Story Details
Categories Science Fiction Robots & AI
Em One escorted the high value asset to and from school each day. During the war, Em One could have taken on a tank regiment and very possibly won. Here there were only young civilians, with one of them his own special charge to protect and serve. How could one prepubescent bully be such a problem?
Author Details
Michael Zahniser The Peculiar Constraints of Peacetime
Michael Zahniser lives in Boston with his wife Christina, three housemates, and two guinea pigs. As a software engineer at an autonomous vehicle company, his job is to create robots that don’t kill people. Story Notes on The Peculiar Constraints of Peacetime Since the early days of science fiction, we’ve used anthropomorphic robots as a way to explore the boundary between what is an object and what is a person. Is Em One just a machine, one that suffered no lasting physical damage in the war and that should therefore be expected to perform flawlessly in its new role? Or could Em One have emotions, desires, and its own interior life… as well as injuries that the world doesn’t acknowledge because they left no visible scars?
The Peculiar Constraints of Peacetime, by Michael Zahniser
Author Details
Michael Zahniser The Peculiar Constraints of Peacetime
Michael Zahniser lives in Boston with his wife Christina, three housemates, and two guinea pigs. As a software engineer at an autonomous vehicle company, his job is to create robots that don’t kill people. Story Notes on The Peculiar Constraints of Peacetime Since the early days of science fiction, we’ve used anthropomorphic robots as a way to explore the boundary between what is an object and what is a person. Is Em One just a machine, one that suffered no lasting physical damage in the war and that should therefore be expected to perform flawlessly in its new role? Or could Em One have emotions, desires, and its own interior life… as well as injuries that the world doesn’t acknowledge because they left no visible scars?
