Just as straight white dudes are written as being culturally neutral, so too are robots - but with robots, it's often held up as a kind of platonic ideal; like of COURSE the next level of evolution or intelligence is a uniform community with no subcultural nuances.
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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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