Started writing a robot pov story (third-person limited pov, the most common for a human protagonist) and realized pronouns are a genuine challenge for realistic (hard sf) non-anthropomorphic robots. Asimov used the R suffix, but stuck to androids so didn’t need to solve it.
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They have enough personhood that it/its feels off, but not a gendered personhood, but also not a gender-focused personhood like in the human culture war case. For most robot futures, “gender” analogues for variety in personhood would be not even wrong.
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While *some* robot futures might end up driven by self-replication and might conceivably evolve a sexual reproduction, and eventually reproduce today’s human culture war patterns, it’s not imo a naturally central concern, and not particularly interesting to me.
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That discourse has some fun but imo clunky suggestions. As you might expect, there’s a lot if search results, but afaik, most of it is an extension/projection of human culture war stuff so peripheral to my interests.
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So what might be a basis for variety in personhood as fundamental as gender?
One thought is that highly connected eusocial robots (drones) lead to a very different technical style than highly autonomous ones. Think ant-level integration in primate-level intelligences.
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As with gendered pronouns, this will work fit some futures/stories where robots are basically slaves (and of course there’s a whole other connection to human slavery discourses there… cf. Pullman “Georges” or depersonalized modern under-the-API humans-behind-apps).
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Replying to @vgr
Phrases like "this one" instead of "I" work reasonably well. Slave language.
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Writing to evoke empathy for robot/AI characters is one reason to explore pronouns, I presume there will be others. I’m interested in technically meaningful varieties in personhood, since that will drive evolution,
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if not much personhood, how will reader emphasize? Zelazny has some examples.
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Another promising dimension is highly embodied+situated robots vs disembodied AI “ghost” intelligences that can awkwardly “possess” any body. Like Robocop vs Agent Smith. There’s a pronoun-worthy fundamental distinction.
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This is certainly an option, but it feels weak to me since it simply blurs the specificity of personhood (which is also an unresolved tension in the human case). Commits you to a more specific kind of story world/future where such blurring is the way things play out. t.co/yOc8jRFadb
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Iirc Banks kinda avoided the whole challenge by using the name or “the drone.” If you think about it ship mind names actually use class names like GSV similarly to gendered prefixes to achieve the precision and specificity in portraying the society of minds. This worked great.
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Fuck I forget, how did drones use pronouns in Culture novels?
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In fact for one story concept I’m working on (humans have gone extinct, leaving behind a large society of rovers on Mars), the rover class would be the primary type system. Shamelessly stolen from Culture.
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Just remembered that in Foundation, the Gaians use the pattern “I/we/Gaia” to refer to their recursively emergent hive-personhood. Asimov’s Gaia directly inspired Rodenberry’s Borg (though twisted dark) and 7 of 9 sometimes goes “we are Borg.”
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Not sure if and how soon this will be important irl, but obviously sexbots and Boston dynamics names (Atlas, spot) and voice assistant voices (Alexa, Siri, Cortana) are already dragging us into this conversation pretty fast.
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But it’s pretty critical to robot stories. Mishandling it leads to bad stories. Gendered robots are the weakest part of Futurama. Some jokes/premises land (how robot sex creates baby robots through design DNA mixing), others end up as tedious culture war commentary.
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I think a good strategy is to pick a primary dimension of variety that is:
a) Interesting in an engineering way
b) Not analogous to human gender unless that’s the point (self-replicating, sexually reproducing robots)
And then start with prefixes analogous to Banksian GSV/MSV
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Adam Elkus recently wrote an essay I’m still thinking about on how robot/AI storytelling ends up being reduced to narrowly human concerns (in Ex Machina, Adam argues the tech is peripheral and the topic is difficulties in human communication) aelkus.github.io/film/2021/09/1
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I’m interested in biomorphism in robots for more functional and foundational reasons than socialization ephemera, as I recently argued in a (paywalled) newsletter. studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/on-robots
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It is, I think, both dangerous and uninteresting to view robots primarily through the lens of how humans might relate to them (sexually, economically). It’s the same legibilizing error as viewing trees primarily in terms of furniture or lumber economics.
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As with any Promethean technology, intrinsic tendencies will rapidly overwhelm human intentions and we’ll shift to co-evolution. Happened even with clocks, telescopes, and steam engines. Don’t even need “intelligence” to be Promethean. Just network-effect generativity.
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Need a better class of robot stories that explore Promethean possibilities. I’m bored of robots wanting to be human socio-sexually or take over the world politico-economically. Let’s get on with the paperclip maximization stuff. That’s the interesting shit.
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Human-centeredness is for insects.
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One of the most powerful sources of comedy in robot stories is actually playing with the it/you boundary. Bender gags on Futurama often involve him showing an unexpected object/non-robotic-machine nature (he's a popcorn machine, beer still, etc)
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There, put that in someone's mouth and you've got yourself a lampshade.
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This is actually the best developed part of Futurama robots -- all sorts of objects are reimagined as robots. Hedonism bot is basically a chaise longue with a brain. The Crushinator, the spaceship, the soda vending machine, the suicide booth -- all robots.
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I think Bojack plays with a similar humanness/horsiness boundary. And while we're on personhood, how could I forget Sirius Cybernetics and Real People Personalities™ -- doors, elevators, ship computers, drink machines (in fact I suspect maybe Futurama copied HHG for this stuff)
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In HHG, the primary dimension of variation for personhood is effectively the product catalog range of a large cartoonish 80s style corporation. Futurama is the same. Mom corp = Sirius Cyberneitcs.
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While not future-engineering-fundamental (the objects are familiar in today's techno-environment -- that's what makes for good gag jokes), the variety is from *past* engineering-fundamental spectra.
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Sirius cybernetics and Momcorp robots are basically "robots as intelligent furniture with personhood"
Extant built environment anthropomorphized, but satirically rather than narcissistically.
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For comedy, this works best if you impose trad gender onto object relations (ie, portray as it-you boundary, relate as he/she). But for a drama version of Sirius Cybernetics or Momcorp, you'd want to invent a fictive personhood scheme.
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Like, in a dramatic version of Futurama (which is admittedly hard to imagine since it is deep satire of 1950s futurism, down to the name derived from GM's 1939 World Fairs exhibit), you might imagine robots derived from vehicles vs. furniture vs. appliances as distinct "genders"
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Connection to Animism
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Replying to @vgr
As I said, this is the Elaine Scarry thesis.
Animism: all objects which are extensions of human capacity are alive. But we only notice when things go wrong.
amzn.to/3lT8VVd
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Reminds me of an article I read and blogged about way back in 2008 on why Japan is a particularly robot-loving nation -- a richer robot-relations imagination derived from animism. ribbonfarm.com/2008/03/12/jap
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