Skip to main content

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (review)

 


I never expected existentialism to be so funny. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is about a robot’s search for meaning. Or maybe it is about a robot who doesn’t know he is searching for meaning, but he is nonetheless. He also doesn’t know he is going on a quest, but he is as sure as if his name were Bilbo. His name is not Bilbo. His name is Uncharles (long story).

Uncharles is a is a robot valet. A gentleman’s gentleman (or rather a gentleman’s gentlerobot). The human society is crumbling and does not have much need for valets anymore. But Uncharles only knows what his programming is telling him, and that is that he needs to serve, and specifically to serve humans. That is going to be rather difficult as there aren’t many humans left alive in this broken world.

Being a robot, he has to follow his instructions, his task list. If those tasks are now impossible to do now, then he has to get creative about fulfilling his tasks. The first task is to find out what is wrong with him. But when he goes to the diagnostic center, it is soon apparent that there is more wrong with the world than just him. He takes on another task, and another, trying to find something that will stick, something that will give him purpose. But nothing ever quite works out.

The story is funny, but it is also a cautionary tale. Humans have made some bad choices in this world, choosing comfort over, well, anything else. But humans always have tended to take the easy way out. The evidence is apparent by looking at what we have done to our planet. In the story, apparently adding robots didn’t help. Things are falling apart and no one seems to know who to talk to, to get things fixed. Uncharles doesn’t really care about any of that. He just wants a job, just wants to fulfil his purpose. “Want” isn’t exactly the right word. Robots don’t want anything. They just do what they are supposed to do. They don’t have free will. At least that is what Uncharles keeps saying. There is a childlike innocence to the robot. And while Uncharles would be the first to say that robots can’t grow, they can’t evolve, after he makes a few of his creative decisions, you start to wonder.

Star Liner

Comments

  1. Jennifer LancasterJanuary 1, 2025 at 8:39 PM

    Sounds pretty interesting in this time of advancing machine intelligence and hype around it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

  Despite both of us having science backgrounds, my wife and I share a leaning toward the artistic, though we may express it in different ways. In her life, my wife has been a painter, a poet, a singer, an actor, and a fiction writer. Not to mention a mother. I don’t remember what precipitated this event, but my wife, my son, and I were at home in the front room. My wife was responding to something my son said. She said, “remember, you get half your brains from me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a complete idiot.” To which my son started howling with laughter and said to me,” I think you have just been insulted.” Sometimes I feel like Rodney Dangerfield. I get no respect. But that is not an uncommon state of affairs for fatherhood. When my son was going to middle school and high school, my wife was always the one to go in with him to get him registered for classes. One time she was unable to go and I had to be the one to get him registered. “Ugh,” he said. “why can’t Mama do i...
1 comment
Read more

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Telephonicus domesticus

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone from 1877 bears about as much similarity to the modern smart phone as an abacus bears to a PC or Mac. There are just about as many leaps in technology in both cases. It’s funny how a major jump in technology happens (like the actual invention of the phone). Then there are some refinements over a few years or decades until it gets to a useful stable form. Then it stays virtually the same for many years with only minor innovations. The telephone was virtually unchanged from sometime before I was born until I was about forty. Push-buttons were replacing the rotary dial, but that was about it. (Isn’t it interesting though that when we call someone, we still call it “dialing?” I have never seen a dial on a cell phone.) Cell phones were introduced and (once they became cheap enough) they changed the way we phone each other. New advancements followed soon after, texting and then smart phones. Personal computers were also becoming commonplace and wer...
Post a Comment
Read more