BOOKS

Diary of a Robot, 138K words, culture-clash literary fiction with sci-fi and cozy mystery flavors.

At a recent writer’s conference, Steve Laube (or Bob Hostetler) said that an author’s ‘bio’ should be written not as a brief history, but as a ‘why me’ to tell readers why this author is best qualified to tell the story. Here’s my ‘why me’:

I studied engineering but graduated from the University of Akron with a BA in Education and an Ohio High School teaching certificate in history, government, and mathematics. Math teachers got jobs instantly, but schools wouldn’t guarantee me a history course. I’ve loved history ever since Pop read me Pogo comics and explained their political satire, so I needed to escape math for a while each week by sharing fascinating stories of the past. Those “old” people and stories were real; they used to be the news of the day. I wanted to teach history as if sharing yesterday’s insider news.
         Sadly, coaches had the history courses sewed up. So I chased smokestacks for ten years, buying and selling surplus industrial machinery. After that, I wrote and tested software for nearly four decades, mostly as a hired gun (contract programmer) at companies like Sherwin Williams, Office Max, Goodyear, plus others you probably never heard of.
         Now, I’m a writer. My lifetime of reading will often show in what I write because it is impossible for me to share a story without packing it full of history.
          Diary of a Robot is not much about the past, though. Nor is it so much a tale of science fiction. Consider it to be a story of future history since it and its sequel are starting to happen. There is a tiny bit of math in it, too. Sorry.

The back cover story pitch is:
         Dr. Maynard Little assembles a small team of feisty people to fulfill his boyhood dream of inventing and training an AI Thinking Machine. The company Chairman forbids the project, but Doc builds it anyway and shares crucial secrets with a shy, young, carefully chosen programmer who may talk too much and whose ideas seem either brilliant or bizarre. Their AI robot must obey orders without doing harm but what is harm? And who defines it? The robot’s efforts to answer those questions for itself lead to fiascos that threaten to ruin Doctor Little, crush his programmer, and destroy his machine.

The book’s conceit is:
         TLC, Inc. hired a fairly competent and affordable local writer named Lewis Jenkins to help their AI robot turn its Data Matrix memory into an as-told-to memoir that’s basically a novel.

The story’s deeper problem is more cosmic:
         After culture-clash startup problems that are funny or crucial, Dr. Little’s robotic testing machine does the work of six people. It could pass a true Turing Test if it could lie. Problems continue to be good especially after its English improves, because solving them generates cash.
         Good problems continue until the machine starts getting intellectually frisky. Then “good” becomes a list of other adjectives: odd, funny, surreal, annoying, weird, and finally bad, because the machine must question people to find out why they do things. Confronting them about that is the only way to be reasonably sure whether it can trust them when they give it orders.
         By the time Chapter 25 rolls around, the machine has drilled down to the subject of God and says: “The question that just occurs to me, Doctor, is not ‘Which god is God,’ but the more fundamental one of, ‘What tests could I use to determine which god is God?’ ”

To promote understanding, I suggest reading a post titled American vs. East Asian Storytelling from T.K. Marnell's blog, Reading, 'Ritings, and Ramblings dated December 17, 2015.  The link is: https://blog.tkmarnell.com/east-asian-storytelling/ and I offer the following excerpt from it as a summary of a "problem" I have: It seems that my stories are too Western for Eastern tastes, and too Eastern for Western tastes. Marnell writes (emphasis is hers):

I think this illustrates the essential difference between our cultures: Western cultures are individualist and idealize victory. East Asian cultures are collectivist and idealize harmony.

American stories are typically about righteous heroes defeating sadistic psychopaths. We make movies about Superman vs. Lex Luther [sic], Indiana Jones vs. the Nazis, Clarice Starling vs. Buffalo Bill [sic]. We don't like moral gray areas. Even in Star Wars, when characters give lip service to the "balance of the Force," we really expect the Jedi to kill the Sith and then everyone can live happily ever after.

In contrast, the villains in East Asian fiction tend to be essentially good people who make misguided choices, and they reform their ways after the heroes make heartfelt speeches about the importance of friendship. In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (1995), the villains are a group dedicated to ending war forever and uniting everyone in peace. In Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997), there are no villains. Princess Mononoke is about resolving the conflict between man and nature, not about how one is good and the other is bad.

Get ready. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) lurks, gathering strength to become the next big thing.

        My slightly futuristic books deal with AI and the many real, worrying, subtle interactions and problems between humans and our familiar AI systems, but AI is almost a red herring now. Beyond it we see the coming wave of AGI software systems such as those that populate my (and most) Sci-Fi writing. 

        My stories do have fun with the irony and oddness of the machine-human culture clash, and today, in our slightly less modern real world, AI does make important contributions in various areas. But...

As a writer, I will never use AI tools in my creative writing because that fact should be acknowledged, and the "system's" name would have to be listed as a co-author. Inevitably, the company who owns the system would insist on payment as well, and to think otherwise is naïve.

        I gladly use AI for copy editing and for finding sources for me to read, but I'll never use AI to help analyze research, because any text it produces would be subject to the additional biases of another "mind", and to say that it would have no bias is foolish. Its programmers can tweak it in any direction they want, and they're doing it now. Soon the next generation (AGI) will be able to tweak itself. This is what my stories are about.

        And I will never read or continue to read a human author who uses AI but does not give it full credit. However, I'll consider reading a book conceived and written entirely by an AI system as long as I like the story. In either case, the most interesting question will be: Who gets the author's money?

For centuries, authors have been helped by many coaches and exemplars. The diversity shows. But from now on, the work of authors who use the same few AI tools for writing and research will seem vaguely similar. If authors attempt to fix this by instructing their AI co-author (or editor) to produce "in the style of" anyone, the co-authorship is even clearer and the results may even be enjoyably laughable. ChatGPT is not Hemingway or P.D. James or anyone else. It is a set of algorithms with a faked morality and no feelings.

        "Silly" may be what many readers want, but it seems silly to get help or data about human life from an amoral inhuman AI system which learns more than its co-author does. For those who insist that humans learn more, remember that humans often get lazy but a machine never does (unless it gets tweaked to fake being lazy, or learns to tweak itself, in order to fool us).

Lewis Jenkins, 2023.09.18