{"id":4541,"date":"2017-10-24T15:36:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T19:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=4541"},"modified":"2017-10-24T16:32:50","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T20:32:50","slug":"autonomous-by-annalee-newitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/autonomous-by-annalee-newitz\/","title":{"rendered":"Autonomous by Annalee\u00a0Newitz\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"28209634\"<\/a>Set 125 years from now, Annalee\u00a0Newitz’s\u00a0debut novel comes at the question of property from two angles: slavery (both robotic and human), and\u00a0intellectual\u00a0property. \u00a0It does so through the voices of\u00a0its\u00a0main characters, Judith, aka Captain “Jack”\u00a0Chen,\u00a0a\u00a0pharmaceutical researcher turned\u00a0pirate\u00a0who clones high-priced drugs to distribute them to those who\u00a0have\u00a0more need than\u00a0means,\u00a0and a freshly-activated bot named Paladin, designed for security work for\u00a0its\u00a0owners, work like tracking down pharma-pirates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Paladin is sent, along with Eliasz, its human partner\/handler, to stop Jack’s piracy, so it comes as no surprise that the two are on a collision course as Paladin and Eliasz roll up Jack’s network\u00a0with bloody determination.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jack\u00a0is on a mission as well \u2013 the latest drug she\u00a0reverse-engineered is killing people. Called\u00a0Zacuity,\u00a0the drug\u00a0focuses your attention on whatever task you’re doing while you take it and\u00a0gives\u00a0you\u00a0a\u00a0dopamine hit of good feelings\u00a0while you’re at\u00a0it.\u00a0 The story is more complex than that, and the bio-tech the author leverages holds up nicely, but feel free to just enjoy the plot.\u00a0\u00a0Given\u00a0under controlled circumstances in regulated\u00a0doses, Zacuity makes you a devoted employee (the kind Silicon\u00a0Valley\u00a0dreams about). <\/span><\/p>\n

In order to finance her philanthropy,\u00a0Jack\u00a0sold a large batch to her underground connections and\u00a0 weird obsessive behavior is cropping up among users. First a student that won’t stop doing homework, then a man who can’t stop painting his home, then more. \u00a0Every day more people are dragged into\u00a0emergency rooms exhausted, dehydrated, and desperate to get back to what they were doing\u2026even\u00a0if, as it often does, kills them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jack doesn’t see this as her fault, since she cloned the drug exactly as it was designed. \u00a0To her, it means that the pharmaceutical company intended for the drug to be addictive, and managed to hide the drug’s dangers through its Phase 1 (human\u00a0trials) testing.\u00a0 As an ethical pirate, Jack\u00a0accepts\u00a0responsibility\u00a0for the damage the bootleg version is causing and\u00a0sets\u00a0out to stop its distribution, find a way to reverse its effects, and blow the whistle on the original drug.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before Paladin kills her and everyone she knows.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"AN-2017-10-12-19.10.37-300\"<\/a>The author meticulously researched the tech in this book, especially the neuroscience, but she made some choices, particularly with regard to Paladin\u2019s mental abilities, that made me cringe. When\u00a0Eliasz\u00a0is confronted by\u00a0Paladin about his physical arousal around the bot, he\u00a0insists\u00a0“I’m not a faggot!'”\u00a0\u00a0This serves to open up discussions about\u00a0robot’s\u00a0gender and sexuality, but Paladin spends an ungodly amount of time and\u00a0research\u00a0trying to decode the comment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there’s the business with face recognition, an AI problem that’s been largely solved and one which, given the processing and number\u00a0sensory\u00a0equipment given the bot, is trivial to affect. At the outset, Paladin does well at face recognition, because it\u2019s got a brain…an actual human brain, donated (posthumously) by a soldier and used like a graphics card to\u00a0do\u00a0certain types of pattern recognition, including faces.\u00a0 The bot has\u00a0its\u00a0own AI brain, which does all the heavy lifting, with no access to the “file system” of the deceased human brain it’s carrying around in its midsection,\u00a0so\u00a0what’s the point?\u00a0\u00a0Another bot explains\u00a0that\u00a0it’s\u00a0 marketing to make humans more comfortable dealing with\u00a0AI\u2019s, which makes it a useful plot device,\u00a0especially\u00a0in Paladin’s relationship with\u00a0Eliasz.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Character-wise, this isn’t really Jack’s book. Sure, Jack wanders through the landscape on a quest, and we spend a lot of time in her backstory,\u00a0from\u00a0farm-girl to pharma-pirate, but she’s largely there to provide action and adventure for the reader, and a goal for Paladin,\u00a0whose\u00a0coming-of-age story is the real core of the book. Ultimately, the two collide, but for Jack, it’s a near-miss rather than a moment of clarity, while Paladin doesn’t really need the event to further its journey of self.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The book’s jacket invokes the twin deities of cyberpunk, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, who say nice things\u00a0about\u00a0the book. Nice is appropriate, but no one should go overboard in their praise. Autonomous is set in a landscape pioneered by Gibson, Stephenson, and others, with economic free zones and evil corporations even if the landscape is reskinned with biotech. That pharma-tech will be a major economic player isn’t news to anyone\u00a0currently alive. James Blish’s\u00a0<\/span>Cities in Flight<\/b>\u00a0(<\/span>A Life for the Stars<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(1962))<\/span>\u00a0talked about using\u00a0pharmaceuticals\u00a0as currency. \u00a0Addicting\u00a0workers to their jobs and the ultimate power of corporations would have been appealing to\u00a0both Frederik Pohl\u00a0and\u00a0Cyril M. Kornbluth, who together laid the groundwork for both in\u00a0<\/span>The Space Merchants<\/b>\u00a0(1952).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Newitz\u00a0does\u00a0bring\u00a0some interesting\u00a0ideas to the table,\u00a0including the notion that granting artificial persons human rights might lead to indenture for both robots and humans. It would be extraordinary if there were not a lot of good ideas in here,\u00a0considering that the author is\u00a0a\u00a0prominent editor and science\/culture journalist.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Newitz has two other books in the works, one a time-travel adventure with political\u00a0activists,\u00a0and the other a non-fiction about abandoned cities and what the causes behind their demise (Note: Ms.\u00a0Newitz\u00a0does not like it when people suggest Detroit for\u00a0the book, as it is not abandoned).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end,<\/span>\u00a0Autonomous\u00a0<\/b>is good science fiction and a good book, but not a brilliant example of either.\u00a0\u00a0The importance of this book is more about the character development of the author\u00a0than the characters in the story.\u00a0Annalee was Editor-in-Chief of the tech culture site\u00a0IO9\u00a0until it merged into Gizmodo, and is currently\u00a0Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica.\u00a0Although\u00a0she has written several\u00a0nonfiction\u00a0works,\u00a0<\/span>Autonomous\u00a0<\/b>marks her debut as a novelist and the change from the passive voice of a journalist to the active one of a futurist.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you like this book, or want\u00a0more on\u00a0similar\u00a0themes,\u00a0I\u00a0recommend\u00a0Daryl\u00a0Gregory’s novel\u00a0<\/span>Afterparty<\/b>,\u00a0also pharma-punk, but with much better mind expansion.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B01N4P14CI\/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Set 125 years from now, Annalee\u00a0Newitz’s\u00a0debut novel comes at the question of property from two angles: slavery (both robotic and human), and\u00a0intellectual\u00a0property. \u00a0It does so through the voices of\u00a0its\u00a0main characters, Judith, aka Captain “Jack”\u00a0Chen,\u00a0a\u00a0pharmaceutical researcher turned\u00a0pirate\u00a0who clones high-priced drugs to distribute them to those who\u00a0have\u00a0more need than\u00a0means,\u00a0and a freshly-activated bot named Paladin, designed for security […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,33,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-science-fiction","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4541"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4556,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4541\/revisions\/4556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}