She pulled away, smiled, and extended a hand over the skin of the island. With one finger, she sketched a face. It was simple and fat. When her hand rose, the face popped out into three dimensions, solid and real and deeply familiar. He knew this face. At least, he knew the older version. He looked at her.
"Will she have your eyes, or mine?"
Amy beamed. "I'm not sure. I'm not finished, yet."
About the Author
Madeline grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. She graduated from a Jesuit university in 2005, after having written a departmental thesis on science fiction.
After meeting Ursula K. LeGuin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she decided to start writing science fiction stories. While immigrating to Canada from the United States in 2006, she could not work or study and joined the Cecil Street Irregulars – a genre writers' workshop founded by Judith Merril – instead.
Since then she has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod and elsewhere. She has two masters degrees: one in anime, cyborg theory, and fan culture, and the other in strategic foresight and innovation. She has written on such matters for io9, Tor.com, BoingBoing, The Creators Project, SF Signal, and others. Currently she works as a consultant in Toronto.
madelineashby.com
When a robot girl loses her inhibitions, it can only end badly
Madeline Ashby in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders
This interview originally appeared at io9.com in July 2011
What does it mean to grow up robotic?
I think there's a lot about growing up that's already pretty robotic. One of the themes the book takes up is parentingas-programming, even when that programming is the unwitting kind that leaves in a lot of bugs. For example: when I was growing up, I watched my mother apply lipstick in the rearview mirror before we went anywhere. "I have to put my lipstick on so I don't scare anybody," she'd say. "My mother used to say that, you know." Well, now I'm the one who says it, and I rarely leave the house without something on my lips. It's nothing major, but I think this little Lamarckian meme of my grandmother's has proved profitable for the lip gloss people.
The robots in this book are synthetic organisms that come with a bunch of possible optimizations, and they're fatally allergic to hurting humans. So that means eating different food from the other organic kids in class, and watching different media, and so on. It also means you can't really fight back when a boy chases you across the playground at recess and tries to flip up your skirt. Not because he's bigger or faster or stronger than you, but because you'll enter a cascading failure loop should you so much as simulate the outcome. Not that you'd want to fight, anyway. You love humans. Your designers saw to that right quick.
How are you tackling the age-old topics of AI and cybernetic identity?
Like a lot of people who have read some of [Donna] Haraway's cyborg theory, I think the mix of dread and desire surrounding AI has to do even older feelings about reproduction. Asimov's Frankenstein Complex notion isn't just an early version of Mori's Uncanny Valley hypothesis, it's a reasonable extension of the fear that when we create in our own image, we will inevitably re-create the worst parts of ourselves. In other words: "I'm fucked up – therefore my kids will be fucked up, too." When I completed the submission draft of this book, I had just finished the first year of my second Master's – a design degree in strategic foresight. So I had spent months listening to discussions about the iterative process. And I started to realize that a self-replicating species of machine wouldn't have the usual fears about its offspring repeating its signature mistakes, nor would it have that uncanny response to copying. Machines like that could consider their iterations as prototypes, and nothing more. Stephen King has a famous adage about killing your darlings, and they could do that – literally – without a flood of oxytocin or normative culture telling them different.