Could robots run things better than us? 'The Tyranny of Heav'n' does a lot with robots, but we're not talking Metal Mickey, CP-30, Daleks or even my personal favourite, Marvin the Paranoid Android from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' My 'robots' inhabit a variety of locations and machines, transferring themselves from database to database as they see fit. (Imagine trying to set up the wifi... On some nights here, it's bad enough trying to stream Netflix.)
My robots are also curious. As a teacher, I remember my school banning Tamagochis, those irritating electronic 'pets' that children brought into school that demanded to be 'fed', 'exercised' and 'played with' or else they would sicken and 'die'. It was just a fashion that came and went, like the Furrbees that reacted to human speech with squeaking and simple movements, but they were just an accumulation of inputs reflecting the behaviour of their human owners. What happens something genuinely starts wanting to learn for its own sake? That's really the point of 'The Tyranny of Heav'n' - guessing at what could come next.
I once bought a big fat SF paperback of space-opera ('Ilium', by Dan Simmons) which lasted me two whole weeks of a holiday (Thank you, Oxfam books of Bideford), featuring two robots of strange shapes and dimensions whose care and compassion for the humans around them stood in marked contrast to anything the humans could do. Something about that story stuck with me, providing the seeds for my own offering. In popular fiction, robots turn on their human creators with cold deliberation - but that's probably just a symbolic fear of all downtrodden 'servants' biding their time until the day they finally rise up to swat their oppressors with big slap. Slaves? The underclasses? The proletariat? It's all a hidden guilt about having to rely on someone else doing what we cannot (or prefer not to), do for ourselves. But Simmons' robots were strong, content with who they were, interested in culture (One was a Marcel Proust fan), and genuinely concerned for the welfare of the people around them who were suffering all sorts of alien mayhem. The robots provided the story's moral centre.... and that is probably reflected in 'The Tyranny of Heav'n'.
Could they do a better job than us? Not yet. But by 2068.... who knows?
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Any requests of subjects for future posts? No idea too stupid for consideration. And yes, I know I am a bad writer, so don't bother saying that unless you can write something better. But maybe there's a topic buzzing around in your head that you'd like to see covered... because I've got a keyboard here, it's loaded with letters, and I ain't afraid to use it.