If you spend your whole life thinking about death, are you even really living? Author Daniel Hope brings us some excellent existential questions like this in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Inevitable. Follow along as he guides you through a robot’s, and in a sense a human’s, attempt to survive in a future world.
DANIEL HOPE:
Despite the fact that robots aren’t human, they are useful for telling very human stories. They offer a way to let us reflect on human experience from an outside perspective. While current examples of artificial intelligence, like Chat-GPT, aren’t actually very intelligent outside of a very narrow skillset, the robots of science fiction get close enough to human intelligence that the quirks of humanity are highlighted.
When I was young, I sympathized with the robots I found in books and movies. Like them, I didn’t fully understand the humans around me, and I found that most of the time I was replicating the emotions and reactions of others rather than expressing what was going on inside my head. That’s why it seemed natural to make the protagonist of my book a robot. Even if neither of us understood the humans around us, we could at least explore together.
There are still plenty of differences between me and Tuck, though. He’s a very old robot, living in the far future, and I’m definitely not. But his primary concern in life will be familiar to most humans: Tuck is afraid to die…
The Inevitable: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Read more at: The Big Idea: Daniel Hope
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