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Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

Who would have thought a book about patent piracy could be so much fun.

Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is such a book, but patent piracy is the catalyst for a future world where everything and everyone can be property.

We have two main characters who are on opposite sides of things. First, the pirate Jack, a former professor who manufactures drugs to sell on the black-market. Then there is Paladin, half of the team deployed to hunt Jack and bring her to justice.

But don’t let the Breaking Bad-esque plot fool you. This cat-and-mouse game is not the main struggle in the book, rather it is the vehicle for some larger and deeper questions.

One such question is at what point do the ideas of freedom and personhood intersect and how do they interact with one another? Paladin is an AI bot and therefore considered property. But in this world, bots are not slaves, rather indentured servants as they can work long enough to become free and therefore granted citizenhood.

After the idea of indentured servitude for bots is introduced in this future, corporations begin to wonder why they can’t do the same thing for people. This gives rise to an economy similar to feudalism, and eerily similar to our current form of economy. People go to school to learn how to be indentured servants and they sell contracts out to the highest bidder.

The book also touches on gender issues as Paladin halfway through the book begins to self-identify as a female even though Paladin is a bot and therefore has no reproductive organs or anything which would suggest a gender.

This realization brings a relationship aspect into Paladin’s storyline as she has a love-interest with her work partner which was initiated by her partner.

This relationship, if you can call it that, starts off as odd and one-sided and really never seems to get out of that stage as Paladin finds out she was programmed to like and to some extent love her partner. This begs the question of whether Paladin understands feelings of love and companionship outside of the parameters written into her, and if she does not, her relationship with her partner is Stockholm syndrome at best and rape at worst.

While the issues raised are interesting, they are never fully realized or explored. The indentured servitude system is touched on but the economics behind it are murky at best, and the way to stay out of servitude, through ‘franchises,’ isn’t explain, and if it is not thoroughly.

There is also never another instance of a human-robot relationship so we have nothing to compare Paladin’s relationship too. Is their relationship normal in terms of humans and robots or is it indeed creepy? Are human-robot relationships an anomaly or are they common? We never know.

Even with these issues, Autonomous is an exceptionally fun and interesting read. Most of the issues concern explaining the world and some footnotes or even a glossary would explain these away, but the ideas presented here are fun and alarmingly pertinent.