Just Finished Reading: Robot Uprisings edited by Daniel H Wilson and John Joseph Adams (FP: 2014) [472pp] 

It’s been a coming idea since the very beginnings of SF – our technology turning against us. It probably first occurred to our cave dwelling ancestors the first time a stone knife ‘turned’ in his or her hand and they cut themselves. Just think, they probably wondered, if that was a nuclear grenade I’d just dropped in the cockpit of my space cruiser!  

Most collections of short stories, as you might expect, are often hit and miss affairs. Afterall even the most generous of us can’t like the output of every author (even in a favourite genre) on every subject. This is however a pretty good collection with few poor shows. One of the poorest (yet still not terrible) was The Omnibot Incident by Ernest Cline where an ‘AI’ robot Christmas present impresses its naïve young recipient a little too much. But others (who more closely fit with the overall title of the work) were suitably disturbing if not actually creepy – which some definitely were! Complex God by Scott Sigler was a good example were nano-bots started building statues of their creator giving her an even bigger god-complex, Lullaby by Anna North was another good one where the teenage granddaughter of the vilified creator of the machines that challenged mankind in a recent war stops another attack in an intriguing way. One of my favourites was Epoch by Cory Doctorow where the world's first AI fights not to be turned off (to save money!) by playing on the fears and ambitions of its maintenance staff. Needless to say the AI is way smarter than the people who built it and is always 10 steps ahead of them. It’s always difficult to realistic portray something smarter than people (and still be understood by the readership and the author brings it off with style here). An interesting one was Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds by Robin Wasserman where a house robot in a global uprising is suffering from PTSD and is cured by a human enabling it to go on killing it oppressors. Definitely a strange one was Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor where a poor musician becomes friends with a maintenance robot just as it and its compatriots become self-aware. 

If you’re interested in AI, robots or cyberwarfare (at least in fiction!) this is definitely the book for you. Brimming with interesting ideas it’ll give you lots of food (and pauses) for thought about what’s going on right now in the world of robotics and AI research and where some of that might end up – and how such a thing might just be the last thing we invent before shuffling off this mortal coil in a rather spectacular own goal. Definitely recommended.