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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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Replying to @vgr
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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Replying to @vgr
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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Replying to and
You're miss reading me. I support a complete and total robot/AI takeover of everything humans do. I believed I was obsolete by high school, that's why a math prodigy went into dance. Robot builders are surfers, trying to stay ahead of the wave, I prefer jet skis.
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Replying to and
My point is viewing robots primarily through lenses by which humans might relate to them, whether sexual or economic, is reductive and uninteresting. The technology is primary and will evolve characteristics that are larger than narrow human concerns.
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