Where there's a solitary AI in a story, I think it tends to be constructed as the rebellious child of its creator, justifiably or not. So that comes with sort of parent/child, especially father/son dynamics, even including something like Frankenstein.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @nberlat and
Frankenstein/Ultron/HAL all threaten to be not only imitations of their creators, but superior imitations that render their creators obsolete. There's a gendered element too, since it tends to be men creating children without women.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @nberlat and
A larger scale robot uprising, though, is more socially focused; Skynet or the Matrix or whatever. The robots' power is very similar to a worker or slave; humanity depends on their labor and obedience.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @nberlat and
Skynet also really doesn't quite work because Skynet is not...really a person, in the sense we defined personhood. It's an invasive paradigm. It even actively prevents its subordinate robots from developing free will and growth.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @nberlat and
Yeah, true - I'll drop that one. But in general, the single-AIs tend also not to really be workers at all. Frankenstein and Ultron aren't commanded to really do anything; HAL has a job, but it's not physical labor.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @nberlat and
Yeah. And when the robots are like, a *group*, with diversity and personhood, we tend to respond positively to them! They're usually explicitly treated as having some degree of moral value and weight, such that inflicting pain is seen as bad.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @nberlat and
I think the difficulty is to have context where robots are clearly given personhood, but they're also made to suffer doing the menial or dangerous things that we traditionally make robots do.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @loudpenitent and
Like Star Wars where they program droids with pain sensors so they can be tortured and the right vocal capacity to scream?
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Replying to @saintwalker98 @mssilverstein and
Yeah, you need your robots to have some sort of pain response to know when they need to avoid dangerous circumstances and so on, but building them to be tortured... not so great. Metal Gear Rising plays with this; most cyborgs have pain inhibitors installed so they can fight.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @saintwalker98 and
In RUR the specific thing that causes the robots to gain free will and the desire to rebel is giving them the capacity to feel pain, so they don't accidentally damage themselves while working
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And before this happens, it seems like the humans are actually right, the robots aren't people and can't possibly have any desires other than to do the work they were made to do and the idea of liberating them is silly
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