Medlar Comfits: Automata and attitudes to terminal failure

27 March 2007

Automata and attitudes to terminal failure

Tangled during the night in a spider's line,

these struggles to stay upright lasted for about twenty minutes.

Most likely, two distinct species of humanoids will arise: those that respond to and illicit our emotions and those we wish simply to do work, day in and day out, without stirring our feelings . — David Bruemmer, Humanoid Robotics: Ethical Considerations, Idaho National Laboratory

Will automata be built with the will to live past their warranty period?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: In those photos, it looks almost like a complex bronze sculpture. Is it a mantis?; 1 April 2007 at 07:54
anna tambour said...: Yes and no!
See here:
http://www.ento.csiro.au/Ecowatch/Primary/insects/pages/Mantispidae.htm; 4 April 2007 at 19:17
Anonymous said...: Thanks for the link! I'd never heard of them.

PS: Last night, PBS had a program about cuttlefish -- mind-bogglingly weird and sometimes gorgeous critters that *do* seem like the closest thing we have to alien life forms (as the show said).; 5 April 2007 at 00:38

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from Oddness/Forbidden Futures

"Her love for the lives and fortunes of the small is most evident to me in her dog-centered stories. “The Dog Who’d Been Dead”, “Shaking Heaven’s Fleas”, and “Bones from Heaven” involve the afterlife of dogs—where they go, what concerns them, how they feel about the humans with whom they are so closely linked, and their own relationship with d/Death. Tambour beautifully enters into the minds and souls of dogs here, and if nothing else, her concern for the little ones, human creation’s overlooked ones, makes her work and this collection in particular immensely rewarding." -- Jeremy Brett, The SFF Librarian Reviews, Ancillary Review of Books, August 2023

from Infinity Plus

"An awful lot in this book. As with her magnificent CRANDOLIN, perhaps too much. Yet it is not a book measured for a market, and we need more of that. Tambour has, I hope, quite a few more coming. And I hope that the market finds her. The language she is evolving for telling the kinds of wild and biting stories she is interested in is part vernacular, part natural historian, full of wit and pulling its drama from an assumed sharing of empathy for those in the predicaments in which her characters find themselves." - Paul Voermans, "Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real", 10/22/2017, The New York Review of Science Fiction