ioveranalyzed:ioveranalyzed:tyrelpinnegar:-CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD MARiiMO FOR FREE!-This is the jour
ioveranalyzed:ioveranalyzed:tyrelpinnegar:-CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD MARiiMO FOR FREE!-This is the journal of Tammy Maheswaran, a reclusive roboticist living with undiagnosed autism, who subconsciously externalizes her issues with touch and isolation via Mariimo, the world’s most advanced developmental robotics project. Upon the machine’s activation, Tammy slowly begins to realize than in the act of constructing Mariimo, she’s been unknowingly deconstructing herself.I loved this book! It’s a fairly short read (I think I read it in under 2 hours or so?), but gives a lot to think about. It’s all in a short journal style format as well, so it’s pretty easy to digest.If you like robotics/building? There’s tons of details on the construction of MARiiMO and the logistics behind her creation. I think they’re fairly thorough without being too dense, I have some passing familiarity with robotics from doing robotics club in high school, but I’m definitely not an expert and the narrative still gave me the gist of what was being built and how.If you like personal journeys/development? The journal format inherently creates a unique viewpoint to analyze Tammy, the narrator. At first the journals seem like they’re meant to only scientifically document the process of building and teaching MARiiMO. However, as MARiiMO grows and becomes a social connection in Tammy’s eyes, it starts to read more like a diary, personal and emotional. There’s a lot to discover based on what Tammy chooses to write about and what triggers her to write certain things.If you like AI and questions of personhood? The growth of MARiiMO is wonderful to watch. The ending also brings up questions about personhood and the process of creating a person, and what that really means.The passages about touch are also very compelling. I’ve had times where I’ve felt touch-starved and yet not consciously recognizing such a need, and I think the story articulates that sort of unrealized longing really well.I really enjoyed this story, and highly recommend. It’s currently free (as of when I read it in March), so you have nothing to lose. Whether you like robots or people, there’s something there for you.I thought I would be enamored with the robot (MARiiMO), but I was surprised to discover how much I grew to care about the narrator (Tammy). She has such a clear loneliness that she doesn’t even recognize at the beginning. As the story continues and you piece together her past and her emotions she gets even more interesting. The ending is the most personal section, and the also the section which made me care for her the most.She is a highly relatable character, though I don’t know how much of that is universality and how much of her just reminds me of me. Of course I’m not a roboticist/programmer with a hook hand prosthetic and my own prototyping lab passed down from my parents, but her obsession, oddness, and loneliness hit home for me in a lot of ways.I was a pretty slow child socially, so I remember most of my own social growth in middle and high school… Recognizing that friendship could be a rewarding experience, and consequently realizing what loneliness was. For a lot of my childhood I was pretty inward focused, so I didn’t pay too much attention to interactions with others. I also had a lot of siblings, so I was not completely deprived of social interaction and sort of had a built-in low-risk social system (low-risk since it’s not like they could stop interacting with me if I was weird/socially inept). Nonetheless, I would get obsessed with various projects or media (watching anime, programming games, drawing, etc), which would fill me with excitement whereas offers to play with others generally did not. It wasn’t until middle/high school when I began developing friendships in earnest that some sort of hole I hadn’t realized existed started to fill. And once I recognized that need existed, it felt like I had deprived myself for so many years, cutting myself off from an innate human need because I hadn’t felt like it suited me.Tammy in this story describes a bit of a similar journey, focused on the sensation of touch, so I found parallels in my own experience that made her realizations and growth hit home for me.(It’s still free!) -- source link