Branching Out With Machinia

Machinia is now available trough many major and independent bookstores.  However, spreading the word is an ongoing process especially in this era of COVID limitations. On the plus side Mike Glyer of the Hugo award winning science fiction website File 770 graciously posted a guest blog of mine entitled "Data Determines Destiny". I will attach the link at the end of this post. In the piece I look at two aspects of Machinia: the ongoing expansion of big data and the inevitable rise of robots.  Given that the novel was a thirty year edit many of the ideas that were highly speculative in the 90's are now becoming more mainstream.  Artificial intelligence is maneuvering its way into our daily lives and robot capabilities are expanding to include services that were once only possible by human beings. In effect we are building the foundation of Machinia's robot empire with every advance by Boston Dynamics, Panasonic, Microsoft, Google, and Apple.  It won't be too long before a humanoid robot becomes something akin to a home computer or microwave oven. Exotic at first, commonplace as time goes on. And with Musk shooting his private rockets into the sky what is truly exotic anymore?  I wouldn't be surprised if he or one of his science fiction obsessed wealthy friends has the first home-friendly robot ready for mass production in a year or two from now. By the time our protagonist sets foot in Machinia it is 2156.  I wondered if a fully established robot society in the 22nd century was a little extreme.  Now I see that my timing was fairly accurate.
"Data Determines Destiny" file770.com/data-determines-destiny-guest-post-by-paul-a-moscarella/?fbclid=IwAR3spWG-aHAixRu7l_NsC2nL5JhhB63A5sXGyEqTjDdq4EeO2eG2O4UtoGY