This is the third and final novella from Tor.com’s sci-fi drop that I read. Honestly this is the one that I had the most issues with. The story is about a lawyer living on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and she ends up defending a robotnic, or a robot worker, in court for murder. Everyone sees the robots as inferior and she ends up ostracized and laughed at for trying. Her argument for an appeal on his case is that he didn’t have a jury of his peers, everyone was biased against him. It’s alluded that this argument implies that robots aren’t the same as humans, that he needed to be tried by a jury of AI, and this could throw some robot rights into question. After winning the appeal though, the robot is murdered in prison.
My main sticking point is that there’s a fairly obvious parallel to racism here. Many Black individuals were unfairly convicted because of prejudiced juries, yet they are seen as equals in the eyes of the law now. Why not use that as a precedent to protect against robot rights being stripped? Especially with the prison fights and a near riot in front of the lawyer’s house, the similarities are obvious. So I’m not sure why that didn’t come up, unless the author truly didn’t think of it. Which feels incredibly disappointing. When it comes to things like AI and new life forms, we do in fact have a history of treating even fellow human beings like monsters. It’s not that hard to find it.
Anyways so this was the only novella in the collection that
I didn’t love, and two out of three isn’t bad. We shall see what the next one
has in store for me!
No comments:
Post a Comment