The Vestigial Heart: A Novel of the Robot Age
Torras, Carme. The Vestigial Heart: A Novel of the Robot Age (2008 in Catalan, La Mutació Sentimental). Josephine Swarbrick, translator. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.
Publisher's summary: "A thirteen-year-old girl wakes up in a future where human emotions are extinct and people rely on personal-assistant robots to navigate daily life."[1]
Publisher's note:
Imagine a future in which many human emotions are extinct, and “emotional masseuses” try to help people recover those lost sensations. Individuals rely on personal-assistant robots to navigate daily life. Students are taught not to think but to employ search programs. Companies protect their intellectual property by erasing the memory of their employees. And then imagine what it would feel like to be a sweet, smart thirteen-year-old girl from the twenty-first century who wakes from a cryogenically induced sleep into this strange world. [* * *]
Torras, a prominent roboticist, weaves provocative ethical issues into her story. What kind of robots do we want when robot companions become as common as personal computers are now? Is it the responsibility of researchers to design robots that make the human mind evolve in a certain way? An appendix provides readers with a list of ethics questions raised by the book.[2]
Reviewed by Sara Martín in SFRA Review 325 (Summer 2018): 33-34.[3] Martín notes the novel's concern with
irrational emotional attachments that we tend to develop whenever we interact with robots in care-related situations. [...] Logically, a robotics engineer [like Torras] can hardly be a technophobic Luddite. Torras’s message is not a protest against the widespread use of personal robots but a warning about how such use should be put into operation and why. Interestingly, although smartphones are never mentioned in The Vestigial Heart, the reader will soon notice the many similarities between our current concerns about our dependence on them and Torras’ worries about the much more sophisticated robots we are sure to develop in the near future.
Martin sees as central the tension between the "Anti-techno therapist Silvana" and, "At the opposite end of the technological spectrum, the acerbic Dr. Craft — a Steve Jobs figure" who "embodies the irresponsible greedy capitalism that has sold our affects to the machines." The plot "leads towards a reconciliation of opposites, with robotics reformulated as a tool for enhanced human creativity rather than for a sinister process of symbiosis, all the more disturbing because it is willingly embraced rather than compulsory" (Martin p. 34).
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See for cryogenic "time travel," the human/robot interface, and for the long-running tension between intellect/machines on the one hand and emotions and the organic on the other.
RDE, 25Nov20
