Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection edited by Allan Kaster
The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-261-9, $18.99, 286pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
Discussions around the place of robots and artificial intelligence have grown in relevance and urgency over the last couple of years; AI is gaining ever more presence in our “real” lives rather than just in fiction. Allan Kaster’s fourth collection of stories about robots and AI, then, is an interesting look at how writers were thinking about these issues in 2022: the interactions between robots/AI and humans, how humans might make use of robots and AI (and vice versa), what sort of world might create and utilise artificial beings – or how our use of them might shape the world.
It’s a bit depressing to note that overwhelmingly, these stories had bleak settings. Not all of the stories were themselves bleak, but the societies in which they take place are not ones in which I would like to live. In fact, out of 14 stories there are only three that aren’t set in what I would regard as actively awful societies. One of those, Gregory Feeley’s “The Secret Strength of Things”, is set on Triton and features no humans at all – only AIs – so it’s actually not clear what the human experience might be at this time. A second, Megha Spinel’s “The Secret of Silphium”, is set in Cyrene in 92BC, where the Romans are on the verge of taking over, so it’s not exactly a utopia. Only E.C. Myers’s “Hello from Tomorrow” features a future world that doesn’t make me concerned for the future of humanity. Interestingly, Myers’s story is simultaneously about space exploration and family connections (Feeley’s story is the only other one set off-world); is it naïve to think that humans might still be able to connect such exploration with hopefulness?
One concern that a few stories examine is the notion of AIs taking over human personas (an idea explored in, for example, the 2013 film The Congress) that is increasingly of concern around ‘deep fake’ video and audio. Kylie Lee Baker’s “Lily, the Immortal” sees the image and voice of a young vlogger taken over by a corporation after her death, and continue to be used for commercial purposes. Will McIntosh imagines a future where a young model’s likeness is used to create sex dolls. In “Dollbot Cicily” the model has no recourse to stopping production (nor does she receive royalties). Both stories see corporate greed as the main driving factor in the use of AI to dehumanise people; the AIs have no autonomy – it’s all about the humans being awful. Alternatively, there are two stories that imagine AIs managing (or manipulating) the humans with whom they are intimately connected. Jendayi Brooks-Flemister writes of a mother and daughter moving into a SmartHome in “Welcome Home”, where initially life seems to be improving for the pair but the mother eventually realizes that she is losing autonomy to the AI. This, too, is spurred by corporate greed – the SmartHome manages everything through associated companies – but there is an overtone of complicity from the AI that is missing in the Baker and McIntosh. This is then taken to an extreme by Louise Carey: In “The Still Small Voice”, humans have an AI implant that manages everything from their calendar to purchasing and releasing brain chemicals like dopamine. John, a salesman, is being actively manipulated by his implant, whose motivations remain entirely opaque.
Robots and androids feature in the other six stories in the anthology. It’s telling that three of those stories imagine robots/androids being used for military purposes: Ray Nayler’s “Mender of Sparrows” is as much a story of returned veterans as it is a story of what it means to be an individual. Holly Schofield and Lavie Tidhar also both place their stories in the aftermath of war: “Maximum Efficiency” considers how a machine designed to kill might find new purpose when the war is over, while “Schlafstunde” considers (among many other things) whether orders given to AIs and robots might outlast their human originators.
The final story of the anthology is a fitting one: Ken MacLeod’s “Cold Revolution Blues”. An English journalist (or is he a spy) on assignment in the European Democracy experiences robots and AIs being used in ways that are not yet as prevalent at home: at passport control, driving a taxi, on the docks. He’s there to explore advancements in AI that could well destabilize the global economy, and ends up being confronted with issues around labor rights and migration policies, not to mention the “how do you know you’re human” question. It neatly and thoughtfully provokes a lot of the questions the world faces today, as do most of the other stories collected in this excellent anthology.
Alexandra Pierce reads, writes, podcasts, cooks and knits; she’s Australian and a feminist. She was a host of the Hugo Award winning podcast Galactic Suburbia for a decade; her new podcast is all about indie bookshops and is called Paper Defiance. Alex has edited two award-winning non-fiction anthologies, Letters to Tiptree and Luminscent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler. She reviews a wide range of books at www.randomalex.net.
This review and more like it in the February 2024 issue of Locus
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