Sirius cybernetics and Momcorp robots are basically "robots as intelligent furniture with personhood"
Extant built environment anthropomorphized, but satirically rather than narcissistically.
Conversation
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.
2
3
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"
1
3
Connection to Animism
Quote Tweet
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
1
1
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
5
5
Original article is from 2005, and reflects on why Americans seem to build robots like the Roomba that strive to restrain their personhood and look/act like appliances, whereas Japanese build robots that exaggerate personhood.
1
3
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.
2
3
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.
1
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)
1
That is a very meatbag way of thinking about things. Maybe it is less about being vague and more about being probabilistic?
1
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.


