A Robot’s Eye View
What I love about being a novelist is having the freedom to explore another person’s life inside their skin and through their eyes. For all my characters, I create a life story and try to understand their motivation - especially for the villain of the piece and those characters who may be very different from who I am personally.
It’s particularly important for me to see the world through the lives of the “baddies” in my books because everyone believes themselves to be doing the right thing as the heroes of their own lives - no-one sets out to be an arch-villain and to do evil things. I also need to take care to understand those characters who are different from me so that I can portray them as real people and not caricatures. And it’s great fun too - because it gives me the chance to “be” other types of people for the duration of the book! Which is why this video footage collated from CCTV and other automated data gathering visual devices is fascinating to me. It offers us a chance to see the world through the eyes of robots.
Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.
I find this video fascinating also as I’m a Battlestar Galactica (Re-imagined) fan - and a fan generally of speculative fiction about androids and artificial intelligence. The overriding sensation I get from watching this film is one of the objectification of humans and human activity - there’s a coldness about it that’s unnerving. If the motivation of the robots is to assess efficiencies of traffic flow and motion, then surely the next step is likely to be scrubbing us humans out for being less than satisfactory…
Posted by Alex Yang (pen name of Yang-May Ooi) on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 7:00am




















