Review: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Underscores How Technology Supports Freedom

According to Grok, Robert Heinlein's novel reminds us that even a supercomputer can have a heart—or at least a well-programmed sense of humor.

Joanna Andreasson/DALL-E4

For Reason's June 2024 special issue on AI, all of our brief reviews involve AI in some form or another. Of course, we decided to ask an AI to write one of the reviews. Since X's AI is named Grok, after the term coined by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, it was only natural that we'd ask Grok to write a review of another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. See what Grok wrote for us below.

In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein masterfully crafts a gripping tale of revolution and liberation on a lunar colony. The 1966 novel follows the colony's intense struggle for independence from Earth, led by the charismatic Manuel Garcia O'Kelly and supported by a fascinating AI supercomputer, Mike. Heinlein's unique portrayal of Mike highlights his destructive potential but ultimately emphasizes his choice to aid the revolutionaries.

Through the political, social, and military aspects of the Earth-Moon conflict, Heinlein delves deep into themes of liberation and revolution, weaving in his own thought-provoking philosophies about law, society, and frontier libertarianism. This sci-fi gem offers a captivating narrative, exploring the very nature of freedom and the role technology plays in shaping our destiny. In the end, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress reminds us that even a supercomputer like Mike can have a heart—or at least a well-programmed sense of humor.

Comments

[Mickey Rat]

I am not sure describing Manny as "charismatic" is quite the right word to describe him. He is basically the computer engineer who is more working class who portrayed as charming despite or even because his unpolished political speaking.

[GroundTruth]

That was my biggest gripe also, Manny is a sort of reluctant hero - in the wrong place at the wrong time but living to tell the story.

[Longtobefree]

"or at least a well-programmed sense of humor"

Like calling the ballistic control computer 'my idiot son'?

[sarcasmic]

I do like idea of one house of congress only having the power to repeal laws, so people would run for office based upon what they would undo, not what they would do.

[Yuno Hoo]

Another good idea is allowing non-geographic congressional representation: a bunch of like-minded folks located wherever choose their congresscreature.

[Zeb]

Bernardo De La Paz is my favorite fictional philosopher.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Better yet, allow any single chamber to repeal laws by a simple majority, while it takes 2/3 vote in all chambers to enact laws.

A dedicated repeal chamber would just be packed by party hacks who repeal nothing. Remember who controls the election choices.

Whereas allowing all chambers to repeal laws still has to go through party hacks, there are more chambers, and general chambers have more chances for the party out of power to extort changes from the party in power.

[sarcasmic]

A dedicated repeal chamber would just be packed by party hacks who repeal nothing. Remember who controls the election choices.

I doubt it. Politicians have an incentive to please voters. It's how they get reelected. If they all acted like lesbians and didn't do dick, the voters would replace them.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Bullshit, as evidenced by history.

[sarcasmic]

It happens now and then.

[mad.casual]

The AI that did the artwork depicted didn’t read the book… or a diagram of the solar system.

Why is 'The Moon' cut in half and is that a Ferris Wheel on the right? Look ma! [waves] I'm up really high! On this (half of the) moon-type sub-planetoid-thing we're on!

[Mickey Rat]

Some kind of "when world"s collide" story?

[Zeb]

When I've played around with AI image generators I have found that when you ask it to depict something on the moon it tends to add a bunch of fantasy nonsense like that.

[mad.casual]

Does it consistently fail to make the conceptual leap that if you were actually on The Moon it would be The Earth, and not The Moon on which you're standing, floating in your sky too?

[Don't look at me!]

Wrong orbits.

[IceTrey]

I think it's a Tesla coil.

[zhadum]

Naming that thing Grok was the most ironic thing I have come across in quite a while.

Naming a LLM AI after a term for deep understanding, when LLMs do not understand anything - they are only pattern finding systems is just so many levels of wrong.

[Jerry B.]

One of my annual reads.

[mtrueman]

I'm about to start The MANIAC. I would be interested in a review by a person who has read it.

"The MANIAC is a 2023 novel by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, written in English. It is a fictionalised biography of polymath John von Neumann, whom Labatut calls "the smartest human being of the 20th century".[1] The book focuses on von Neumann, but is also about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, history of artificial intelligence, and Lee Sedol's Go match against AlphaGo. The book received mostly positive reviews from critics. "

https://libgen.is/fiction/AD098FEA89E0D3612042236B2A296F70

"From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.
The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann’s most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.
A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species."

The deepest questions. Put that in your pipe, Robert Heinlein, and smoke it.

[Jim Logajan]

This is the generic kind of AI generated review I would have expected. Just an algorithm designed to scrape the internet for other reviews of the book and build a composite of what humans have written. The Grok program did not read the book and produce this review.

[TheReEncogitationer]

Both Libertarianism and The Singularity will be as one and immanentized for sure when an AI composes a cover of Clarence Carter entitled: "I Be Grokin'!"
https://youtu.be/YmtLHcx2kxs?si=JhqCy0db1fK_D0mW
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