writing iron/feeling machines
a) writing iron:
once again, "Our Shorter Fiction Workshop" is up and running, with the same rules (except two weeks per assignment) -- scribble_work; the first assignment's words are birth, baseball, cascade. I don't mind telling you I have, for the first time in my life, intense writing cramps.
b) feeling machines:
A little while ago I joked with a friend about how robots would one day be better than people at reading human emotions -- which might come with the development of human emotions in robots; and finer discernment might come with finer sentiments -- "We'll be the robots, then," I said.
I just finished reading Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, which has some hilarious narrative examples of what I was joking about. From "Robbie", about robot nursemaid Robbie: "He just can't help being faithful and loving and kind -- he's a machine, made so!"
In a mechanistic universe, of course, robots are not only equivalent to people, but they're better than the average; as Susan Calvin notes in "Evidence", when the question comes up about whether someone is a robot, "He may simply be a very good man."
And as any long exposure to Susan Calvin will have the reader realize, the fact that robots are so sensitive to emotion means that, if you want to deal with robots without affecting them with your emotions, you have to develop a flat affect -- which is why Susan Calvin is mostly described as dry, cold, expressionless.
It's a curious example of what Teresa Brennan calls the transmission of affect. In a "folie a deux" situation, you'd expect two people to have the same feeling/neurosis by the end of the day -- the crazy drives the sane crazy. But in a "transmission of affect" model, one person's feeling can shore up the second's non-feeling (or complementary feeling -- your fear becomes my anger). In the case of Susan and the Robots, the robots deep emotions runs into Susan's schizo-like flat-affect.
once again, "Our Shorter Fiction Workshop" is up and running, with the same rules (except two weeks per assignment) -- scribble_work; the first assignment's words are birth, baseball, cascade. I don't mind telling you I have, for the first time in my life, intense writing cramps.
b) feeling machines:
A little while ago I joked with a friend about how robots would one day be better than people at reading human emotions -- which might come with the development of human emotions in robots; and finer discernment might come with finer sentiments -- "We'll be the robots, then," I said.
I just finished reading Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, which has some hilarious narrative examples of what I was joking about. From "Robbie", about robot nursemaid Robbie: "He just can't help being faithful and loving and kind -- he's a machine, made so!"
In a mechanistic universe, of course, robots are not only equivalent to people, but they're better than the average; as Susan Calvin notes in "Evidence", when the question comes up about whether someone is a robot, "He may simply be a very good man."
And as any long exposure to Susan Calvin will have the reader realize, the fact that robots are so sensitive to emotion means that, if you want to deal with robots without affecting them with your emotions, you have to develop a flat affect -- which is why Susan Calvin is mostly described as dry, cold, expressionless.
It's a curious example of what Teresa Brennan calls the transmission of affect. In a "folie a deux" situation, you'd expect two people to have the same feeling/neurosis by the end of the day -- the crazy drives the sane crazy. But in a "transmission of affect" model, one person's feeling can shore up the second's non-feeling (or complementary feeling -- your fear becomes my anger). In the case of Susan and the Robots, the robots deep emotions runs into Susan's schizo-like flat-affect.