I love science fiction; by this I mean of course science fiction books. When it comes to science fiction tv and movies, I am always a little snooty and firmly adhere to Harlan Elison's idea of Science Fiction as being a literary endeavor whilst science fiction themed movies and tv shows are merely "scifi"--a lesser form of the art, if one at all. Sure there are exceptions: Star Trek has proven itself capable of bridging the gap, as has the British show Doctor Who and a personal favorite of mine, Joss Whedon's Firefly--the very sadly short lived series.
As for scifi, perhaps the culturally eminant Star Wars saga exemplifies this kind of science fiction: a lot of big flashes and space-born explosions which entertain the general public, but leave veteran science fiction fans suspending a lot of disbelief. It is even more difficult when one has a background in physics and engineering, as I do, making the concepts often twisted or misinterpreted in traditional scifi as familiar to you as knowledge of sports scores (incidentally the Superbowl was played earlier tonight) or the newest car is to the general public.
This is the main reason for my snootiness: an observed lazyness on the part of the script writers to invent 'realistic' technologies, truly interesting scenarios, and resolve conflicts in a surprising and imaginative way. For a long time this lead me to bar myself from watching anything remotely resembling scifi. As I write this I have never seen Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator--or any of the subsequent films, and used to hate even the idea of including non-Asimovian androids/gynoids (viz. something which doesn't follow Asimov's three laws) into fiction. "How lazy of them", I thought of the writers, "to make non-Asimovian androids. Then you can have a predictable and boring robot revolution plot everytime". (I must say here that a poor script writer can do that even with the three laws, c.f. the Will Smith I. Robot movie--a very loose adaptation of Asimov's work).
Then a friend of mine turned me onto an old cartoon called My Life as a Teenage Robot. It's a simple scifi show intended for adolescents and high schoolers, but nevertheless features a non-Asimovian gynoid which is actually interesting. Moreover, seeing as this gynoid is the main and titular character of the show, rather in the spirit of R. Daniel Olivaw from "real" science fiction, there are manifold possibilities to explore the difficulties in its design without reguritating a dumb robot revolution plot everytime (In one for instance the robot, called Jenny, wants to experience the sensation of dreaming. But when the scientist who made it creates a chip to allow it to do so, flaws in the gynoid's design make it difficult for it to destinguish reality from "dreams"--and yes, they even threw in a Philip K. Dick reference for the not-so-young viewers!). Enjoying this series more than an adult should made me reevaluate scifi. I still am snooty, but perhaps the importance of scifi is, like true science fiction, to get you to think about technology, how it should be designed, and more importantly how those designs will affect users. That little show got me to think about AI the most I ever have since first reading the powerful literary works of Asimov; Certainly more than I ever expected reluctantly coming to it!
I decided to continue my viewing of Scifi and wanted to start this blog to record my thoughts pertaining to the "science philosophy" aspects along the way. Anyone else viewing it is purely coincidental, and I promise nothing about regular postings or anything.
