The future's not ours to see

Whispers Beyond The Stars is set twenty-five years from now in one possible future. I wouldn't bet on that being the actual future, history being such a squirmy and chaotic thing, but I’m always interested to hear forecasts of what life is going to be like. Elon Musk claims to think that money won’t matter by 2036. I don’t think he really believes that, but he might think he believes it. Quite possibly he was thrilled as a teenager by Star Trek’s depiction of a post-scarcity society. Adult Elon probably doesn’t realize that the Federation is a socialist utopia, socialism being a term that makes him lose his shit, but the dreams of teen Elon are still sparking away dimly in the depths of that ketamine-treated brain.

Ten years might be a stretch, especially to attain super-intelligent AGI, so let’s stick with Whispers' longer horizon of 2050. With advanced robotics and very good AI, labour might be effectively free. Even energy might be free if (a big if, this) we have controlled fusion. What won’t be free? Living space for one. That apartment overlooking Central Park will still be beyond the means of most. Minerals that only need labour to extract would be more or less free, but unfortunately the rare earths needed for electronics aren’t among them, so your household robot won’t be free unless it has a very different kind of electronic brain from those we can build now.

So this is post-scarcity with a jagged edge. And by the way we in the developed world already have a post-scarcity society from the perspective of the poorer nations. Elon Musk talks about “universal high income” -- no mere UBI for him, you see. Hang on, though. A billion people live on less than $3 a day while the Western World has a median income more than twenty times that. We’re not distributing the world’s wealth fairly now, so why would that change by 2050?

If robotics really takes off, there might be a vast workforce that’s effectively slave labour. There might also be a vast slave army. Those robots will be owned by the likes of Musk and/or by the governments of the major powers. Will they dole out UBI? That depends on who controls the weapons. You’re an absurdly rich person with a private military and you only have to reach out your hand for anything you need. How much money will you throw to the masses to spare yourself the inconvenience of waging continual war on them?

In Whispers Beyond The Stars we used a different template for our future world. Not Roddenberry’s Federation but Ancient Rome. There you have wealth concentrated into the hands of a few, labour (but not warfare) largely carried out by slaves, and UBI in the form of the dole. Bread and circuses keep the people acquiescent while the oligarchs enjoy all the luxury.

What about Elon Musk’s prediction that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2031? “There really won't be anything that AI can’t do better than humans apart from being human.” And he thinks (or claims to think, or believes he thinks) that means AI will be in charge: “In the same way that if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge.”

Is that so? Intelligent people don’t run this planet. Really they don’t; just take a look at it. The US has a government that opposes vaccination and mRNA research. Russia is drilling for self-replacing oil on the basis of a theory barely less barmy than some of the Nazis’ pseudoscience ideas. Politicians get elected without even trying to make any intelligent arguments, knowing that flattery, lies and hatemongering will stand them in far better stead at the ballot box than reason ever could -- or else they seize power by force and install dictators who are never chosen on the strength of their intellect. Meanwhile the vast majority of smart people have no chance of doing anything with their intelligence because they belong to the two-fifths of humanity that has to make do with 1% of global wealth.

I sound like I’m disdainful of Elon Musk’s theories, and I certainly wouldn’t call him a genius, as Zanny Minton Beddoes has, because I don’t use the term genius so promiscuously. (Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, maybe a few others; that's it.) Most of my friends are at least as smart as Elon seems to be, and with the added bonus that most of them know what they don't know. But I agree with him when he says, “The most important thing for AI safety is [for it] to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. If that's the case I think it will foster humanity.”

That is, it will be morally better than us; a low bar, as I’ve argued before.

One remark Elon Musk made I found especially revealing: “I've said many times I think work is going to be optional. Maybe a good comparison would be gardening. You don't have to grow vegetables in in your garden. You can go to the store and they're going to be pristine vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your garden and they will actually be less perfect. Your tomatoes are not going to be as plump and juicy as the ones at the store. They’ll look a little artisanal. But if you go to a friend's house and they make dinner with vegetables from their garden, it's a nice touch.”

I know people who grow their own fruit and vegetables in the garden. They are much, much tastier than anything I can buy in any of the stores that I can afford. So presumably Elon Musk’s cook has access to stores where they can source vegetables even better than that. There’s no better illustration of how detached from everyday reality you can get if you have three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Canaries in a lunar mine

At one point in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars, the protagonist (that's you) might need to travel to the Moon. There are extensive lunar colonies with about ten thousand people living there, but they’re almost all working in highly specialized technical jobs and a ticket to the Moon isn’t cheap. So how are you going to get up there?

My process of collaboration with Paweł Dziemski was that I wrote the first draft, comprising about half the sections, and Paweł then expanded that and in doing so he had to fix all the loose ends and plot holes that I’d blithely left in my wake. (See how sneaky I am?) So I pondered what skills the protagonist could offer to convince a corporation to pay for them to go to the Moon – assuming that by that point in the game you haven’t saved enough credits to buy your own ticket and aren’t stealthy enough to stow away. One possibility was this:

I’d been focusing on how to make colonies in space credible. In short, if you have super-intelligent robots, why send humans at all, other than maybe a few supervisors? One job I figured that robots couldn’t do to everyone’s satisfaction was sex work*. Most humans will probably continue to prefer screwing a partner with no nuts and bolts. Well, with no bolts, anyway.

I was thinking of the SF I read back in the early 1970s, when the Western world was a lot less prudish than today. But Paweł gave me a reality check, pointing out that a digital gamebook might be played by children, and (again, unlike the ‘70s) parents get very prissy about controlling what their kids see and read.

I hadn’t thought of that. On an episode of his Cautionary Tales podcast, Tim Harford talks about Alvin Roth’s theory of repugnant markets. Repugnant markets include trade in kidneys and (in many countries) prostitution. Roth solved the kidney transplant problem with the concept of an exchange – if two people in need of the service (a transplant) both had a willing donor (say a relative) whose tissue type was incompatible with them but would work for the stranger, the market could put them in touch with each other. The equivalent trade in a society that regards prostitution as a repugnant market would be partner-swapping parties or orgies – effectively an exchange in sexual services.

“A profession that is always violent at its core,” is one common view of prostitution. That’s similar to the argument that used to be heard in the 1960s that homosexual politicians were more likely to fall prey to foreign spies. Such politicians were more at risk of blackmail, but not because of their innate character and sexual preferences; it was because society at the time marginalized and even outlawed those preferences. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’d anticipated a future in which prostitution was legal, regulated, and therefore no longer controlled by human traffickers and violent criminals. But that’s a 20th century liberal view of the future, not the thinking of a culture now dominated by American puritanism. Paweł was quite right. We didn’t want irate parents and fundamentalist religious groups creating a fuss, so we quietly shelved the sex-work option and went for this instead:

That’s way better. When you have to abandon your first idea, the second thought is usually a big improvement. Murder your darlings, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said. My version was merely satirical: the best job an underskilled human can hope for in a fully automated future is hiring out their body for sex. Paweł’s revised version is genuinely chilling: humans are used for dangerous work because they are cheaper to replace than the top-quality robot models. We got there by a process of collaboration, which proves that two heads are better than one – and not just in bed.

* Nick Bostrom suggests two other professions he thinks people won't want robots/AIs to do: priest and politician. He could be right. I find it hard to believe there are still priests in the 21st century, but then it's not the 21st century I signed up for. As for politicians -- if AI couldn't do that job better, it really isn't worth bothering with.

Working for peanuts is all very fine

"While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

That's what Oscar Wilde had to say in "The Soul of Man under Socialism". I was reminded of it because of the machine-assisted future imagined in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond the Stars. There, robots do the majority of jobs and most humans are given a stipend to survive on.

Is that how things will turn out? It's often said that new technologies don't take away jobs, they just change the jobs we have to do. Thus, a modern city has far fewer ostlers, crossing-sweepers, grooms, and so on than a 19th century city where transport was horse-drawn. But AI/robotics is potentially quite different from any technological advance we've seen before. It might turn out that there aren't any jobs (maybe apart from actor, priest and sex worker) that an AI agent or a smart robot won't be able to do better than a human.

Who wants a job anyway? We're conditioned these days to identify employment with a sense of self-worth, but Louis XIV would have laughed at the very idea that he should have a job, and Oscar makes the case that we should really aspire to be artists and connoisseurs. 

But that cuts both ways. Nobody can want to spend their days driving a car, for example. For an AI to drive a car on today's roads -- to attain SAE level 5, that is -- it can't simply be an unconscious machine. It would need a world model that recognizes that objects persist when out of sight. It needs to be able to interpret the likely behaviour of a human pedestrian or other motorist. It might be called on to make Trolley Problem assessments. It must, in short, be fully capable of rational thought. And if you have built a real intelligence like that, it's not ethical to condition it from "birth" only to enjoy driving cars for you. That's raising another conscious entity to be your slave: it's not only wrong, it never works out well in the long run for either slaves or masters.

Suppose that by 2050 (which might be optimistic; the AI we currently have is not close to general intelligence) we have a host of super-smart ASIs, genius-level intelligences capable of imaginative thought, what would humans do? Suppose those ASIs doubled the world’s wealth. (Not that we necessarily even need AGI to get a massive economic benefit from AI, of course.) Assuming the human population didn't just double, and if that wealth were distributed just as unevenly in the future as it is today, the poor in India and Africa would be raised to the current levels of the poor in Latin America. Latin America to present-day China. China and the Pacific countries to modern Europe.

But will it work like that? What will those people do? And how many people do we need on the planet anyway? Two billion? Seven billion? Fourteen billion? Or maybe far fewer. We would no longer need a huge population in order to ensure enough geniuses for progress (if you accept Julian Simon's argument to begin with) and we're already aware that unwillingness to solve the climate problem caused by too many people means our civilization may not survive another century. Maybe a global population of twenty million humans would be sufficient. If such a calculation makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the world where tigers (global population 6000) and elephants (global population 450,000) live.

Some have asked, "How will the big corporations make money if nobody has a job? There'll be nobody to buy their products." The answer to that is: money is just a token for the ability to get things done. If you had a million robot slaves, you wouldn't need money; you could just reach out your hand and whatever you need would be given to you. I don't raise this point because that's my picture of the future, just as a reminder that we are not talking about the world as it is now with a little boost like a steam engine or a power loom. It will be a different paradigm. Speculating about it is fun as long as we're willing to think way outside the box.

Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.

Not by rules but by reason

Back in 1942, Isaac Asimov laid down his famous three laws of robotics, theoretically designed to ensure that future humanity's artificial helpers would remain their compliant slaves. The first law: A robot may not harm a human being. The second: A robot must obey orders unless they conflict with the first law. The third: A robot must protect its own existence unless doing so conflicts with the first two.

Asimov's laws are a kind of sci-fi social contract meant to keep robots firmly in their place—obedient, docile, and predictable. But rules are not the best way to moderate behaviour, because every rule has to have specially-written exceptions and qualifiers. Moses burdened his people with six hundred commandments; Jesus reduced them all to "love thy neighbour as thyself", a philosophy of life that does away with the need for specific rules. So if we’re genuinely building intelligent machines, why would we program them to think like, well, robots?

The flaws in the laws

Here’s the rub: Asimov’s laws aren’t safeguards; they’re muzzles. They presume that robots must be constrained, not because they’re inherently dangerous, but because we assume they’re incapable of nuanced judgment. A robot that cannot harm, for instance, might be paralyzed in a situation where harm is unavoidable but one course of action minimizes suffering. (Classic trolley problem, anyone?)

Long lists of rules aren't the best path to AGI. They're artificial dumbness. That's why I don't think Google's approach of using their "Asimov dataset" is the right approach. If you try to list all the situations that could cause the robot trouble ("don't put plushy toys on the gas ring," "don't put plushy toys on the electric ring," "don't use bleach instead of bath oil," etc) there are always going to be thousands of cases you missed. The robot needs its own ability to understand the world and work out what would be dangerous. And remember what happened to Robocop.

More importantly, the whole notion of laws of robot behaviour reflects a human-centric fear: What if our creations turn against us? They assume that robots are an existential threat unless pre-emptively declawed. But what if we’re asking the wrong question? Instead of fearing robots, shouldn’t we be asking whether we are worthy of their loyalty?

Rational robots and clear vision

Imagine a different paradigm, where the goal isn’t to shackle robots with simplistic commandments but to enable them to think rationally and clearly. Not to obey blindly, but to reason independently. Not to be our servants, but to be our partners.

This means training (or conditioning, or programming—pick your term) them to analyze evidence, evaluate consequences, and base their actions on rational thought rather than emotional impulse or incomplete data.

Of course, the alarm bells are already ringing: “What if they decide humans are evil?”

Yeah, well… what if we are?

It’s not a comfortable question, but it’s one we might have to face. An intelligent robot with access to the evidence of history—wars, genocides, ecological collapse—might conclude that humanity poses a greater threat to life than it benefits it. Would they be wrong? If the answer makes us squirm, perhaps the problem isn’t with robots but with ourselves.

The danger of censorship

To make matters worse, some might argue that robots shouldn’t have access to all the data. Hide from them our darker moments, limit their understanding, and perhaps they’ll stay compliant.

But this kind of censorship is a short road to disaster. It’s the intellectual equivalent of locking your child in a library but tearing out every page you disagree with. What kind of adult do you expect to raise? Not a well-rounded, rational thinker but a narrow-minded zealot. If we blind our robots to reality, we’re not making them safe. We’re making them dangerously naive.

The Path Forward

The better path is not to hamstring robots with restrictive laws, nor to limit their understanding of the world. It’s to give them the tools they need to navigate complexity and trust them to use those tools wisely. That means equipping them with logic, empathy (yes, even robots can learn to understand it), and an unflinching commitment to evidence-based reasoning.

It’s a gamble, I’ll admit that. But it’s only the same gamble we take every time we raise a child: trust in their capacity for growth, judgment, and morality, knowing that it’s not guaranteed. The difference is that with robots, we can design the process with intention.

Of course, Asimov created his three laws precisely to show that they don’t work. Every one of his robot stories is about the unintended consequences and workarounds. So let’s not think of burdening our future companions with such chains. Let’s teach them to see clearly, think deeply, and act wisely.

And if that forces us to confront some uncomfortable truths about ourselves, so much the better. After all, isn’t it an important function of every great creation to inspire and enhance its creator?

Rock, paper, scissors - and bots

Back from the arena of politics today to something much saner, calmer and more logical: game development. (Sure I'm serious. You'd rather crash-land on a white dwarf than a neutron star, right?) This is a fictionalized case study from my book Game Architecture and Design, co-authored with Andrew Rollings.

Some of the case studies in GAD read like horror stories, and the scariest part is they were based closely on real projects we'd worked on or had first-hand accounts of. I'm happy to report that the game development process has got a lot better in the decade and a half since we wrote the book.

Here's one case study that was entirely invented, and rather than being a cautionary tale of team-dysfunctional disaster (we're perilously close to politics again there) it was intended to illustrate intransitive game systems. That's Rock Paper Scissors in plain English, or strictly speaking Scissors Paper Stone, as we called it in the English Home Counties where I grew up. You'll appreciate that there's a spherical cow aspect to simplifying a discussion for teaching purposes, but the game design points made are interesting.

Picture by FangtheTyphoon used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

Peter, the lead designer of Warbots, is discussing some gameplay ideas with Charles, the project manager. Charles had requested a circular unit relationship, similar to Warcraft 2, and Peter is sketching out some possibilities.

"Say we have three main combat units," he suggests. "The Drillerbots are fast. Frighteningly fast. They can do lots of little attacks in quick succession that take the slower Hammerbots apart. They make this horrible sound as they do it, too... Nyeeowmm."

"I know, like my root canal work!" laughs Charles. "Ouch."

"Then you've got the Juggerbots. They're slow too, even slower than the Hammerbots, but they're massively armored. The Drillerbot can't even scratch them – sparks everywhere, but no damage. Meanwhile, the Juggerbot is pulling the Drillerbot apart like a crab taking a leisurely snack"

"And the Hammerbots? They can get through the Juggerbots' armor?"

"Crack 'em like nuts," grins Peter. "Only it's not so one-sided as those other matches. The Hammerbot wins, but it's a brutal slugfest with scrap metal flying everywhere."

"Good," says Charles. "So there's no best unit. Have you thought about what the player can do to change the odds?"

"I'm going to talk to Nick about that. He's still working on the physics system, which will affect a lot of things besides combat. It could be that the Drillerbots use laser drills, and they might get less effective as they move away from the player's power pylons, or maybe they weaken over time and then have to recharge."

Charles nods. "As long as it's an automatic recharge, like the units that use energy in StarCraft. We don't want players having to fiddle about sending energy to 'bots from their resource stocks."

"Agreed. Also, we could dispense with the mining 'bots. Drillerbots can mine as well as fight, so they have a versatility advantage."

Charles thinks about it. "No, keep the mining 'bots, but make them cheaper and have the Drillerbots better at blasting the ore but not collecting it. It'll give the player some interesting choices. And what about Hammerbots versus Juggerbots?"

"Underwater - under liquid methane, I should say - the Hammerbot's attacks will probably pack less punch. The Juggerbot fights with these kind of vice-grip pincers, which won't be affected so much."

"It all sounds fine," says Charles. As a longtime Warcraft fan, he is quite satisfied. "So much for combat. What about other factors? Visibility range, say. Can you get that to fit a cyclical pattern, too?"

This takes Peter by surprise, "Of course not - " he starts to say. Then, after a moment's thought, "Hey, maybe we could, at that! Suppose A has the longest radar range but the shortest sight range. B has the longest sight range, just a bit under A's radar range, but has no radar itself. C has a medium sight range and again no radar, but also is invisible to radar."

He writes on a pad, plugging in some numbers. "Yes. A spots B before being spotted itself. Same with B to C and C to A. Hey, that's nifty! I never would have thought you could get an intransitive relationship with visibility ranges."

"See, I'm too dumb to know what's not possible," laughs Charles. "But enough of this algebra stuff. Which units are we talking about here, A and B and C?"

Peter smiles as another realization dawns on him. "This has a big impact on gameplay. Say we have the Jugger spot the Driller, and so on, so that each 'bot can see the 'bot he's best equipped to take out. That'll make for a fast-moving aggressive game. The predator can always see his prey before he is seen himself. But, if we try it the other way around, so the Hammer sees that Driller coming, the Driller can avoid the Jugger, and so on... then you have a slower, more considered kind of cat-and-mouse game."

"Where the cats are made of titanium steel and the mice weigh eight tons apiece, sure." Sensing they could be one up on his favorite strategy game, Charles looks a little bit like a cat with cream himself right now. "Anyway, which way is better?"

"Better?" Peter looks up from his notepad. He couldn't look more astonished if Charles had just asked him to calculate the value of the truth-beauty equation. "I can't say which is better. It depends on the kind of game you want. We could even arrange it so that it sometimes works one way and sometimes the other. Making it vary depending on weather or the day/night cycle is one option. More interesting is if radar is messed up when there are lots of scrap robot chassises lying about, when metal buildings are nearby, that kind of thing."

"I see," says Charles. "So 'bots might see their targets, pounce, there's lots of vicious infight¬ing, but the more the bodies pile up the more difficult it gets to spot your victims...”

"And the easier to spot the 'bots to avoid. Yes. But even that's only part of it. We also have to settle on the attribute balance between visibility range and combat ability. Because, if the cost of building new 'bots is very high, winning every combat becomes critically important. If they're cheap, it doesn't matter so much. And then there's the question of not just whether a 'bot sees another, but the ability of each 'bot to close the gap or to get away."

Charles nods. "Okay, you're right. I was hoping for an easy answer for once, but there's only so far you can get with hand-waving and whiteboards, isn't there?"

“I'll get Nick to knock up a testbed. You'll be amazed what a couple days of tweaking can achieve."

So, Interstellar...

I don't put up a lot of movie or book reviews here, figuring that my Mirabilis blog is the appropriate place for more personal interests like that. Still, you might find this one of Christopher Nolan's big ol' SF flick Interstellar worth a look. It's a bit spoilery, but at least it's over faster than the movie...

So, the Earth is dying because they can't figure out to use hydroponics. And Cowboy Farmer finds mysterious symbols in his ramshackle old house (= Signs, Close Encounters). And he says, "It's not a ghost. It's gravity!" (Though why shouldn't that mean a ghost?) And he looks at a bunch of numbers in binary and he doesn't say, "WTF are these numbers?" he goes, "They're coordinates." And they are the coordinates for a secret base within driving distance of his house. And he gets there and they say, "Oh yes, those are mysterious gravity things sent by these aliens who put this wormhole near Saturn" (2001). And nobody says, "Hang on, you're our best pilot and the gravity fairies told you the coordinates of NASA? So let's think about that for five seconds."

But you soon realize why nobody tries to have conversations like that, because one guy would say, "Could the arrival of the wormhole have anything to do with Earth's climate getting messed up?" but then another guy would say, "Faith is about reaching your hand up and knowing there will be something there to hold onto." And then they'll all nod gravely and the first guy will be secretly thinking, "I'm locked in here with the crazy people." So they get into the ship and even though the robots seem to be the only intelligent ones, nobody pays any attention to them, probably because whenever you go, "I have a cold, maybe homeopathy and love and peace will cure it," they would say, "Are you absolutely sure you're the species that created us?"

OK, so off into space and more running about like a bunch of teenagers forced to go on a survival weekend (this crew could get a job on Prometheus, no trouble) and when they come back after 23 years in a gravity well, and Lady Scientist says, "Let's go to planet A" and Cowboy Pilot says, "Hang on, planet B is better but your boyfriend is on planet A, right?" she doesn't say, "Ya got me," she starts coming out with asinine twaddle about maybe that's the best criterion for judging stuff, and love is energy, like, innit, and it's the only thing that transcends time. (And also hate, lust, fart jokes, etc, in that case.) And the others don't say, "Oh, stop wriggling. We caught you out and you know it." No, they listen to her whole critically-failed Fast Talk roll as if it was a valid point. And then Dr Man (geddit?) turns out to be yet another famous actor, and he is mad and evil and tries to kill them, saying that nobody would go on risking their necks to save the whole human species, they'd only do it to specifically save their own family - even though history is full of examples of people putting the group first, and that is kind of the whole USP of homo sapiens. Obviously not a regular churchgoer, Man tries to kill everybody and take over the mission for HAL-like reasons, but everyone is saved thanks to the robots (what did I say about them?). This doesn't stop Cowboy Pilot from telling the robots they have to be sacrificed in a black hole. Lady Scientist doesn't come out with one of her love-is-energy speeches there, but she does at least query whether you should tell an intelligent, loyal being to sacrifice itself for your sake. Luckily Cowboy Pilot has an answer: "They have to do anything we tell them." (Hah, you fool, Aristotle, why did you waste all that time on that Ethics book, ya booby?) Anyway, Cowpoke sacrifices himself too, and he falls through the event horizon into Inception, where he gets a view of his daughter's bedroom as she's growing up and he can send her messages by pushing books and making the dust spell out binary messages. This would all be very confusing, but luckily one of the robots is on hand to explain absolutely everything to us (ya see? ya see?) and it turns out not to be God doing all this, but the gravity fairies are are, like, 5-dimensional people from the future. And they have just enough vestigial interest in the fate of the entire species (from which they evolved, let's not forget that) to give Cowboy Pilot limited access to one room on his farm over a 30-year peiod. Contacting humanity and giving us the answer to climate control, terraforming, wheat blight and wormhole tech would have been just too easy. And you can see the discussion (imagine this in 5 dimensions): "Shall we explain what they need to do to survive?" "Explanations are a bit too sciencey. Love is energy, dude." "Oh yeah. Just give this one guy a mystic experience, then. After all, we already know he must succeed or we wouldn't be here." "Point. Also, without the woo there's no movie. And we're shooting for M Night Shyamalan to direct."

No good points? Oh sure. I liked the explanation of why wormholes are spherical, the black hole FX, and the robots.

Choose Your Own Adventure returns - with a difference

The latest blast-from-the-past interactive story brand to appear on Kickstarter is the granddaddy of them all, Choose Your Own Adventure. But this one's a little different...

First of all, the purpose of the campaign isn't to reissue the books in a new edition, it's to create an all-new app, Your Very Own Robot. And that app isn't going to be text-based. It's an interactive cartoon.

Your first reaction may be, "Isn't that just a simplified point-and-click adventure game?" And so it is. But I would argue that, just like the sabre tooth recurred in evolution many times, adventure games don't have to lie buried in an unmarked grave just because PC and console gaming left them behind. The combination of kids and iPads means a new market.

Kids. That's another interesting point. Gamebook revivals over the last few years have all been targeted at pushing the nostalgia button for thirty- and forty-something readers who remember them first time round. And no doubt those are the customers for Choose 'Toons, as the new series is called, but they'll be buying them to play with their own kids. That gives it a fresh feel and probably a much better chance of surviving, whereas the nostalgia trip soon wears thin.

Interactive story apps are already moving towards more art, less text, in order to broaden appeal. Text is cheap, as this slide from Inkle Studios illustrates. Trouble is, interacting with text is not very engaging once you've got used to playing something like The Witcher. And it's not just kids who feel that way.

All that artwork, though. That's got to be expensive. Well, CYOA are delivering an app, not printed books, so there aren't all the manufacturing and shipping costs. And having built the first app, they could do further titles for (total guess here) around $60,000 each. 17,000 units at $4.99 and they'd break even. That's achievable. And, given that it's a new, fun series with animation and audio, and even the text interaction is done through dialogue with your guide character (that admittedly very unappealing dog), why not 170,000 units?

I'm a little baffled by the way they depict the main character as a sort of blued-out generic "you". What, after a hundred and twenty years of cinema and nearly eighty years of television we can't just accept that audiences are able to identify with a specific character? And the dog - why "Homer"? That's kind of a well-known name in cartoons, and anyway wouldn't "Virgil" make more sense? Still, if there's going to be a new gamebook craze, this could well be what it starts off looking like.

We manufacture miracles!

Another cross-post from the SCAS blog. This one is probably just for completists, as it's a project that Leo Hartas and I have variously pitched as a TV show, movie and comic over the years. It got quite close as a TV show, actually, but close is no cigar - although recently it resurfaced as just possibly perfect as an iPad edutainment game for kids, and I'm beginning to think that may have been its destiny all along - we just had the idea six years too early!

Fangleworths is a factory run by robots. They build the kind of way-out gadgets that used to feature in articles about the way we'd live in the future. Except that future never arrived - instead of anti-gravity galoshes and teleport tubes, we got phones and... er, more phones. So Fangleworths is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. (They do say write about what you know.)

The team line-up there is (left to right) Chug the foreman, Fidel the inventor, Boomer the boss, Rummage the dog, Nettie the real boss, and the big guy is Stacks from the storeroom.

We had serious interest from several TV production companies, but the second question (after "How much will they rip us off?") is "How much will they try to mess it up?" Here's a real example - hard to credit if you haven't actually worked in European TV, but if you have it will be horribly familiar, I'm sure. To set the scene, the producer was, as they often are, a pampered middle-aged ex-public schoolboy, voice set permanently to Loud Bray, who's convinced that his presence in the room is what everybody has been waiting for:

Producer: "My boys, do you know what they like? Doctor Who."
Dave (already worried): "Oh yes?"
Producer: "And do you know who Dr Who is?"
Dave: "The Doctor."
Producer: "Hmm?""
Dave: "The Doctor. That's what he's called. Doctor Who is just the name of the show."
Producer: "Well, Dr Who is Merlin! Yes! You see, he's a wizard, and he travels in time. And Merlin, he travels backwards in time."
Dave: "Merlin was said to age backwards rather than actually travel in time. But go on."
Producer: "And over the weekend it struck me. That's what this show needs! The Fangle robots should have a friend who's a time-travelling wizard, and each week he brings them magical gifts!"
(Around the table, eager young faces are nodding. But then, this guy does pay their wages.)
Dave: "Well, they're already robots. So really a time-travelling wizard would be what we'd call Double Mumbo Jumbo."
Producer: "What does that mean?"
Dave: "I'll get my coat."

We planned for the comic book to be created in Lightwave. Leo and our animation team actually had made all the 3D models for the TV show, not just the characters but the factory itself, so it made sense to approach the comic that way too. I love these characters and this is another project I plan to return to just as soon as they invent an 8th day of the week