#omnibot classic

[siryl]

A futuristic robot by Kyle-KR.

[sbuggbot]

Remaking one of my first posts on this website (which I have since privated), a headcanon post about 80s Robot from The Muppets because he's my favorite and a comfort character for me. This is just some quick(ish) basics. They mainly exist in my headcanon universe where the 2011 movie was either real or based on true events rather than "just a movie".

One of Bunsen and Beaker's creations. His function was basically what Tomy Company had envisioned while creating his real-life inspiration, the Omnibot 2000. (Greeting/entertaining guests, serving refreshments, watching the house even... although Tomy never got that far with their 'bot!)

He wasn't self-aware at first; that developed on its own later because nothing Bunsen invents works as intended.

Part of that included not being able to talk at first - he figured that out later and first demonstrated this by going up to Kermit one morning and saying "Kerrr-mit". (Needless to say, Kermit was very startled. Something had been up with the robot for a while, but it didn't prepare him for that.)

80s Robot has the Y2K bug. He can keep track of what day it is, but once years get involved he gets very confused. It's also part of the reason his speech patterns and such are stuck in 80s-era slang. (He was a little more adaptive before the turn of the millennium, but defaulted to what he knew once he couldn't keep track of what year it was anymore.)

Very clumsy because of his technical limitations and plain old hardware degradation. (Retrofitting or otherwise updating him has not worked, only replacing components with like parts.)

He doesn't have a color camera. Despite this, he can still see and understand things well enough to drive. He just doesn't pay as much attention to his surroundings when he isn't piloting a two-ton hunk of metal.

By the way, he drives using a remote system he hooks himself into that presses the pedals for him.

That modem of his is a huge battery drain and probably wouldn't work correctly if it was restored and used today. Also, his antivirus is very outdated. (Although some viruses might not be able to get enough RAM to run on him.)

Somehow he has an infinite supply of Tab and New Coke. If you ask him for a Coke to drink, you must specify Coke Classic or you will get a New Coke.

No one knows if the New Cokes are still drinkable or not. Nobody's been daring/stupid enough to try one (or more accurately, allowed to be daring/stupid enough to try one).

He will not go to Dr. Honeydew for repairs if he can do anything at all to help it. Bunsen is too much of a tinkerer and 80s Robot has a very realistic concern he'll wind up with some dangerous or unnecessary modification.

[semper-legens]

18. Robot Uprisings, edited by Daniel H Wilson and John Joseph Adams

Owned?: No, library My summary: A collection of short stories themed around the idea of, funnily enough, robot uprisings - killer robots, robots bent on revenge, robots rising up to kill humanity. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

You know, for someone who watches as much Doctor Who as I do, I should really read more sci-fi. I think a large part of why I don’t - other than my local library not having the biggest collection - is due to how inaccessible sci-fi can be at times. You look on a back cover and it’s number 17 of a 28 part series based on the far-flung world of Xionremsik written by a straight white guy who is, at best, gonna have one female character who’s a girlfriend or something. Not saying all sci-fi is like this, but it’s the impression given by the ones I look at the summaries for in the library.

All that said, robots! Let’s read about some robots.

I’m not gonna cover each short story individually, because I don’t really have that much to say about some of them. So, thoughts! Sadly, a lot of these fell into the short-genre-fiction trap of being pretty much just exposition about a Thing That Happened in the backdrop of being At Some Point After The Thing. It’s not a story, it’s backstory. Nothing actually happens. Which is not inherently the worst thing every, but at least one of them was just straight up “Tell me about the apocalypse!” “This is how the apocalypse.” End.

With the theme of robot uprisings, there are only really a few stories to be told - classic ‘robots rise against their makers’ stories, robot oppression metaphors, nanobots infecting everything/one, We Rely Too Much On Technology. That said, I want to give a shoutout to Epoch by Cory Doctorow for not being that at all. Epoch is about a robot called BIGMAC, the first ever emergent AI, and his efforts to stay alive after the Institute housing him decides he’s not worth keeping on any more. It’s a look at ethics around AI, the risks of humanising computers, and the games that a sentient AI can play, and it’s worth checking out!

Another standout to me was Seanan McGuire’s We Are All Misfit Toys In The Aftermath Of The Velveteen War, first of all for that kickass title. What a title! Velveteen War manages to create an incredibly sombre and melancholy atmosphere, delving into the pure horror of creating an AI system that goes so far wrong while still technically doing what you want it to, and the aftermath of living in that world. McGuire manages to reveal her world slowly and gradually, mixing between background and current events well to maintain interest, and the ending packs an emotional punch when it is revealed what, exactly, happened to this world.

Ernest Cline’s The Omnibot Incident was one of the worst stories, to me. It’s the 80s, and a kid gets a robot for Christmas - but it’s a prototype AI, and sentient! It was very run-of-the-mill for that concept, I didn’t feel a lot of tension throughout, the first-person narrator was supposed to be 13 years old but never really sounded like it, and the twist was both predictable and unsatisfying. Bleh.

The last one I wanted to comment on was Sleepover, by Alastair Reynolds. In this, a man is revived from cryogenic sleep only to find that something has happened, the population of the Earth is now in cryo-sleep, and the population at constant war. While I really enjoyed this story, in particular the entitled protagonist learning to be a better person, I thought it was a bit too high-concept for this kind of collection? It’s less...robot-y than the others. The robots are all off in another dimension being mystical and don’t really factor into the story. That doesn’t make it bad as a story, just a weird fit in this collection.

In all, Robot Uprisings was a mixed bag - but there were a few stories in there well worth the read, and hey, robots. Nothing wrong with robots. (Until they rise up and kill us all, natch.)