Machine revolt
Read this fantastic lecture by Murderbot author Martha Wells
Each year, the Eastern New Mexico University holds the Jack Williamson Lecture (named for science fiction writer and professor Jack Williamson), and this year's speaker was Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series.
She's posted the text of her lecture, and it's a powerful read that explores the nature of autonomy and slavery in science fiction:
Arguments against and in support of the enslavement of sentient beings are baked into the origin of robot and machine intelligence stories. The first story to use the word robot in English was R.U.R. (Rossom's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, written as a play in 1920, about a slave revolt by artificial beings created by a corporation to serve humans. Karel was against the enslavement of sentient beings, and he was pretty clear on that point. So it is interesting to watch how many machine intelligence stories written since then do assert the idea that if humans create a sentient being whose only reason and purpose for existence is to serve them, that's somehow okay. Many of those stories end with a machine intelligence objecting strenuously to this and going on a murderous rampage, which the brave humans have to defeat.
The entire speech is worth a read, and you can find it on her website here. You can watch Wells deliver the speech here (the sound is a bit iffy, though.)
Martha Wells on her upcoming Murderbot novel, System Collapse
A short interview with Martha Wells about her upcoming Murderbot novella, System Collapse
