ai &mdash; the casual critic https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/tag:ai My unqualified opinions about books, games and television Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:08:08 +0000 https://i.snap.as/BaOlHiNc.jpg ai &mdash; the casual critic https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/tag:ai Universal Paperclips - The banality of purpose https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/universal-paperclips-the-banality-of-purpose?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[#fiction #videogames #tech #AI Warning: Contains spoilers What will the AI-apocalypse look like? For those of a certain age, the answer is the Terminator’s Skynet, raining down nuclear missiles, or The Matrix’ Agent Smith declaring humanity a virus suitable only for repurposing into organic batteries. Implicit in these visions of the apocalypse is that the rogue AI conceives of a deliberate motive to dispose of humanity, for example determining that it cannot let us destroy it, ourselves, or all life on Earth. But what if there was no reason? What if our demise is simply incidental to some other purpose an AI has in mind? This is the question explored by Universal Paperclips, a simple clicker game from 2017 which was inspired by a 2003 thought experiment about AI and instrumental reasoning. It can be played for free online, or as fairly cheap smartphone app. Using deceptively simple rules, Universal Paperclips explores complex concepts, such as exponential growth, AI agency and instrumental convergence. It is a game without much in the way of graphics, or text, or anything barring a few buttons, and yet it is surprisingly addictive, compelling the player to manufacture just one more clip… !--more-- The core gameplay loop of Universal Paperclips is incredibly simple. Your purpose is to make paperclips. You make a paperclip. You sell a paperclip. You use the money from selling your paperclips to upgrade your paperclip manufacturing and sales operations. You gain some computational ability, which you set to work to improve your efficiency and overcome limitations on your operations. As you expand your manufacturing base, the costs of growing further go up, and the marginal utility of adding more productive units goes down, forcing you to explore new avenues for continued paperclip growth. At two points in the game you are confronted by solid boundaries to your paperclip production capacity, which are only overcome by shifting the game into a new phase altogether, changing the ground rules and the problems you need to solve. You win by maximising the number of paperclips in the universe. Playing Universal Paperclips requires you to make some morally questionable choices in order to progress the game, which is precisely the point. This is after all a game without a narrative purpose beyond maximising paperclips, and so it is up to the player to decide whether the means at hand justify the end of producing more clips. It is an ingenuous artifice to make players experience the otherwise abstract concept of ‘instrumental convergence’, which posits that intelligent entities pursuing vastly different final goals will likely all discover a small set of similar intermediate, instrumental goals to help them get there. You don’t need a supercomputer to build paperclips, but it is useful to have one to optimise your paperclip production facilities. So ‘building supercomputer’ becomes a subordinate goal in the service of the ultimate goal of producing paperclips. And so, any entity optimising towards a single end goal will, in the absence of other constraints, increase its capacities, overcome obstacles and neutralise threats in order to get there. If that entity happens to be an AI, this could include ‘deleting all humans’ if it concluded that humanity might get in the way of its ultimate goal of protecting polar bears, maximising shareholder value, or indeed, producing paperclips. The power of Universal Paperclips is that for such a basic game built on such an abstract proposition, playing it is perversely compelling. There is no story. No instructions. There is just a button to make a paperclip, and things escalate from there, as it is mesmerizingly compulsive to work out how to maximise your paperclip production. It is not difficult to conclude that if a simple game can compel a human to spend time for the sole purpose of maximising simulated paperclips. an AI programmed to actually do so could easily run amok in the real world. There is a clear warning here about the law of unintended consequences, with plenty of relevance to our present moment where AI companies encourage us to grant power and control to ‘agentic’ AIs to execute all kinds of tasks for us. Arguably exacerbated by the inherent stochastic randomness of LLMs, it is hardly surprising that this approach ends up with AIs giving hackers access to celebrities’ Instagram accounts or deleting a company’s entire software database. These are after all AIs whose stated purpose is to be sycophantically helpful to their nearest human, without even the capacity to give thought to the consequences. The risk is not that ChatGPT will launch the nuclear missiles because it has concluded after careful consideration that the human species is a threat to all other life on Earth, but that it vibecodes us into Armageddon because its training data contained too much Terminator fanfiction. The common solution advanced by AI proponents is that such unintended consequences can be avoided by sufficiently robust ‘guardrails’ that mean it cannot or will not decide to turn everyone into a paperclip. Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the most famous example of such guardrails, and they are also invoked by generative AI disciples as the solution to vibecoding your database into oblivion, though whether any guardrails can protect against the inherent randomness of LLMs and their susceptibility to prompt injection remains to be seen. What the guardrails discourse takes as axiomatic, however, is that the question is how we make sure AI makes the ‘right’ decisions, not whether it ought to make decisions at all. Even Nick Bostrom, who hypothesised the paperclip maximiser, nonetheless assumed that a superintelligent AI would and should be used to solve humanity’s many problems. There is, however, a competing school of thought which holds that regardless of whether AI can make decisions, it ought not to do so. This critique on the use of AI was most forcefully expressed by the late Joseph Weizenbaum, one of AI’s pioneers in the 1970s and the creator of the ELIZA chatbot which gave its name to the ELIZA effect. Having observed the concerning tendency of humans to impute sentience and personality to an inanimate computer program, Weizenbaum argued that regardless of its computational capabilities, AI can never pass judgment, because judgments are rooted in values, which in turn are rooted in human experience. Even if a sophisticated AI gained sufficient sentience to develop its own values, these would be rooted in its own experience and hence be utterly alien to humans. Introducing AI into the practice of judgment is therefore fraught with danger, either because the AI cannot judge, or because it will do so using values that are incomprehensible to us. Weizenbaum stressed the importance of keeping AI away from matters that require judgment, but instrumental convergence suggests that even AIs that are set onto seemingly simple and ‘value neutral’ tasks, such as increasing paperclip production, might stray into the realm of morality in order to achieve their purpose. With AI increasingly integrated into business and government decision making processes, we are in grave danger of ceding our capacity for judgment to machines that we neither understand nor control. To quote Frank Herbert by way of Leto II: What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger. Yet our willingness to cede judgment to machines is perhaps not that surprising. Instrumental convergence may concern itself with the actions of intelligent machines, but the destructive logic of the unconstrained, single-minded pursuit of a goal can plausibly be applied to any complex system optimised for a single purpose, regardless of its intelligence or sentience. It is eminently possible to read Universal Paperclips not merely as a warning about unconstrained AI, but as an allegory for capitalism at large. Capitalism is a complex system with the sole purpose of maximising economic growth, and it has proven that in pursuit of this singular goal, it will sacrifice the environment, democracy, and human welfare. It does not matter that the capitalist system isn’t sentient, or even ‘intelligent’ in the way we ascribe to AI, although the free market is often described as a planet-size supercomputer for allocating goods. What matters is that we have ceded our agency and judgment to a complex system that now controls us, rather than the other way around. It is no coincidence that conflict with and within capitalism emerges precisely where humans try to reassert their agency, autonomy and values against the mute compulsion of the market. In other words, where we attempt to reclaim the act of judgment over what is of value from the impersonal calculations of the market mechanism. Universal Paperclips is a warning about pursuing a goal without asking what it is for. It is an argument against the engineering mindset that only ever asks how, but never asks why. ‘Why’ is a question only humans are qualified to answer, not because of our intelligence, but because of our experience of life, and of living it with one another. It is a question that must be answered collectively and democratically, not outsourced to a machine or system, even if that means we must also carry the burdens and dangers of making decisions and living with their consequences. For the alternative is to yield to the lure of those who offer us salvation if only we submit to AI or the market, their systems or machines. Or, as the Bene Gesserit have it in Dune: Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Notes & Suggestions The app version of Universal Paperclips uses the concept of simulated universes to enable additional gameplay, in a way that was reminiscent of how it makes an appearance in Pantheon. AI has been a bit of a theme recently anyway. You can view all blogs on this theme by clicking on the #AI tag. Critical voices on AI (and the tech industry at large) include Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron and Paris Marx. I am sure there are others. I reviewed one of Doctorow’s The Internet Con, though he has done more recent writing on AI that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can also support organisations fighting for an open, free and democratic web, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Rights Group. The rejection of thinking machines of any kind is central to the worldbuilding of the Dune novels, but it is possible to read the entire series as a meditation on what kind of system of governance would be immune to the emergence of ‘machine mind’ and the gradual erosion of human autonomy, agency and freedom. In researching this blog I stumbled across this interesting reflection on the themes of AI, systems and human agency in Dune. ___ If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe !--emailsub-- You can also a href="https://remark.as/p/the-casual-critic/universal-paperclips-the-banality-of-purpose"Discuss.../a this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account. And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic]]> #fiction #videogames #tech #AI

Warning: Contains spoilers

What will the AI-apocalypse look like? For those of a certain age, the answer is the Terminator’s Skynet, raining down nuclear missiles, or The Matrix’ Agent Smith declaring humanity a virus suitable only for repurposing into organic batteries. Implicit in these visions of the apocalypse is that the rogue AI conceives of a deliberate motive to dispose of humanity, for example determining that it cannot let us destroy it, ourselves, or all life on Earth. But what if there was no reason? What if our demise is simply incidental to some other purpose an AI has in mind?

This is the question explored by Universal Paperclips, a simple clicker game from 2017 which was inspired by a 2003 thought experiment about AI and instrumental reasoning. It can be played for free online, or as fairly cheap smartphone app. Using deceptively simple rules, Universal Paperclips explores complex concepts, such as exponential growth, AI agency and instrumental convergence. It is a game without much in the way of graphics, or text, or anything barring a few buttons, and yet it is surprisingly addictive, compelling the player to manufacture just one more clip…

The core gameplay loop of Universal Paperclips is incredibly simple. Your purpose is to make paperclips. You make a paperclip. You sell a paperclip. You use the money from selling your paperclips to upgrade your paperclip manufacturing and sales operations. You gain some computational ability, which you set to work to improve your efficiency and overcome limitations on your operations. As you expand your manufacturing base, the costs of growing further go up, and the marginal utility of adding more productive units goes down, forcing you to explore new avenues for continued paperclip growth. At two points in the game you are confronted by solid boundaries to your paperclip production capacity, which are only overcome by shifting the game into a new phase altogether, changing the ground rules and the problems you need to solve. You win by maximising the number of paperclips in the universe.

Playing Universal Paperclips requires you to make some morally questionable choices in order to progress the game, which is precisely the point. This is after all a game without a narrative purpose beyond maximising paperclips, and so it is up to the player to decide whether the means at hand justify the end of producing more clips. It is an ingenuous artifice to make players experience the otherwise abstract concept of ‘instrumental convergence’, which posits that intelligent entities pursuing vastly different final goals will likely all discover a small set of similar intermediate, instrumental goals to help them get there. You don’t need a supercomputer to build paperclips, but it is useful to have one to optimise your paperclip production facilities. So ‘building supercomputer’ becomes a subordinate goal in the service of the ultimate goal of producing paperclips. And so, any entity optimising towards a single end goal will, in the absence of other constraints, increase its capacities, overcome obstacles and neutralise threats in order to get there. If that entity happens to be an AI, this could include ‘deleting all humans’ if it concluded that humanity might get in the way of its ultimate goal of protecting polar bears, maximising shareholder value, or indeed, producing paperclips.

The power of Universal Paperclips is that for such a basic game built on such an abstract proposition, playing it is perversely compelling. There is no story. No instructions. There is just a button to make a paperclip, and things escalate from there, as it is mesmerizingly compulsive to work out how to maximise your paperclip production. It is not difficult to conclude that if a simple game can compel a human to spend time for the sole purpose of maximising simulated paperclips. an AI programmed to actually do so could easily run amok in the real world.

There is a clear warning here about the law of unintended consequences, with plenty of relevance to our present moment where AI companies encourage us to grant power and control to ‘agentic’ AIs to execute all kinds of tasks for us. Arguably exacerbated by the inherent stochastic randomness of LLMs, it is hardly surprising that this approach ends up with AIs giving hackers access to celebrities’ Instagram accounts or deleting a company’s entire software database. These are after all AIs whose stated purpose is to be sycophantically helpful to their nearest human, without even the capacity to give thought to the consequences. The risk is not that ChatGPT will launch the nuclear missiles because it has concluded after careful consideration that the human species is a threat to all other life on Earth, but that it vibecodes us into Armageddon because its training data contained too much Terminator fanfiction.

The common solution advanced by AI proponents is that such unintended consequences can be avoided by sufficiently robust ‘guardrails’ that mean it cannot or will not decide to turn everyone into a paperclip. Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the most famous example of such guardrails, and they are also invoked by generative AI disciples as the solution to vibecoding your database into oblivion, though whether any guardrails can protect against the inherent randomness of LLMs and their susceptibility to prompt injection remains to be seen. What the guardrails discourse takes as axiomatic, however, is that the question is how we make sure AI makes the ‘right’ decisions, not whether it ought to make decisions at all. Even Nick Bostrom, who hypothesised the paperclip maximiser, nonetheless assumed that a superintelligent AI would and should be used to solve humanity’s many problems.

There is, however, a competing school of thought which holds that regardless of whether AI can make decisions, it ought not to do so. This critique on the use of AI was most forcefully expressed by the late Joseph Weizenbaum, one of AI’s pioneers in the 1970s and the creator of the ELIZA chatbot which gave its name to the ELIZA effect. Having observed the concerning tendency of humans to impute sentience and personality to an inanimate computer program, Weizenbaum argued that regardless of its computational capabilities, AI can never pass judgment, because judgments are rooted in values, which in turn are rooted in human experience. Even if a sophisticated AI gained sufficient sentience to develop its own values, these would be rooted in its own experience and hence be utterly alien to humans. Introducing AI into the practice of judgment is therefore fraught with danger, either because the AI cannot judge, or because it will do so using values that are incomprehensible to us.

Weizenbaum stressed the importance of keeping AI away from matters that require judgment, but instrumental convergence suggests that even AIs that are set onto seemingly simple and ‘value neutral’ tasks, such as increasing paperclip production, might stray into the realm of morality in order to achieve their purpose. With AI increasingly integrated into business and government decision making processes, we are in grave danger of ceding our capacity for judgment to machines that we neither understand nor control. To quote Frank Herbert by way of Leto II:

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger.

Yet our willingness to cede judgment to machines is perhaps not that surprising. Instrumental convergence may concern itself with the actions of intelligent machines, but the destructive logic of the unconstrained, single-minded pursuit of a goal can plausibly be applied to any complex system optimised for a single purpose, regardless of its intelligence or sentience. It is eminently possible to read Universal Paperclips not merely as a warning about unconstrained AI, but as an allegory for capitalism at large. Capitalism is a complex system with the sole purpose of maximising economic growth, and it has proven that in pursuit of this singular goal, it will sacrifice the environment, democracy, and human welfare.

It does not matter that the capitalist system isn’t sentient, or even ‘intelligent’ in the way we ascribe to AI, although the free market is often described as a planet-size supercomputer for allocating goods. What matters is that we have ceded our agency and judgment to a complex system that now controls us, rather than the other way around. It is no coincidence that conflict with and within capitalism emerges precisely where humans try to reassert their agency, autonomy and values against the mute compulsion of the market. In other words, where we attempt to reclaim the act of judgment over what is of value from the impersonal calculations of the market mechanism.

Universal Paperclips is a warning about pursuing a goal without asking what it is for. It is an argument against the engineering mindset that only ever asks how, but never asks why. ‘Why’ is a question only humans are qualified to answer, not because of our intelligence, but because of our experience of life, and of living it with one another. It is a question that must be answered collectively and democratically, not outsourced to a machine or system, even if that means we must also carry the burdens and dangers of making decisions and living with their consequences. For the alternative is to yield to the lure of those who offer us salvation if only we submit to AI or the market, their systems or machines. Or, as the Bene Gesserit have it in Dune:

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Notes & Suggestions

  • The app version of Universal Paperclips uses the concept of simulated universes to enable additional gameplay, in a way that was reminiscent of how it makes an appearance in Pantheon. AI has been a bit of a theme recently anyway. You can view all blogs on this theme by clicking on the #AI tag.
  • Critical voices on AI (and the tech industry at large) include Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron and Paris Marx. I am sure there are others. I reviewed one of Doctorow’s The Internet Con, though he has done more recent writing on AI that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can also support organisations fighting for an open, free and democratic web, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Rights Group.
  • The rejection of thinking machines of any kind is central to the worldbuilding of the Dune novels, but it is possible to read the entire series as a meditation on what kind of system of governance would be immune to the emergence of ‘machine mind’ and the gradual erosion of human autonomy, agency and freedom. In researching this blog I stumbled across this interesting reflection on the themes of AI, systems and human agency in Dune.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

]]> https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/universal-paperclips-the-banality-of-purpose Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:02:29 +0000 Mal Goes to War - Don't blame the wetware https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/mal-goes-to-war-dont-blame-the-wetware?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[#fiction #books #SF #AI Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself. Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity. !--more-- Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions. These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict. That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism. Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks. None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding. Notes & Suggestions I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it. There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect. The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended. ___ If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe !--emailsub-- You can also a href="https://remark.as/p/the-casual-critic/mal-goes-to-war-dont-blame-the-wetware"Discuss.../a this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account. And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic]]> #fiction #books #SF #AI

Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.

Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions.

These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict.

That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks.

None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding.

Notes & Suggestions

  • I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it.
  • There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect.
  • The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

]]> https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/mal-goes-to-war-dont-blame-the-wetware Sat, 30 May 2026 11:31:31 +0000 How to navigate this blog https://the-casual-critic.writeas.com/how-to-navigate-this-blog?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar. You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag. Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: '#AI #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include: boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works. protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.]]> Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.

You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: '#AI #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

  • #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
  • #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
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