*Big on the diegetic prototypes. You'd think that eighty solid years of abject failure would discourage people, but humanoid robots, born on a Czech stage, are just too dramatic to leave alone.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/book-review-science-fiction-bots-becoming-fact
book review | Science fiction bots becoming fact
March 3, 2011 by R.U. Sirius
An interview with Mark Stephen Meadows, author of We, Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact.
"With We, Robot (Lyons Press, 2010), Mark Stephen Meadows explores the recent edges of robotic development in the context of some of our favorite fictional narratives.
"It’s a smart, edgy read, written in a very hip, almost cyberpunk style (for one example, the author describes himself arriving in Tokyo, dropping two hits of codeine — no medical excuse required — and striding out into the neon lit night-time street in his leather jacket grooving on the strangeness of it all in search of signs of bot/human integration). (((It's got me almost as nostalgic as a hit play starring Mrs Karel Capek, Olga Scheinpflugova. Man, Olga was hot.)))
"Meadows spent time at Xerox PARC as an artist and researcher,focusing on interactive reading and narration and SRI, working as a researcher in the intelligence and linguistics group. He shares patents related to artificial intelligence and virtual reality and brings the understanding of a technologist and the insight of an artist into his written work.
"Aside from his other books, including I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life, Meadows is known for his imaginative artwork, which has been displayed in galleries across the U.S. and Europe. An adventurer, he hitchhiked to Baghdad in 2003.
"R.U. Sirius: Describe what inspired you to write this book. Was there a particular moment or thing or release that made you feel that robotic fact was starting to match science fiction in a particularly interesting way?
"Mark Stephen Meadows: The book probably started, what … more than ten years ago? I wrote it to explore some ethical questions. And yeah, there was a particular day, or week, when things got weird.
"It was in 2006, I guess, and I was really into watching Battlestar Galactica (partly because of them hot fembots). Of course I had noticed that the cylons had changed since last I’d seen them in 1979. The cylons were really human-like. Number 6 (Patricia Helfer) in particular, was no rigid-armed midget walking into walls.
"I realized that the robots of science fiction had managed to climb their way right out of the uncanny valley. The more modern the science fiction, the higher out of the valley they’d climbed. This caused me to notice that science fiction was mapping to the uncanny valley — a theory about real robotics...."
