Silicon Sonatas: Variations on Digital Themes

Like every young nerd and fanboy, I fell in love with robots and AIs at an early age.

The first was, of course, the Robot from Lost in Space, with his “Danger, Will Robinson!” admonition – which my hilarious playground comrades would shout at me at recess when I approached. I later met Robby in Forbidden Planet, as well as Robbie in Asimov. Then came HAL. Landru, M-5, Vaal on Star Trek. Domino in Michaelmas. The Westworld Gunslinger. The supply was endless!

And today, AI is actually upon us – AI, AI everywhere, and robots on every street corner. ChatGPT and other generative wonders. Self-driving vehicles in beta. Lots of it is just as we imagined it, and lots of it caught us by surprise.

So it’s with both pride and gratitude that I offer this collection of my own imaginings of robots and AI, culled from a quarter century of musing about it. And I couldn’t help noticing, as I was pulling them together, some recurrence – I had, over time, written variations on themes. In music, that makes a sonata.

There’s the fanboy chestnut of downloading a human brain into a computer, for example, explored here from two different directions – “When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again” and “Download”. There’s AI running the world – two stories about a super-AI called Medallion, another about an automated society continuing after we’re gone – “When She Woke at Dawn” (an extension of Ray Bradbury, written as a gift for one of my daughters). And, of course, there’s the classic Robots Behaving Badly theme, varied three ways here in “Peacekeeper”, “Rebound Girl”, and “Song of Aveyron”.

I imagine I’ll never stop writing about robots and AI. I have my own AI blog, The Pod Bay Doors, and I’m an activist for AI ethics and responsibility, so it’s kind of a holy mission for me in any case. But the sense of awe and wonder persists through it all, and I’m hoping I never stop looking ahead.