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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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This actually goes much deeper. A Japanese account I follow, tweets great photos of Japanese corporate mascots, which are a dizzying array of vaguely anthropomorphized things. You could build a fictional universe just using mondo mascots.
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Replying to and
Why wouldn't they use the more exact language like a common decentralized identifier (DID)? We use "he/she/it/they" to shorthand an identifier that has already been used which could be verbal or assumed.
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Replying to and
I think once you get sufficiently social, exactitude will become a limiting factor, not an advantage for computer brains. You want to say vague things like "is there a doctor in the house" (kinda like declarative programming with agents)
Replying to and
I don’t think it’s meatbag. It’s more powerful abstraction abilities for np-hard problems that have to be solved whether you’re meatbag or metal and don’t necessarily yield well to quantitative-only thinking.