Robots are presented as being better than people - smarter, more durable, more *logical*, pure in their lack of Base Human Emotions - while simultaneously being written as a disrespected underclass.
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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
End of conversation
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