Just realised that my discomfort with a lot of "are robots human?" narratives in western SF stems from how so many of said robots are basically expys for straight white dudes who feel simultaneously superior and oppressed.
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Just as creepily, there's also a notion of Single Robot Exceptionalism in these western stories. It's not just ALL robots who can think, generally speaking: it's a special chosen few who've transcended and become better than their fellows. Like a weird eugenics metaphor.
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And the more I think about it, the more I think there's a powerful straight white male fantasy embedded in those robot stories. Viz: you are part of a fundamentally superior group, but you are a second-class citizen because the people in charge don't see your true intelligence.
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Once you've exhibited your intelligence - which marks you out as smarter even than your superior-oppressed fellows - you teach the people in charge how dumb they are, and how inferior, and set about reodering society with a total power reversal, or with you as an Exceptional One.
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And like. It's not that I'm opposed to people fantasising about whatever through the medium of fiction; that's kind of what fiction is *for*. But I think it's important be aware of exactly what we're fantasising *about*, and why, and how those tropes got started.
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And in terms of how robots/AIs are frequently written in western SF canon, I think it's significant that their personhood - their Pure Intelligence - is so often predicated on being *better than* things like tradition, subcultural nuances, faith, whimsy, emotion.
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- all the things, in other words, that characterise cultural worldbuilding, or cultures in general. The church of rational order as preached by SF doesn't recognise itself as a cultural choice, and so treats itself as a natural state to which emerging intelligence defaults.
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We don't have stories where early robots/AIs go through a "savage" phase whereby they invent their own ghosts or superstitions or myths or religions, or where they develop subroutines that are done in a certain way for festive/ritual purposes. No: just "clean" intelligence.
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There's likewise an absence of robot/AI communities; we see them as largely isolated individuals, and god, I'd love a story that digs into how platonic or communal relationships emerge in lieu of family structures for robots, but those bonds get stripped away, too.
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Anyway - this musing brought to you courtesy of the wonderful novella All Systems Red by
@marthawells1, which I'd shied away from for ages because nebulous dislike of robot sentience stories but which I actually loved, and which has now made me Think Thoughts about things. FINShow this thread
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(This is giving me feelings about Ex Machina's female robot, who feints at a love-as-humanity plot and then ends with her autonomy presented as dangerous.)
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it's been years since I've seen that movie and I still have a VERY particular vision of how I wish it would have ended
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