posts are humans, so these are humans writing as if they are robots who are unconvincingly trying to pass as human.

There is a recent and extremely impressive system called GPT-2 which unsupervised-ly learns English and performs some really impressive computational linguistic feats, including writing mediocre high-school-style essays and writing very interesting and totally feasible poetry.

There is a subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2 which trains GPT-2 on subreddits and automatically writes "coherent and realistic simulated content" for each subreddit. Of course, this subreddit is just going through other subreddits, training GPT-2, and writing new (automated, simulated) posts for that subreddit.

Now the subreddit-simulating robot has trained on r/totallynotrobots, which means that there are posts on the internet which are written by a robot imitating a human writing in a style pretending to be a robot who is unconvincingly trying to pass as a human. (Or, as slatestarcodex put it, "a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.") You can see those posts here.

It's turtles all the way down, and every. single. turtle. is a Turing machine!


This post's theme word is anastrophe, "the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses." Silly grammar mistakes and anastrophe are used to denote unfamiliarity with human language.

Star Wars: n+1

No spoilers: It was cute, with the expected (large) amount of fan-service, call-backs, and foreshadowing of predictable events. The villain was actually villainous, with depth of character and a psychological edge that was scary.

As always, the evil side made a series of logistical, engineering, and personnel choices that resulted in catastrophic failure of a[n ill-conceived] plan. I would be really surprised if this did not happen in a Star Wars movie. Also, explosions in space made noise.

I predict that rolling robots will be a popular toy in the upcoming months.

I shared the audience with several storm troopers and one wookie. They did not fight where I could see. No jedi, at least not that I could tell, but I guess they could be disguised as normal people.


This post's theme word is anserine, "of or relating to a goose; silly, stupid." Yet another anserine evil plan thwarted!

Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice is a magnificent dollop of science fiction. It is ɛ-close to the Platonic ideal of a space opera --- I have zero complaints, but I reserve the final ɛ of my opinion for the piece of entertainment (perhaps Infinite Jest V?) so engaging that it induces willing dehydration and starvation.

You should read it.

The novel achieves magnificent things on many axes, simultaneously (and impressively).

On the surface, it is an easy read, quick and engaging, emotional and intellectual in good proportion. The structure of the universe also lets the reader tweak the experience; the story is so rich with details that it is possible to be entirely absorbed in wondering about the emotional states of sentient spaceships (HT to Iain M. Banks, whose sentient spaceships are similarly clever, funny, inhuman but interested in and interesting to humanity, and surely influenced this book). The more technical daydreamers can wonder about the AI technology, the biological interfaces with ancillaries, the Stargate-style gates in space, the scientific abilities of the just-offstage aliens waiting in the wings.

The meat of the story has a fascinating POV character. Other narrators who I find similarly engaging are all unreliable; this one is reliable, and even fallible, but the narrative line between being one character and an amalgam of several bodies, with knowledge of other characters' biological states but not direct access to their thoughts, is fascinatingly navigated. Ann Leckie performs masterfully, and like all masters, the performance seems effortless. The imbricated timelines of different branches of the story are handled superbly, with coordinated unfurling of recounted history and current action building in synchrony up to the book's climax. All with a light, intelligent touch.

As a literary work, too, the novel has merit. It raises questions of identity, personal intention and actions, and fate. Religion is an available theme, if you're interested. So is the question of empire-building, and utilitarianism: is some barbarism permitted, in the interests of uniting everyone under a single overarching government of fairness and justice? (Reminiscent of the philosophical point made by the beautiful action movie Hero, or the histories of China and Rome.)

One of the nice takeaways (for me) from the novel was a similar tone and subtle message: do good work. This is a lot like Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish and Earthsea novels: no matter the character's personal scope of power or influence, it is possible to better the universe by exerting that small influence in a responsible manner. For the greater good. Just do what you can, with the power you have, whether you are an omnipotent, all-skills-endowed superprotagonist (my pet peeve), or an unempowered, unevenly-systematically oppressed, unimportant body on the slush-pile of history. A secret and heartwarming message that, with enough decent people performing good (not necessarily coordinated) works for justice and kindness (and dignity and propriety), these small pieces can aggregate to form an overall society with a generous spirit and positive outcome.

Anyway, read this book. It is a gratifying experience on every level.


This post's theme word is helot, "a serf or slave." There are citizens, non-citizens, aliens, and ancillaries; no one is a helot, although ancillaries' movements and thoughts are subordinated to a centralized AI brain.