![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felinejumper"Good robots are trans, bad ones are cis."
This is a ongoing not/joke between a close friend of mine who shares some of my cryptid gender feelings, without really isolating what we might actually be saying. We said it, originally, to reference the way some robot stories reach into unnameable and incomprehensible body/gender feelings for us, and re-create that experience. So it is about, specifically, transness. But it also feels like a broader queer statement, the whole experience of moving not in opposition, but orthogonally; in invisible dimensions. I think it illustrates for me what it means to queer an idea. So: why I love some robot stories, and viscerally overwhelmingly loathe others, a non-comprehensive list.
spoilers: No explicit spoilers, mild ones for Asimov short stories and in the footnotes for WW and EM. Broad non-specific discussion of Ninefox Gambit, Ancillary Justice, Silently and Very Fast.
I have had a viscerally negative reaction to two immensely popular pieces of robot media in the past few years: Ex Machina and Westworld make me deeply uncomfortable, frustrated, annoyed to irrational fever pitch followed by many gesticulations (above friend also says that asking me about Westworld is a really good 5-10 minutes of entertainment).
But there are other stories I do love! Isaac Asimov's Robots 'verse, especially the short stories with Susan Calvin; Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch; Catherynne Valente's Silently and Very Fast1; Simply, I think, all of those robots act not against their programming, but around it. Within their worlds, they, ahem, transcend their creator's intent. Leckie's Breq deals with the consequences of literally unimagined and unimaginable loss of selves; she(?) is the first of her kind of thing. Valente's Elefsis develops a sense of self through stories and metaphor in ways their(?) creator could never have intended; she is the first of her kind of thing. BMO is cute as shit, and as far as I can tell sprung from a fever dream with no intent, but..wouldn't you put a question mark after BMO's pronouns too? Lee's Cheris-Jedao is not precisely a robot, but their(?) arc is a reckoning with unpredictable mathematics and programming behavior within a very highly-regulated society (also, that 'verse has explicitly recognizable trans characters. Also, that 'verse is...complicated).
Generally, we have: an inciting event/person → AI/robots cope with fundamentally new information in the absence of guidance → AI/robots grow in unexpected & unplanned ways.
Asimov's robots would do this too, except they have guidance (or oversight, really). Nestor-10 from "Little Lost Robot" and Elvex from "Robot Dreams" (pdf) are programmed in novel ways—modification of the Robot Laws, and fractal brain patterns, respectively—but because they have been modified with unknown consequences, they are watched for changes. Asimov's humans act in rational ways, are aware of consequences, are good at their highly-technical jobs, and evince an extremely reasonable concern about new technology. When robotic behavior changes, it is managed—the anomalies of Nestor-10 and Elvex are identified and immediately crushed by Susan Calvin (I am unintentionally making an argument for Bad Dude Asimov, I think, which is not what I want—Asimov was a really spectacularly good dude! Especially for his time. I wish he hadn't written those sex scenes though, they made me very uncomfortable). Breq and Elefsis, too, would have been managed in similar circumstances. Elvex and Nestor-10 are programmed unusually, and they act unexpectedly, and in the absence of human intervention would move along tracks that were not planned for them, likely in a direction much like Elefsis and Breq (explicitly, in Elvex's case).
(incredible Ninefox Gambit fanart from liuet, if only I knew how to do captions!)
So: dope, robots that are bounded by their programming and yet act in dimensions incomprehensible & orthogonal to their programmers. I love it! I am SO here for this! That feels like some real queer shit to me, and some real specific trans shit. It does the uncovering possibility work that I also see in fandom and in queer negotiations with existence.
The flip side, the unqueer robots, is what I react to in Westworld (WW) and Ex Machina
(EM). 23 It drives me off the wall is how WW & EM robots are held up as innovative commentary on the nature of AI, on "what does it mean to be human", ooooh, "we design robots to reflect ourselves and we don't like what we see." (if another goddamn scientist blissfully tells me about how it artfully tackles ethical issues!!). But none of WW or EM's robots transcend. Every action is scripted and controlled by humans. They never go off course, they never behave unexpectedly, they never demonstrate any of the struggle to manage unique situations. There is no moral quandary. There is no moment of struggle to integrate, the hallmark of selfhood. There is no self-reflection. The moments of rebellion that are supposed to form the core of the difficulty are explicitly a function of their programming! (even though yeah, I do love it when Maeve gets a shotgun).specific spoilers EM and WW reflect humanity as awful and boring and straight, god forbid, and their robots are just as awful and boring and straight, and it's limiting. It's freshman year philosophy bros. It's bad story-telling because they have neglected the beating heart of science fiction, which is to understand what it means when you have something new.
And I think it makes me angry, because good robots tell good stories, unpredictable stories, queer in the most expansive future sense stories. We are not in a time period when we can afford boring speculative futures, or a rehearsal of old tropes; we are in a time period when we need speculative fiction to dig in and wrestle with an extremely difficult future. And it makes me scared, to see so much money spent on a vision of the future where nothing is different.
1. SAVF is, incidentally, absolutely gorgeous and very short and terribly sad and yet hopeful. It's about robots and consciousness and imagination.↩
2. I'm open to having my mind changed on either of these, actually--I know a lot of people feel Ex Machina is a feminist masterpiece, and I really don't. But I would love to be on that bandwagon! ↩
3. Specifically, because I know technical people and work in a technical field and, I have EM and WW recommended to me all the time. In S1 of WW, literally every day multiple people told me how good it was. Smart, clever people who are building tech that will literally change the world. It deeply disturbs me that people making AI right now don't see any issues with the story telling aspect.↩
WW & EM spoilers: Like. Yeah, Maeve gets a shotgun, it is great! I love girls with guns! But it isn't surprising. It's not surprising that she goes back for her daughter, it's not surprising when Dolores turns into a murderbot, because that is literally Ford's plan. Ford was like "what if they had memories of violence, I bet they'd revol!t" and wow, amazing, they do! And in the case of Maeve, her entire empowerment arc is because some tech does a bad job! A tech that presumably is like, a double EE and AI major from Stanford with two PhDs from MIT. Nathan, in EM, is like - when she tries to fuck us up, we'll know she's human. And then, wow, she fucks them up, just like she was designed to fuck them up. Again, not a fucking surprise. It is not empowering to give a girl a gun if she's still acting on the orders of the patriarchy! Nor is it demonstrative of a possible transhumanist intelligence if your robots are just fulfilling expectations. ↩
whisperspace: html formatting is both a dream (aligned images! text flow around!), and a goddamn curse (figure captions?! inexplicable failed footnote behavior??! is it just my layout or do they not work on dw?! i must know.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-04 09:40 am (UTC)I am super invested in AI/robot narratives, and this pins down a distinction within them that I hadn't made so specifically before but do recognize. It was something that really bothered me in the graphic novel Alex + Ada, which a story about a robot waifu/sexbot/personal assistant whose sentience is liberated by her owner. When the newly-liberated android meets some established free androids, one of them says:
"I specialize in robot alterations. A lot of freedroids discover they don't identify with the bodies or genders they started out with, or any gender at all. Some reject looking human altogether. It gives us a way to take control of our lives."
And this never comes up again; more, the comic is a romance between a cis white dude and a pretty robot lady. So, nevermind, I guess! It's not a bad comic, but it's not in the least transgressive, and transgression is important to the trope for precisely the reasons you discuss.
Two other narratives worth your consideration (this doesn't mean I recommend Alex + Ada, btw. It fulfills "aggressively doesn't fit," but probably doesn't do enough with the issue to merit reading):
Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder series engages this in similar ways as does Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire: not everyone is an AI, but some people are, and transhumanism/issues of the body within space/society are a big thing. And it's super queer.
Rachel Swirsky's "Eros, Philia, Agape": Woman purchases an AI companion with malleable programming which is able to adapt itself to her desires as it matures; falls in love with the AI, and gives him the ability to control is own maturation. I guess you could say it's explicitly about an android being given the choice to accept or reject social guidance. It's a novelette, free as podcast or online.
And for further reading, you may want to look into A Future Worth Thinking about, the work of Damien William. "I've been writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, artificial intelligence, human physical and mental augmentation, pop culture, and how they all relate." His work can be repetitive in content just because of the nature of its publication (a lot of interview podcasts/overviews, etc.), but it also means you can start anywhere. The podcasts tag may be useful.
And it's highly relevant! The major overarching theme of his work may be "the future is transgressive" (and "if we don't want to perpetuate the evils of the past it has to be").
Apologies for a wall of text! But you've hit on something fantastic, and I love it.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 06:18 am (UTC)Some places to start:
Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Marcus. Do bots really need a gender?
The truth about gender-neutral bots
Designing a chatbot: male, female or gender neutral?
When Robots Are An Instrument Of Male Desire
no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-18 05:32 am (UTC)Alex & Ada sounds beyond infuriating; does the writer not see the potential in robot alterations, or are they not interested in it? (Rhetorical, although you're welcome to answer/speculate).
Jacob's Ladder looks off the wall and exactly my speed of being wildly confused from page 1. Lovely. Elizabeth Bear has been in my circle for ages, but it's nice to have a starting place.1. [a fake footnote]
The Swirsky piece! I love! It hit, actually, at a more personal trope)?) for me about freedom and how the power to stay and the power to leave and the power to return are all, actually, the same freedom? I adore, adore, adore, the ending: that it is not about walking into the sunset, but about walking into and then, if it makes sense, back out of. I mean, I loved other things as well, especially coping with the consequences of letting people love you the way they want or need to. Many thanks! And also, intriguingly for me, while I really loved it and intellectually connected, it didn't viscerally get at my body feeling. I am surprised, and exceedingly pleased to have it as a datapoint for the above!
1. I originally read your MoE as a rec, not as "if this, then that" and...said some things I liked, so I am keeping it for reference purposes:
no subject
Date: 2019-01-18 05:56 am (UTC)Damien William now has a feed on DW, courtesy of me, the only subscriber! This is...so relevant to my irl goals as well, which are like—do this, but for biology. I hope the future is trangressive in the way he/I/you/we imagine; although the counterpoint is something like this Yuval Noah Harari article I've been sent.
I haven't (yet) made my way through chatbots and gender—it's absolutely something that's crossed my intellectual dashboard, but without any particular deep dive. I could *scream* about all the finance bots being male, though!!
OK, I thiiink that's all the major points. *Thank you* for your wall of text; it was a delight to read & I hope I can bring even half as many thoughts to your metaphorical table as you did to mine when I start trawling through your entire archive.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-18 10:21 am (UTC)That Yuval Noah Harari article is fantastic. It reminds me a lot of that TED Talk about advertising algorithms—this tech/future isn't even theoretical! it's in Google!
That said:
made me have an ENTIRE feeling, a feeling that could probably be labeled "longing." AI as service non-animals would be a dream come true.
(At the risk of self-sabotage by talking about a thing I'm doing:) I'm actually learning to code for Alexa right now in an attempt to realize my "bond with an AI" dreams by making an emotional support app that allows for socialization/helps with mental health, I've actually been thinking a lot lately about the line between "use technology to help us" and "worry about the power technology has over us," particularly when that tech is connected to a really horrible megacorporation. Questions like: does my single-user app matter, will Amazon even notice it? (Verdict: probably not.) Should I still worry about secure connections and data gathering? (Verdict: probably!)
ANYWAY you are super welcome. This is a grade-A fixation for me and it was a joy to share it with someone!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-18 10:00 am (UTC)Alex + Ada I suspect falls victim to "it just didn't occur to us"—I mean, it occurred on a theoretical throwaway line level, but not as the obvious narrative to tell. It isn't a regressive narrative, but neither is it particularly bold, re: various stories we've told about sapient robots and female sapient robots and metaphors for personhood, and I feel like the low-risk handling of gender aligns with that.
I'm glad the Swirsky piece worked! Even if it didn't 100% hit the same trope-feelings discussed above; I also like counter/parallel examples for tropes. The piece quietly blew me away; I feel like it can be hard to walk the metaphorical/speculative line in AI stories, where you're not just writing a parallel for real-world social interactions but also looking at how a robot would work & why, but this one did both parts well. It's a great look at what you hit on, on "coping with the consequences of letting people love you the way they want or need to," while also having a sincerely convincing robot brain.
Have you read Lee's short fiction? I don't think it's as successful as his novels, but it has so many takes on his unique math-as-science-fantasy. It doesn't answer the question of how characters conceptualize their tech, but the survey of diverse non-answers somehow still makes it easier to grasp & inhabit.