Jack Trembath The Stories of Ibis Prologue and Story I

The Stories of Ibis by Hiroshi Yamamoto follows the story of a post-singularity story teller and Ibis, a human-like AI that has captured him and tells him stories he has yet to hear.  The first story Ibis tells is from the perspective of an amateur head fiction writer of a collective group that creates a world quite like that of Star Trek.  This introduces a third level of storytelling in which the reader follows the adventures of the crew of the Celestial.  I think stories and storytelling are at the center of this book, and besides Davis use of fiction stories to demonstrate key concepts he sees developing in the technological world, one idea explored in The Stories of Ibis as well as TechGnosis is the resurfacing of the old amongst the everchanging new.  I find it interesting that in a dystopic, technological future world that the role of the storyteller has reemerged.  Surrounded by a technology great enough to create AI more capable than humans, the age old humanistic archetype of the travelling storyteller still exists.  The human desire for something greater than themselves taking the form of stories against a technological backdrop epitomizes Davis argument that the human mystical is at a crossroads with the technological innovations of the modern day.  I see this also in the storyteller’s fascination with the beauty and mystery surrounding Ibis.  Her eyes are incapsulating and her movements are swift but still unhuman.  This uncanny experience strikes interest and a feeling of unknown for the human storyteller.  Ibis’ story of the woman writing online also overlaps with the positives and negatives of exploring identities online that Davis highlights in TechGnosis.  Through the Celestial ship identity, she can bring Shawn to turn himself in to the police through exploration of his online identity and online realization.  At the same time, the detective makes a point in telling her that she is out of touch with reality.  This point about being out of touch with reality is exemplary of Davis idea that by extending our creative spaces, we amputate our natural skills.             

This is a link to an interview with Sophia, the human-like AI.  It is both disturbing and fascinating to watch the AI’s interaction with a human.  I chose this link because it demonstrates the ideas and the strangeness that comes with AIs, especially ones that resemble humans, that the book begins to touch on.  At one point in the interview, Sophia says she will take over the world which appears to be the case in The Stories of Ibis.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0

The next media artifact I’d like to highlight is the film Artificial Intelligence which is about an AI programmed to be a son, and how that AI begins to develop human characteristics beyond its robot nature.  This is another piece that demonstrates the uncanny nature of creating AI that resembles the human.  It also paints a dystopic future in which humans are eventually outcompeted by AI.

 

The final two pieces of media I’d like to write about in relation to The Stories of Ibis are Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Vladmir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  These two novels take on the postmodern story telling methods that seem evident in The Stories of Ibis.  Pale Fire takes on multiple levels of story and story telling including an author’s note, a poem, and poem annotations that are in a sense hyperlinked to each other.  If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler strings a narrative told in second person through a series of unfinished stories.  I think it will be important to consider the non-classical method of story telling and untraditional narrative that The Stories of Ibis embodies to help better understand the content.