What it gets right about robots: artificial general intelligence, bounded rationality

Recommendation: It’s is an enjoyable series and suitable for the family- there’s no sex, just Princess Bride trwue luv, lots of fighting but no gross, trauma inducing descriptions, and much honor and doing the right thing, and lots of robots, good and evil. 

Did you revel in the sweeping scope of Game of Thrones, with godzillions of characters? But do you secretly like in how in the Star Wars or Star Trek universes no fan favorite really ever dies? Do you like robots (oops, of course you do)? Do you like series that are finished so you don’t have to wait for the author to write the next one? 

Then Saga of Seven Suns is the book series for you! It’s a fun fast read, like binge watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, a bit uneven but the good parts are good and all the threads are wrapped up into a happy ending. And it has some teachable moments about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Saga of Seven S...

It’s the end of the world and I feel fine. No, not really. Life can be depressing. You can either double down and reread Philip K. Dick or Robopocalypse or you distract yourself with funny books.

RTSF has found 9 funny books or series about robots where you will be laughing so hard, you’ll have to put the book or mobile device down from time to time. But most are family friendly and you can count reading them as continuing education as most offer insights into real robots.

Books mentioned in the video:

• The Murderbot Diaries

• Lock In/Head On

• The Automatic Detective

• Prey of Gods

• The Complete Roderick

• The Robot Proletariat

• The Wrong Unit

• Ray Electromatic

• Rex Nihilo Adventure Series

The top of my list is The Murderbot Diaries: Bad software engineering is almost murder

Martha Wells’ The MurderBot Diaries is a series of threenovellas, each a quick read of about 3 hours. The first instalment, All Systems Red, won the 2017 Nebula, and volumes 2 and 3,...

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is a classic science fiction novel. When it was published in 1969, it created the techno-thriller genre. And looking through the Technovelgy.com website, it is the first work of fiction where robots are used for a biological outbreak. Fifty-one years later, Daniel H. Wilson, author of the more recent robot classic Robopocalypse, has written an authorized sequel, The Andromeda Strain.

Watch my video review below

The Robotics Through Science Fiction Podcast is back and today I'm with Howard Chizeck, a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, a leading roboticist and a lover of science fiction.

And here are links to the science fiction that came up:

The Invisible Boy (movie)

Bolo by Keith Laumer

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

“Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear in The Best of Elizabeth Bear link

Lock In by John Scalzi

Neuromancer by William Gibson

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This week on the RTSF podcast, I talk to Elizabeth bear about her amazing book, Tideline.

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Halloween is here and I'm sure many of you are going to be wanting to snuggle up in a dark room to watch a scary movie. If you're fresh out of ideas on what to watch, I've rounded up the top 5 scary robot movies that will be perfect for a Halloween scare-fest!

Or listen to the podcast below:

I Am Mother is the Hilary Swank-Rose Byrne movie streaming on Netflix, where a robot, named Mother (Rose Byrne), raises a girl, appropriately named Daughter, as part of a plan to repopulate the Earth after an extinction event. Or maybe not, once a survivor (Hilary Swank) shows up and starts challenging some of the fundamental assumptions. While it is neither a great scifi movie nor a bad one, it is a good way to jump start thinking about physical human-robot interaction, also known as Physical HRI.

The Robotics Through Science Fiction podcast returns! Today we're joined by the wonderful Daniel Suarez

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Drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS), are in the news this week with the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities. Ever since the CIA weaponized Predators in 2002 the conversation has typically been about killer drones remotely piloted by soldiers as part of a government’s military operations. There’s a summary of history at understandingempire.wordpress.com and you can go to io9 for a clever 5 minute video about how CIA weaponized drones and the computer vision  involved gizmodo.com. In 2014 the United Nations held a Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in 2014 to discuss killer robots www.un.org, focusing on getting governments to sign off. But as the Saudi Arabia attacks highlight, weaponized drones are becoming available to non-state actors (yes, it appears the ones in Saudi Arabia were launched from Iran or Iraq, but Hamas has been using inex...

Recommendation: Read Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach for the excellent ideas, great story, and compelling characters but pay attention to the drones too.

Read Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach today by ordering with Amazon, just follow the link below: