Robots - Pluto

After much prodding from some Manga-crazy friends, and looking for something comparable to the experience of Ghost in the Shell (both the mangas and the TV/movies are awesome - one of the few totems of nerd that I will defend in a room full of women) I bought all 11 books of Naoki Urasawa Manga Pluto. Pluto is a very different experience than GIS, with a very different purpose and background. Pluto is a retelling of a story from the classic Manga of the 50's Astroboy - by Osamu Tezuka - which I tried to read after Pluto but found it painfully dated. Pluto takes all the minor characters of the original story and gives them a large, complex, and beautiful back story. Mostly about the ghosts and consequences of war and power.

On the tech side, this story is about robots. AIs who have long ago passed any/all Turing tests and who have advanced specimens are, of course, more human the many of the humans that made them (yeah I know). Luckily this sort of techno humanism is bearable in the series due to the fact that the story doesn't heavily dwell on it with words but through beautiful drawn panels, and tie the robots humanism to the traumas of the war they participated in on the behalf of humans against their own kind. The advanced, more humanoid robots, commit genocide-like atrocities on behalf of their human masters, on their less AI affluent robot brethren.

This of course leads to wonderful musing on the nature of war, responsibility and revenge, since there is of course some super robot, with some nebulous relationship to the loser of said previous war that is slowly killing all the main characters of this series. While the narrative descends into my AI is stronger/better than your AI sort of video game like relationship, it's a beautiful simple story full of redemption and questions around the inevitable challenge of using advanced AI for irrational human wants.