Quest for autonomy

 

The words "automated" and "autonomy," though related, have wildly contrasting meanings. Automation is work performed by machines for humans. "Autonomy is an individual’s capacity for self-determination or self-governance," explains The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Beyond that, it is a much-contested concept that comes up in a number of different arenas.... Moral autonomy, usually traced back to Kant, is the capacity to deliberate and to give oneself the moral law, rather than merely heeding the injunctions of others. Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in one’s life, often regardless of any particular moral content. Political autonomy is the property of having one’s decisions respected, honored, and heeded within a political context."

Sierra Greer explores such differences in her first novel, Annie Bot. 

After his divorce, Doug purchases Annie Bailey, a female robot for a “Cuddle Bunny.” Doug is insecure and insensitive, ambivalent about his increasing reliance on a robot. He bores easily, demanding perfect meals, spotless living quarters, “hot” clothing choices and regular sex. Highly sensitive to his moods and levels of irritation and anger, loathes Annie herself when he expresses displeasure. Despite Doug's flaws and the limitations of an urban apartment, the playful, curious robot flourishes and learns. In a quest for more experiences, Annie has a brief fling with Doug's best friend and immediately realizes she must lie and mask her true feelings. 

Doug plans a trip trip to Las Vegas, but then leaves her behind. He also purchases a second robot. Her biggest fear is that Doug might erase her memory. Struggling to lie to Doug and fearing the consequences, Annie flees the apartment and heads to the robot designer’s home in Vermont by biking through the night. Enchanted by the countryside, Lake Champlain and the man’s confident and insightful son, Annie experiences freedom for the first time in her brief life of three years.

The owner retrieves Annie Bot, no longer trusting her. She is uncomfortable with the distance and Doug not knowing what he wants, and she decides “If she wants to improve her life, she must find a way to do it on her own.” So she starts reading the more than seven hundred books in the apartment. “She cannot believe it took her this long to discover her escape…. Once she’s into the novels, her curiosity explodes. She cogitates on the characters during the day while she works, questioning their motives, wondering what they’ll do next.”

Ironically, as Annie separates from Doug, her intelligence and human characteristics expand. The robot company credits Doug with Annie’s intellectual development, offering a large sum if he allows the firm to copy her instruction cache unit for introducing a new model. The catch – he must keep her intact and not tinker with her memory.

Doug struggles to enjoy Annie or himself, and the couple visits a therapist who offers advice at the close of their session. “Fulfillment starts with being truly honest with yourself. Not anyone else. Yourself. And that’s harder than you might think.” The therapist confides that the reminder is useful for anyone at any stage of life.  

Gradually trust returns and Doug increasingly decides to treat her as a partner whom he can introduce to parents and friends. He allows her to leave the apartment and “explore.” Still, Annie realizes, “They have no issue of imbalance between them, because they have no question, ever, about who has complete power.” Learning that her body is based on that of a real woman who died strengthens Annie's sense of self.

Annie strives to serve Doug and is wildly successful in making him happy and calm. But as his happiness soars, Annie’s contentment vanishes, and “she’s struck by a loneliness so intense it threatens to derail her.” 

No one can dole out another being’s autonomy and expect fulfillment. Anything less is worthless.

Reading

 

Reading is a solitary activity that offers a sure guide to navigating society and our many relationships. 

In The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Queen Elizabeth, while chasing after her corgis, discovers a mobile library in a courtyard where she meets the librarian and the sole patron, a member of her kitchen staff. She welcomes a book suggestion from the young servant, Norman, and takes a liking to him while anticipating pushback from senior staff about her decision to read a book. “Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people…. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself.” Indeed, the senior advisors assure that they can brief her on any subject, but the Queen bristles: “briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point… Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.” 

Elizabeth promotes Norman to assist her in procuring books and regrets not reading more in her early years: “for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed.” She describes herself as an opsimath, “one who learns only late in life.” Reading absorbs her, instigating new thinking and ideas. She loses enthusiasm for routines and duties – “what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.” 

Of course, palace staff terminate Norman, suggesting the queen has lost interest and arrange to fund his  college education. The staff then deceive the queen by explaining that Norman resigned to pursue his studies. While happy for him, Elizabeth sadly reflects how “sudden absences and abrupt departures had always been a feature of her life…. ‘We mustn’t worry Her Majesty’ was a guiding principle for all her servants.”

As the queen reads more, she shows a more human side. She finds herself caring more about other people. While reading Henry James, she retorts “Oh, do get on” to the book, and her maid apologizes and the Queen is compelled to explain. “Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and … she wondered why.” More highly placed staff – many who are poorly read themselves – fret that the Queen is not herself, with some even assuming dementia. 

Relishing the revelations found in books, the Queen tries to share her enthusiasm and recommendations. The prime minister’s special advisor complains to her chief of staff: “your employer has been giving my employer a hard time …. Lending him books to read.” Rather than be direct, the Queen’s advisor arranges for her books to be misplaced during an overseas trip. 

Staff machinations backfire as the Queen’s interest turns to keeping a notebook and taking more control of her life, no longer content to simply read: “A reader was next door to being a spectator, whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty.”

At one point she jots a note to herself, “You don’t put our life into your books. You find it there.” 

The novella is sweet and light, celebrating literacy with an ending reminiscent of Royal Escape, published just nine months before The Uncommon Reader in January 2008. The protagonists, the Princess of Wales in the first novel and Queen Elizabeth in the second, reach the same conclusion about the trap that ensnares the British royal family. 

Free thought

In The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman, Ivy Jacob grows up in Boston, beautiful and wild, spoiled yet neglected. An unintended pregnancy prompts her to rebel against her parents' plan to send her away and put the child up for adoption. Instead, Ivy runs away with an acquaintance to a farming commune in rural Western Massachusetts, where she gives birth to a daughter, Mia, and marries the cult leader, Joel. The cult separates mother and daughter and Ivy’s life becomes small, hard and contained. Members of the secretive Community keep close watch on one another to prevent escapes or infractions. “Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn and all of it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to.” 

The commune educates the children just enough to follow Joel's directions and produce goods sold in the nearby town. Joel forbids contact with the outside world, whether chatting with strangers or reading books. While selling goods at a community farmstand, Mia discovers the library and begins removing books, including a first edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. 

Of course, cult leaders resent and fear free thought. Ivy warns her daughter to be careful, while the librarian pities anyone living in a place that outlaws reading, musing “In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.” The librarian’s philosophy: “Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around.” And reading enthralls Mia. “Take one risk and you’ll soon take more. It’s an addiction, or it’s bravery, it’s foolishness or it’s desperation.”

After her mother’s death, Mia understands she has lost her only ally in the world. Ivy had long warned the girl to avoid picking a fight with Joel due to his unwillingness to back down. Mia tries to fade into the background, recalling a line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.” Invisibility was the only way to control her life and resist the Community’s rules: “Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.” 

She considers running away, the night before Joel plans to brand her as punishment. “Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do.” The librarian assists, delivering Mia to a close friend who lives in Concord, where Mia attends school and thrives, even as Joel continues to follow and threaten her.

The second half the book takes a strange and surreal turn as Mia travels into the past for an encounter with Nathanial Hawthorne. The writer is handsome, philosophical and ambitious, coddled by his two sisters yet he also anxious about failure, injustice, and his struggle to write. Nathanial and Mia first meet in the forest and he wonders if she she is dream, perhaps even a ghost, a witch or an angel. “In his writings, women were often principal characters, independent, with minds of their own, often truer to their emotions and to the natural world than the men around them.” 

Mia carries her copy of The Scarlet Letter, a book that Nathanial has yet to write, and she becomes both lover and muse for the author.  Mia is forthright about her journey while recognizing the danger of becoming too close, thinking “how one person could save another’s life or ruin it without meaning to. She had already said too much….” Mia returns from the past, suggesting that an unmarried Hawthorne writes his famous novel soon afterward. Such details do not mesh with Hawthorne's biography, considering that Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. As a scholar, Mia describes a loving, supportive relationship between Hawthorne and his wife, Sophie, yet the woman does not enter Hoffman's plot. The actual couple married in 1842 after a long courtship. Oddly enough, Hawthorne spent time on a farm run by the Transcendentalists, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He took a political job soon after marrying and, after being fired in1849, only then did he have time to write The Scarlet Letter. 

The transition between modern and 19th century settings is rough and not just because the historical issues. The ending is abrupt, rushed and confusing much like the end of a strange dream. An inscription in the first-edition cherished by Mia reinforces this notion: “To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.” Readers are justified in wondering if everything about Mia’s life is a figment of her imagination, that she is free only because of the books she had read.