A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious– “Technology and Privacy” just cries out for Asimov’s “The Dead Past.” Others don’t lead to immediate suggestions, but I have some ideas of where to start– if Cory Doctorow hasn’t written stories illustrating ethical issues about “Ownership and intellectual property rights,” I’d be stunned, and after reading the wrist-slittingly depressing “Yellow Card Man,” I bet there’s something about sustainability in the work of Paolo Bacigalupi.
But while I could come up with suggestions for most of these, it occurs to me that this is exactly what the Internet is for. So, suggest some science fiction stories, shows, or films to illustrate some of these points.
The fine print:
Short is preferable to long, here– this isn’t a class about ethics in SF, it’s a class about CS, with an ethics component. Watching the entire run of “Babylon 5” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is not in the program.
Obvious is better than subtle, here. Whatever you suggest should have the ethical issue front and center, not completely buried in the background. Again, it’s a CS class, not a literature class.
The one exception to the previous: Do not suggest “The Cold Equations.”
Try to keep your comments to a reasonable length. If I have to hit “Page Down” to get to the end of it, I’m not likely to read it. If you have that many recommendations, put them on a separate web page and post a link in the comments. This means you, Jonathan Vos Post.
“Luminous” by Greg Egan
“Press Enter” by John Varley
The Egan is typically dense, the Varley is arguably Luddite; both are damn fine bits of work in their own right.
Asimov’s Earth Is Room Enough (http://books.google.com/books?id=8Dw3AAAAIAAJ&dq=label:%22fiction%22&pgis=1) is chock full of ethics and sustainability issues- one of my favorites.
Another Asimov piece that is interesting is The Gods Themselves (http://books.google.com/books?id=-04N0Lo4kE4C&dq=label:%22fiction%22)
Just about anything by Iain M Banks. A good start in a context like this would be the novella “The State of the Art”, in which The Culture visit Earth. Lots of fascinating ethical stuff in there, from the ethics of intervention in less developed societies to the ethics of photography (“Can you believe it? They think they can own the light!”). Plus it’s got a hyper-intelligent sentient spaceship – who is a big Star Trek fan.
The primary ethical issue is whether it is right for a super-advanced civilisation, equipped with hyper-intelligent AIs and vast amounts of statistics, and without any possible ulterior motives (other than their own self-righteousness), to interfere in “primitive” societies (such as our own) for their own good – but there are lots of interesting side issues as well, which cover all of the above categories. Technology and privacy? The Culture’s technology makes absolute privacy impossible, and nobody can imagine why anyone would care. Sustainability? Culture ships are essentially vast Von Neumann probes – completely self-contained. Ownership and intellectual property? The Culture have neither of these concepts (other than the only form of either privacy or ownership they recognise – the ownership of your own thoughts). And as for the possibilities of A.I., they’re absolutely fundamental – virtually all Culture technology is sentient to some extent, and all lot of it is far more sentient than the biological members of their society.
It’s not his best, but it does cram a heck of a lot of issues into quite a small space. Oh, and it’s quite a good story, too…
“The Dead Past” is a good choice for privacy, but I would pair it with Damon Knight’s “I See You” for a different perspective.
For IP, maybe Spider Robinson’s “Melancholy Elephants?” It’s not that great a story qua story, but it has an interesting take on the subject.
For AI, there are many, many choices. Asimov’s “… That Thou Art Mindful of Him” is one I would recommend, with the caveat that it might not work as well if one hasn’t read some of his earlier robot stories.
I’m sure there are many more recent stories that would work as well or better, but I haven’t read any often enough yet that I can call them to mind easily.
The classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” comes to mind as being about (un)sustainability. Tribbles are cute little alien animals that multiply quickly, as the crew of the Enterprise discover after adopting one during a visit to the tribbles’ native planet.
“Press Enter” is a great one. A little dated now, maybe, but some great stuff there.
I like the idea of “The State of the Art,” too.
Most of the ones I can think of are too long, or not of much relevance to the core topics, but I have a couple:
1. The 1983 short story version of “Blood Music” by Greg Bear.
2. “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson (1947)
Off the top of my head, Doctorow is easy. “Printcrime” http://craphound.com/?p=573#more-573 is short and not at all subtle. Stallman’s “The Right to Read” even moreso: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Has anyone mentioned Cory’s “Scroogled” yet?
I came across F. Paul Wilson “Lipidleggin'” not long ago. It doesn’t fit into the stated categories. http://billstclair.com/DoingFreedom/000623/df.0600.fa.lipidleggin.html
Vinge’s story that started cyberpunk, “True Names” certainly has some privacy angles.
“I Robot” by Asimov.
The laws of robotics are classic.
Regarding specifically Cory Doctorow, the best thing for “ownership and property rights” might be “After the Siege”. It’s a short story, a great read, available free online, and not very subtle at all.
Heck, if you’re talking robots, go back to “R.U.R.” by Karel Capek and “I, Robot” by Eando Binder. And the flip side – “With Folded Hands” by Williamson. Brrr.
_A Deepness in the Sky_ by Vinge is kinda long, but perhaps some sections on Focus? Scary stuff.
“Gattaca” the movie would fit the tech ethics and privacy theme though it isn’t about cybernetics per se.
I’d suggest there might be some interesting material to be pulled from some of Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” short stories.
The preface in James P. Hogan’s _Code of the Lifemaker_ has actually been reprinted as a short story, and gives an interesting viewpoint, even if not entirely on the topic of thinking machines per se.
Vernor Vinge’s classic story “Bookworm, Run!” touches the topic of intelligence augmentation by machine means.
Oh, and in reference to comment #5, nobody from the Enterprise visited the planet of the tribbles in that episode.
Most things by Cordwainer Smith, particularly Alpha Ralpha Boulevard and Norstrilia. The Rediscovery of Man is largely about regaining ethics (or at lest responsibility).
For “Threats and possibilities of A.I.”, how about Neil Stevenson’s short story Jipi and the Paranoid Chip?
It’s set in the Cryptonomicon universe a few years after the novel’s action, and is about talking down a schizophrenic car alarm connected to a bomb. Not only does it relate to several ethical issues, but there’s some really good science content about genetic/evolutionary programming.
‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’
by Ursula K. LeGuin
How to raise your AI ethically and sustainability are discussed in “Lungfish” by David Brin http://davidbrin.com/lungfish1.html. Brin’s “Stones of Significance” deals with property rights and AI threats/benefits also.
Ownership:
I am floored that no one has mentioned this. Bicentennial Man by Asimov. 1st the original owner “gives” him to himself, implying he owned him and then mankind has to recognize his right to exist only after he arranges for his eventual death.
The basic premise is that no matter how smart, realistic, etc he was he was not considered a man/alive/sentient until he was capable of dying.
Wonder what would happen if we ever met an immortal species. Would they become property.
The other story about ownership would be Permutation City by Greg Egan
and the URL for “Stones” is http://davidbrin.com/stonesofsignificance1.html
Soylent Green for sustainability! What is better than Chuck Heston saying “Soylent Green is made of people!”
Technology? Take your pick. I go for Westworld.
An interesting movie that looks at both sustainability and technology is Silent Running. The droids end up being real characters.
“Holy Quarrel” by Philip K. Dick (it’s (undeservedly)one of his more unknown short stories), about a computer technician arguing with a “super computer” whether to start bombing California or not. Thinking about arguing with computers, there’s also that classic scene form John Carpenter’s “Dark Star”, where the astronaut tries to convince the bomb not to explode.
Sustainability: Second the choices for Soylent Green and Silent Running, two of my favourite SF films. Frank Herbert’s Dune probably fits in here as well, what with water being so important on Arrakis.
I assume ‘Technology and Privacy’ is meant to be a single category, in which case the films Minority Report and The Conversation provide interesting views of the surveillance society. And, of course, 1984 in all its forms.
If ‘Technology’ can be considered on its own, then the classic ‘technology as trap’ story in the field (required reading at one time at MIT, I think), is Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Superiority’.
And for AI threats, how can anyone not mention Colossus: The Forbin Project, Eric Braeden’s only really memorable role, in which US and Russian supercomputers join forces to take over the world? On a less epic scale, Star Trek‘s ‘The Ultimate Computer’ shows what happens when you let ‘thinking’ machines run your starship for you.