Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!
Announcing the She-bot 3000, a female companion who’s the perfect combination of girlfriend, mother, and therapist. For a low daily rate (and with no minimum commitment or background check required), the She-bot can be your bot, and yours only.
...more
In such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
...more
Ornamental yet functional, mobile yet fragile—do these aesthetic humanoids belong more to the realm of novelty or art?
...more
Don’t try to make human what you are not willing to regard as human.
...moreIndie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreYour new chatbot therapist recommends volunteering. Womp womp: those productivity hacks are making you less productive. A quick-and-dirty primer to the “Anthropocene.”
...moreWhy Finnish women matter to the history of science fiction. Holiday science books: let visions of squid and sarcophagi dance in their heads. Astronauts survive thanks to a black female mathematician. This robot could make your toddler Mark Zuckerberg. (Minus the billions.)
...moreDon’t dis slang—it’s older than you are. Regarding the pain of fish (and humanities-loving robots). Fake scientists are real. Sexism messes up men’s mental health, too. Aimee Bender and the Ladies of Contemporary Fairytale.
...moreIn a universe slowly sinking into entropy, writing can take the disordered pieces of our experience and fit their edges together into something organized. If the work of a writer is to tease out meaning from the tangled mess of life, many of these algorithms essentially do the opposite, taking meaningful human posts or experiences and reducing them […]
...moreForget yoga—hallucinogenic ayahuasca is the new health cure du jour. H.G. Wells’s BFF was editor of Nature. Also from Nature: Wave goodbye to the 10,000-hours rule. Neurofiction, or stories that read your brain. Accurate AI models of existence? Not until robots dance.
...moreAny Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A certain likeness to humans inspires kinship, but when the line blurs, that kinship turns to […]
...more
There is a looming rift in science journalism. Also, a looming rift in journalism journalism. Letting the robots take over. Brains are not computers. Death, plutonium, and our nuclear history.
...moreRobotics have come a long way in the last century, but even Siri can’t lay claim to impeccable British manners. The British Science Museum is crowdfunding a replica of the UK’s original talking robot, Eric.
...moreAn automaton symbolizes the creepy resemblance between us and the clockwork mechanisms we’ve invented… and to explore the awe and apprehension of mechanical existence. Michael Peck writes for Lit Hub on the literary history of cyborgs and robots through the centuries.
...moreFacial recognition technology is a little racist. Two writers talk about the end of the world and more importantly, the end of social media. Robots are just babies—tiny, terrifying babies. Nabokov and butterfly sex.
...moreDon’t miss the official trailer, just released last week, for Moon Shot, a web documentary series directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, and produced by Epic Digital and Bad Robot, surrounding some of the scientifically savvy entrepreneurs competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE to send the first privately-funded robot to the moon.
...moreLast year physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that advanced artificial intelligence, or AI, could lead to the end of humanity. How are scientists working on this issue? Teaching robots empathy with books! Newsweek reports on the Quixote system, which teaches AI a human sense of right and wrong.
...more
I’ve long been afraid of toilets in Japan, beginning with the one in the temple we visited every summer starting in 1975, when my mother and I began to regularly go to her homeland in a bid to make sure I was familiar with her culture.
...moreUsing your English degree while coding. One foot in the real world, one foot in a story. A return to blogging? Or just marketing. Could robots be Renoir?
...moreCreepy robots were often at the heart of Philip K. Dick stories. The future is now: a company is building a realistic looking robot to haunt your dreams and it looks strikingly similar to the science fiction author. Electric Literature reports on the project from Hanson Robotics: On their website, Hanson Robotics highlights their desire to […]
...moreIs your ad blocker hurting publications? New technology. New crimes. All of our friends are on the Twitter. “Beep bop beep,” is “I do” in robot.
...moreTrauma haunts your DNA. Robots at CVS. Erik Larson’s favorite gadgets. Drones do good? Shrooms, science, and Beatrix Potter.
...moreComputers are judging you. Sexy robot story! Sexy robot story! “Trolls of mine, so undivine…” A wasteland of bodies. If it’s between money and trees, take the trees.
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Who is burning black churches? The weird history of weird news. What animal is going to infect us all and lead to our doom? Robots know. The office snake. Politics of the potty.
...moreA real nerd’s nerd. Nerd. Ceding moral decisions to driverless cars. (Warning: A video immediately plays when you click the link.) Your dead dog is a robot. How do you feel? There is no such thing as a millennial. There is also no spoon. Changing research forever! Or that was the goal, at least. The […]
...moreTwitter isn’t always toxic. The technology of the dinosaur epic. Score one for lady gamers. Can math solve questions of authorship? Toys are as creepy as you think.
...moreA new website called Poetry for Robots seeks to find out whether robots can learn human poetic language. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s theory that despite humanity’s near-infinite capacity for creating distinct metaphors, we still use the same ones over and over again in literature, like comparing eyes to the stars. The website […]
...moreYour new lesson plan: Be smarter than a computer. John Henry. But instead of a railroad, it’s a computer. And instead of John Henry, it’s NPR’s Scott Horsley. Your stories may not persuade like you thought they did. The charming tale of a robot coming to destroy you. You aren’t measuring your baby right. This could be […]
...more