My take on “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating on GoodReads: 3 of 5 stars


So many very insightful reviews on this book I hesitate to try to chime in.

I chose to read this book in reaction to the news articles (https://www.washingtonpost.com/techno…)
regarding Blake Lemoine’s belief that Google’s LaMDA chat bot had become sentient.
Apparently, this book is one of the seminal SF works on computer sentience.
It did give me a basis for comparing more recent plots (e.g. “Her”, “iRobot”, etc.)

Unfortunately, Heinlein uses his sentient computer, named “Mike”, as more of a deux ex machina device to pull off an otherwise highly unlikely and predictable plot. The most redeeming twist is that Mike apparently dies at the end which opens a potential sequel plot using current science to make Mike come back as a more useful analysis of AI singularity.

Besides that, Heinlein used his other characters to celebrate an anarchist society where it is deemed reasonable to “eliminate” those you don’t approve of by throwing them out an airlock. Heinlein is a very influential writer. I hope this sort of thinking isn’t taken at face value by his readers.
Overall, I’m not sure I got what I came for and thus 3 stars.
-jgp



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