Comic Picks By The Glick

3 responses so far ↓

• Krill // Dec 8, 2009 at 12:09 pm

  I don’t understand what you mean when you say Urasawa is writing hard science fiction with Pluto. I don’t think he’s trying to invoke any sort of plausibility or explore actual artificial intelligence. In fact, he’s kind of working from the bottom down. He starts with questions about humanity and then models his robots and their ’science’ in order to explore what it REALLY means to create the perfect human simulacrum.

  You do seem to be the only one I’ve seen respond that way to Pluto, which is getting heaped praise upon praise around the internet.

• Krill // Dec 8, 2009 at 4:08 pm

  And by “bottom down” I mean “top down”.

• JG // Dec 13, 2009 at 2:32 am

  I understand that’s what Urasawa is doing in this series for the most part, but there are many scenes that require some actual science as it relates to AI if we’re to take them seriously. (spoilers ahead) The biggest offender in my mind is when Geischt regains his memory in volume five — something that shouldn’t be possible since the data was removed. Saying that it was “buried too deep” makes it come off like a human’s “repressed memory.” What’s worse is that we find out in his memory that he was able to overcome his programming and kill a man because he hated him enough. While I’m open to the idea that there are actual scientific reasons for these things, these events make Geischt seem less like a robot and more like an actual human. That might have been Urasawa’s point, but when the series is founded on showing what it means to be human through the eyes of those who actually aren’t it makes the whole endeavor seem kind of pointless.

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