Review: Service Model

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd like to start with a few authors and books that this reminded me of.

* Stanislaw Lem. He wrote robot stories that, like this, parody faulty logic and stupid bureaucracies.
* Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams. The unexpected tongue-in-cheek similes and asides to the reader, even when telling us what the robot (un)Charles is thinking.
* L. Frank Baum, Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. This is a trip to Oz or Wonderland -- anywhere that the rules don't make sense, and they must absolutely be followed regardless.
* Kilgore Trout. This author takes the Hero's Journey and removes the hero. The robot protagonist (hah!) is mostly along for the ride.
* Verner Vinge, particularly Rainbow's End. Reasons in the spoilers

Like our favorite hobbit, Charles just wants to go about his little routines, even if he is occasionally troubled by them. But then he kills his master, and doesn't know why, so obviously he must be defective. Thus begins his odd Odyssey, as everywhere he goes, he encounters broken systems that nobody can fix, people that he isn't equipped to help, and many, many entities that basically want to compress, dismantle, or otherwise destroy him. His companion is a defective robot that can only communicate by voice, and behaves erratically.

This novel is a commentary on AI, and on following orders without question, and on the concepts of service, duty, and justice. It speculates on the end of human civilization, not because things broke down or went wrong, but becauses the systems we put into place work exactly as they were designed to do.

***spoilers below this line***

It was apparent from the first introduction of The Wonk that this was a human in a "Mr. Roboto" disguise. I never, ever figured out why un-Charles, an advanced human-facing bot, doesn't clock this. It seems to be just an assumption, which later on cannot easily be corrected. I appreciated her insistence that the robot has awakened - having lost her parents, she desperately needs the world to make some kind of sense. We tell ourselves stories mainly for that reason, I think.

The police bot who investigates the murder seemed to be following the programming set by detective novels and shows, rather than any real police procedure. Could this be a commentary on AI as it exists today?

Manors abandoned everywhere, Thousands in a concentration camp (excuse me, "historical re-enactment"). Seems to me that "Make humans history" is more than just an unfortunate turn of phrase.

The librarians destroy the original work to make a copy, which isn't guaranteed to be a perfect copy, but they will all pretend that it is. Then they broke all information down to bits (1s and 0s), and then SORTED THE BITS. Stanislaw Lem and Vernor Vinge could not have done better. This is shortsighted programming at its finest. Then later, we meet robot God, who received equally foolish programming by meting justice to everyone on the assumption that everyone is probably guilty of something.

I would laugh if not for the fact that this is exactly the system that my company would design. So instead, I want to weep. Best thing to come out of this part is the concept of justice as a sliding scale. You can tell where someone is on the political spectrum by which way they adjust the slider - whether to punish the innocent so that no guilty escape, or to allow some guilty to go unpunished rather than harm an innocent. "God" chose the "tough on crime" stance shared by many conservatives today - personally, I prefer how The Wonk and un-Charles handled it, moving the slider all the way over to the opposite side.

Did unCharles develop free will? The seeds were present from the beginning, when he started to notice that many tasks were unnecessary. And, as pointed out, it's quite possible to have free will and still want to do your job. Quite a few humans are like this, although none I've met are so selfless in their service.

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