A machine near the end of its life and a curious boy come together and create a relationship that will honor the past and lead into the future. Tideline is a science fiction, award winning, short story by Elizabeth Bear. In this episode of Leave It To The Prose, Reid and Isaac discuss the ethics of robotics and the characteristics of great characters. The story leaves us with many questions off the page, including what machine cognition is like, and if it is possible for a machine to act against its self interest.

• Tideline by Elizabeth Bear
  
• Bicentennial Man (movie)
  
• Born in China (movie)
  

Machines are portrayed in many different ways across science fiction, from “WALL-E” to “I, Robot” there is no one vision of the future of our mechanical contraptions. As artificial intelligence continually advances, there is no knowing what the future of robots would look like. Despite all of these different types of robots that could be, the ones that stay close to our hearts are the ones that remain like us: emotional, contradictory, empathetic. The robot of Tideline is one that will steal your heart and make you question what robots could be in the future.