Writing robot characters

I can point you to my C.A.T. series of stories (Agents of Repair, C.A.T., Neptune's Angel, Guard Cat) - look them up on Amazon and you'll be able to see a way of writing about robots from the start of each story, which might give you ideas about how to do yours. (The stories are all at different stages of development of the same robot.)

My first thought: Asimov

It’s been done plenty before, dating back to the 60’s/70’s. Asimov’s stuff as noted by Asda. Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad is good (and very funny).

Nthing Asimov, especially I, Robot. And our very own zanjan wrote the Hugo-nominated short The Secret Life of Bots which is very worth a read.

How you approach writing bots depends on the level of tech advancement in your 'verse. Bots that are capable of emotions and such are going to behave differently than bots that run completely on deterministic logic. Usually, though, you're going to have some deterministic logic at their core (though increasingly we have neural network-based learning AI, which, well, this explains it better than I probably can.) A little background knowledge on computer coding might help a bit - CodeCademy is a pretty nice site where once you sign up you can jump in to some beginner-level interactive tutorials (Javascript is probably the most accessible).

I have a friend who is heavily involved in the AI scene and he mentioned something about the "bots gone rogue" trope that is worth bringing up. A deterministicaly programmed AI can not go rogue unless the programmer has explicitly given it that ability. Such a program can do only and exactly what it's programmed to do, including whatever might have been programmed badly. But with newer "genetic programing" AI, where we don't (and can't) actually know all of what's going on inside (much like how the human brain evolved), that's up in the air. A bot that learns like that could spontaneously develop quirks.

Asimov has been mentioned. Clifford D. Simak's classic City also has sentient robots with personalities. For amusingly defective robots, Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series (with his perpetually depressed "Genuine People Personality" module) is the gold standard. More recently, Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries (first installment: All Systems Red) feature a half-organic artificial life form, and Jeff Lemire's graphic novel series Descender has many robots of variant personalities.

If you're going for light SF, don't worry overmuch about technical details (unless you want to, for humor purposes.) Given that basic emotions seem to "work" insofar as keeping life forms behaving in more-or-less beneficial ways for their own survival, I wouldn't have a problem with someone inventing a Macguffin artificial emotion program/chip/thingybob to govern advanced robot behavior. Beware of the "Pinocchio" trope/cliche, where a self-aware robot automatically aspires to become a "real human", unless you're going to play with it; been overdone, IMHO.

robot = YourRobot;
readerEntertained = true
While readerEntertained
TreatLikeAnyOtherCharacter(robot);
End;

The Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451. *shiver*

DOGS OF WAR by Adrian Tchaikovsky does an excellent job creating robots that were spliced with animal minds. The main cast are a dog, a bear, a giant bioengineered lizard, and a swarm of bees. They all think very differently--especially the swarm of bees, who are my personal favourite.

EMaree said:

DOGS OF WAR by Adrian Tchaikovsky does an excellent job creating robots that were spliced with animal minds. The main cast are a dog, a bear, a giant bioengineered lizard, and a swarm of bees. They all think very differently--especially the swarm of bees, who are my personal favourite.

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There was also a graphic novel, We3, about a dog, cat, and rabbit cybernetically enhanced to become military weapons... who did not take it well when they were supposed to be decommissioned.

Star Wars. Who doesn't love the little rolling ball? Or R2D2? C3PO?

I've written an AI in my space opera, but I 'cheated' on laws and programming - Hal is a human virtual assistant, modified into an AI by an alien race, who try to make him human-like. It allows me to give him quirks that wouldn't be realistic in a true AI. There's always a way to make your character work.
And yes, the aliens picked his name. ;-)

woodymellor said:

Does anyone have any advice re: writing good and interesting robot characters? Or can point me to good examples? (Particularly robots who aren’t designed to pass for human)

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Study the classics. And I don't only mean Isaac Asimov's robot stories.

If you let go of the notion that robots must be completely synthetic, you can start with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and imagine the creature as an organic robot whose adverse experiences after its abandonment by Frankenstein had made it all too human.

There's also Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., which stands for "Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti" or "Rossum's Universal Robots". It's how the word "robot" entered the English language in the first place.

For more recent works, you could also rent or buy a copy of Nier: Automata, a Japanese Action-RPG featuring androids in fetish wear dealing with existential angst.

One book I read recently was book one in a series called the Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. It won the Nebula for best novella in 2017.
"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

That's a nice hook, one that caught my attention. It's a clever story, and it looks like it's developing into a long series.

Also, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice is told from the viewpoint of a humanoid who is essentially an AI, or a biologic interface with a ship's AI unit, one that has become separated from its collective (I don't remember why now, as I read it a while ago. I think the ship was destroyed or something) and has to function alone and make sense of people who aren't AIs.

I think "themindstream" has it right. My baseline is any sentience starts with self-awareness. Like us their personality is created by the environment they come from and how they learned from whom. Just like us there can be a mix. Smart, or not so much. Sense of humor, or doesn't understand the concept. Quick thinker, or might have to take time to process things first (older tech). It's really an unlimited place to explore. AI, robot, mindship/cyborg or any other combination you can imagine. In many tales involving robots and the ilk, I often have the sense that being an aware machine must be a lonely existence. An individual that knows it's different and has to struggle to fit in, if ever at all.

Roxxsmom said:

One book I read recently was book one in a series called the Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. It won the Nebula for best novella in 2017.
"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

That's a nice hook, one that caught my attention. It's a clever story, and it looks like it's developing into a long series.

[...]

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I read that as well - good story and characterization.

Also, check out Alasdair Shaw's Two Democracies series - I'm about half way through the third book now. The writing is interesting because it's SO character driven (especially the AI's). The plot is the old space wars trope, and if it weren't for the characters I would have set it aside long ago.