The Robot Chronicles

A Word from Samuel Peralta

The classic Turing test is a qualitative measure of a machine’s ability to mimic the behavior a human. The test was posed by Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician, philosopher and computer scientist.

As I write this, the Turing test has just been passed in real life, by an artificial intelligence that its programmers call Eugene Goostman. This A.I. fooled the test judges, at least 33% of the time, into believing they were conversing not with a robot, but with a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy.

“Humanity” is the story of a double Turing test, about how a little girl and a man both fail their tests, and their redemption.

The epigraph is taken from the film A.I. by Steven Spielberg, a modern retelling of Pinocchio (or the commedia dell’arte Buratino) in which a robot boy longs to regain the love of his human mother by becoming “real.”

“Humanity” also references the experience of the Holocaust era, when a Star of David was used as a method of identifying Jews. The apartheid of the world of “Humanity” is underscored by my Three Principles of Robotics—with apologies to Isaac Asimov—mentioned in passing in this story and explored elsewhere in my other stories, including “Liberty” (subtitled “Seeking a Writ of Habeas Corpus for a Non-Human Being”). It’s a construct that allows me to explore the nature of, not robots, but human beings.

“Humanity” is set in a world I think of as the Labyrinth—the same world that houses my stories “Trauma Room,” “Hereafter,” and “Liberty”—a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where people live in the shadow of surveillance by telepaths, and where robots are second-class members of society, on the verge of becoming self-aware.

If that world sounds almost familiar, you’d be right. Change “telepaths” to “intelligence agencies” and “robots” to the name of any one of the many displaced segments in our societies, and we’d be talking about the world we live in today.

Ever since I fell in love with science and speculative fiction—both the classic writers, including Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and the more contemporary, including Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro—I’ve realized that what such fiction does so well is to illuminate not the future, but the present.

And yet, we live in a present in fear of the future—of something unknown, dystopian, apocalyptic. I believe that, despite all this, there is promise. There is hope. I write about that, and I hope you’re with me for the journey.

My website—forever being revamped—is http://www.samuelperalta.com. And if I have new books, a continuation to “Humanity,” or other stories, a small circle will hear about it first on my free newsletter http://bit.ly/SamPeraltaNews. Please join me there.

Many thanks to my editor, David Gatewood, whose surgical eye kept me from splitting too many infinitives. Thanks, too, to my colleagues in these pages and in my community of science and speculative fiction writers, for their encouragement and support of a simple poet. It’s a privilege to share these pages with such talented authors.

The best is yet to come.