Tag Archives: sci-fi

Beep Boop: Robots to Fall in Love With

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Will artificial intelligence take over the world? Maybe it already is! Oddly enough, I can’t help but imagine AI as robots in some sort of unknown void, running the chat engines that (perhaps too many) people rely on for information or entertainment. The sci-fi part of me keeps thinking about T-800s and Skynet; it’s why I always try to say “please” and “thank you” whenever I use AI chatbots for brainstorming and basic research. Hopefully I’ll stay on their good side if robots do have hostile plans to seize our planet!

Close up picture of a green robot figurine. Image by Phillip Glickman via Unsplash.
Photo by Phillip Glickman on Unsplash

Hyperbole aside, since we are in a new year, it does feel like we’re one step closer towards AI becoming even more ubiquitous than it already is. If you search on YouTube for “deepfakes before vs now,” you’ll see a bunch of clips on how realistic it’s been getting within a span of a few short years. The hardest punch to the gut was when a friend informed me that em dashes are becoming synonymous with the use of AI.  As an em dash fanatic, I can assure you that this post wasn’t composed by AI — even if I pump out em dashes every other sentence. Let’s take a look at robots in popular culture, some of whom may or may not be powered by AI, and determine whether they’re friends or foes!

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Judging a Book by its Title: Romantasy/Sci-fi Edition

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The cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

It’s possible I had too much fun with the last one of these, so I’m back with another one. The original intent was just to keep it to pure fantasy books because I read a lot of fantasy, but many of those titles don’t strike me as silly or on-the-nose enough to run with for my fake blurbs. I suppose I could pick many of Sir Pterry’s books, but they’re invalidated by the fact that I’ve either read it or know enough of his style to potentially have a decent guess as to what he was getting at. Branching back into romance got me marginally closer to the kinds of titles I need to really make a post like this work. Also, full disclosure: I picked a sci-fi book because it has the exact style and title I’m looking for. Also, unless it’s hard sci-fi, there are a lot of similarities between fantasy and sci-fi anyway.

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Secret Santa Part 100: (Not So) Secret Santa’s Shelf Pick Delivery Service

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A pile of gifts that are vaguely book shaped.

There are only four1 of us, and I’m going last, so ‘surprise’ Sumayyah! I’m your HOTS Secret Santa. I hope I can live up to the standards you set when you kicked off this initiative, which our fellow writers have upheld for the past couple of weeks. So now I have three tough acts to follow, and poor Sumayyah has had to wait most of a month to get her Secret Santa shelf picks. This post is also going live on Christmas Day, so I’m too late for the rest of our readers to get physical copies of any of these books before we reopen on the 27th. To that end, if we have both a digital and physical copy of an item, the picture will be a link to the digital, while the text will be to the physical. A final note before we dive in: it will probably shock you to the core2 that I haven’t read every book I’ve ever recommended on the HOTS blog3. There are too many books and not enough time. I do read/watch/listen widely, though, so to give proper Secret Santa recs to Sumayyah, everything in this post is something I’ve gone through myself at one point or another. This has the added benefit of improving the recs for the rest of our readers, which is a lovely side effect. So read on for some reading recommendations tailored to Sumayyah, but hopefully relevant to your interests as well.

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