“Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.” After four novellas, Network Effect was the first time I had to settle into a full-length Murderbot story. Until this point, the books moved quickly. Most could be finished in a couple of sittings. This one…
“Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.” By the time I reached Exit Strategy, I had started noticing a pattern in The Murderbot Diaries. The books are often discussed in terms of artificial intelligence, autonomy and personhood, and those…
There are times when the market actually tells you to stop looking at it. There is something that I have noticed over the past month, and the thought came to me while talking with my better half. These days there seems to be a dearth of investing gurus on YouTube. Earlier, a scroll through…
By the time I reached Rogue Protocol, I thought I had a fairly good understanding of Murderbot. It was competent, sarcastic and perpetually irritated by human beings. Every novella seemed to follow a familiar pattern. Murderbot would arrive somewhere intending to mind its own business. Then a conspiracy would emerge, people would find themselves…
After finishing All Systems Red, I did what most readers probably do. I immediately picked up the next novella – Artificial Condition. Part of the appeal was Murderbot itself. By the end of the first book, I had become oddly invested in this socially awkward SecUnit that wanted nothing more than to avoid conversations…
Every once in a while, I take a look at the Hugo and Nebula award winners. Science fiction is one of those genres I keep returning to, and the awards are usually a good way of discovering writers I might otherwise miss. That is how I ended up reading A Memory Called Empire last…
Frank Miller’s Batman can make you smile. The kind of smile that remains on your lips long after you have closed the book. When I wrote about Miller’s The Last Crusade, I said it was a sad book. I was looking for fun, and it was a sad book. But this next one made…
I thought that my recent reads have all been heavy and I needed to read something fun. So I decided to indulge myself and picked up Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade. I was looking for fun, but this one is a sad story. It stays somewhere between a Batman story and…
A few days ago, while writing about John Ruskin’s Traffic, I had mentioned an essay recommendation from The Ken’s First Principles newsletter. That recommendation was Douglas Brundage’s Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise. I ended up thinking about that essay for much longer than I had expected. But there was another recommendation in the same…
In my attempt to keep myself educated on AI and how it is shaping our world, or speculations on how it’ll shape our world in coming days, I picked up The Age of AI. Written by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, the book is somewhat unusual in the way it approaches artificial…