I met my first robot 40 years ago. I entered a large warehouse near Newark and this formidable thing moved quickly to intercept me. It was over 6 feet tall and more or less conical. It had a large circular base. I assumed there were wheels inside.
It spoke to me, some sort of greeting. I believe my answer was confused. You see, there’s something unsettling about robots when they speak to you. What are they actually doing? Or thinking? Or deciding to do to you?
Typically, whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing it the way you do it. You are animal; they are mineral. So, there’s already a divergence. You are both aliens in the other’s world. You are almost certain to experience misunderstandings and confusion. This remains the aspect that fascinates me the most. As a novelist, I am drawn to the possibilities of language, and the limits.
When I got back to my apartment in the west side of Manhattan, I started calling experts or supposed experts or so-called experts. The fascinating thing was none of these geniuses agreed on what was possible, would someday be possible, or would forever be impossible.
Mainly, did that thing in New Jersey actually communicate with me? To what degree was it autonomous? In what respect was it thinking? This is the robot singularity, and more and more people will be reaching it. Imagine a person across the room. A very attractive person about 30. You sense something different but you’re not sure. You finally guess, Is that…a robot??? Now the question is, is your realization thrilling and welcome? Or is it intimidating and creepy?
Some people will love robots. Some will recoil.
That’s precisely the divide that was the starting point for Frankie. In the first chapter, an AI genius brings his most brilliant work home for his wife’s admiration. But the wife is not charmed. She is threatened and angry. She does not want this other “woman” in her house. The husband is much too obsessed with whatever it is.
Thus begins a novel that is a blend of several genres: suspense, mystery, crime, sci-fi, speculative fiction, and thriller. I think people who read murder and crime mysteries will find it engaging because Frankie is a unique mystery. Many people die, but Frankie does not appear to have an evil circuit in her body.
Elon Musk seems almost to be part of my PR department. I am grateful. He constantly warns that AI will soon kill us. So, lots of people are worrying about these matters. But the robot as killing machine is not my particular interest. My robot misunderstands and is misunderstood.
For writers and academics, the most intriguing issue is communication and miscommunication
If you went away for the weekend and left your eight-year-old in charge of the house, what strange things would happen? My novelistic premise is that the smarter that robots get, the more likely you will see bizarre and unanticipated events.
As for the robot in Newark, it was advertised in a small intellectual magazine with claims it could interact with humans. The idea was that businesses would hire it for trade shows; people would experience robots for themselves. In fact, after listening to all my experts, I finally concluded that the robot was a fake. Not autonomous at all but radio controlled. But does that matter if the people at a trade show think it’s real?
The same questions persist in all discussions about what a robot is doing, when it does whatever it does. Alan Turing wanted a machine to carry on a conversation, as if talking to a human in another city. But in what sense is it carrying on a conversation? Is Siri conversing? We are entering a strange world of theater and secrets well hidden.
If an actor pretends to have an emotion, does the actor have an emotion?
One of my conclusions was that the public is confused about robots because virtually nobody in the media understands them enough to explain what is going on. One of my main areas of research is our K-12 system and how it’s become a wonderland of fatuous failure. Similarly, robots are even spookier than they need to be because virtually nobody understands the basics. To explain why robots are so mysterious, I created Price’s Three Rules for Understanding Robots. That’s a nod to Asimov.
Rule 1
Is that you can’t judge anything about a robot because it easily does something that’s difficult for you. Robots can count to 1 billion in seconds, but you never will count to 1 million. But many things you find sublimely simple, the robot will not be able to do any time soon.
Rule 2
Is that android robots are not something that will one day be invented by a solitary genius. That’s what might be called the Frankenstein Fallacy. In reality, robotics is advancing on a thousand separate fronts. When innumerable systems and sub-systems are perfected, you will then have the robot of your fantasies.
Rule 3
Is that for a robot to function in this world as well as you do, it must know as much about this world as you do. Humans typically spend 10 or 20 years learning the basics about the world they are born into. Initially, AI people thought they could create a big database and give it to the robot and that robot would move intelligently among us. Not so.
Note that nothing I said so far tells you what Frankie is really about. That’s the mystery.
I’m proud of this aspect. Typically, a crime mystery starts with a body on the floor, gunshot wounds, etc. The fun in this case, if bafflement can be fun, is that you don’t know what the landscape is, nor what is transpiring in front of you.
Which brings us to the words on the cover:
“Experts are baffled when many people die in a university town. Cause of death: unknown.”
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It’s interesting to hear about the different perspectives of the husband and wife.