good robots are queer robots, and other reasons i dislike westworld

[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; Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire ok that one isn't *quite* robots but it kiiiind of is, depends on how you feel about calendars and math really; Adventure Time (look at that face!).

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.

<sup>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.)</sup>

Comments

[hebethen]

Nothing substantive to say in response, but I appreciated reading this, so thanks for articulating this so nicely!

[dragonlady7]

I had never really thought about this but I feel this way too, and so books about robots are always so hit or miss with me, and that's absolutely why!! OMG. well said!!!

I... hesitate slightly because I feel like recs for this series have been all over the dang place and so maybe you're avoiding it on purpose, but... Murderbot? Is possibly the queerest robot ever? Explicitly? It refuses to use gendered pronouns and at one point during a configuration change is offered sex-related organs and emphatically turns them down.
Technically a cyborg, I suppose.

[glorious_spoon]

I'm not familiar with Westworld, but this is really interesting commentary!

Have you read 'A Closed and Common Orbit' (it's a sequel to 'The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet' and probably wouldn't make much sense without having read that, but the AI character is much more prominent in the second book)? If so, I'd love to know what you thought of the author's handling of the trope--if not, it seems like something that might be up your alley.

[prettyarbitrary]

This is good good stuff. I feel much the same about robots. There's something unique about them that lets them serve both as mirrors to humanity, and also as kind of our conceptual descendants/creations.

I don't think we can ever count on TV for really revolutionary speculative fiction stories, though. It's too much of an Industry. Too much money being poured into something with too many rich people who have the veto over it.

It's not like book publishing doesn't involve a lot of work, but 1: a lot more diversity in the staff there, 2: we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, but not millions and these days 3: a lot more options in terms of indie publishing and small publishing houses that are willing--or specifically exist to--cater to audiences outside mainstream.

[pangodillo]

This. Is such a fucking cool essay. I don't have anything to add but I'll be looking into some of the works you cited--particularly Valente's, as I've read (most of) her Fairyland series and loved it and haven't gotten to anything else of hers yet or to 3/5s of Fairyland either whoops. & I'll be thinking of this as I look at probably every robot story I read in the future.

[juushika]

(Normally I comment on new/strange journals with an explanation of how I found them, but the honest truth is that between Yuletide & the Tumblr migration I have about 23048232 tabs open and I can't remember how I got to any of them, so: Hi, stranger! I have no idea how I found you!)


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.

So I'm Slow-As Molasses

[jesse_the_k]

in catching up to comments, and simultaneously proving that DW is a conversation, not a stream.

Don't know if you have notifications on--if not, see my new comment up thread re: the C21 Battlestar Galactic TV reboot, where the robots/cylons become gods.

I really enjoyed this essay, and I'm stumbling my way to a distinction between the robot/AI and genetic manipulation tropes. I think the former puts us humans as gods: creating a new race in our image. The latter, because it hews closer to our germline and requires coloring within the general lines of our phenotype, is also about being better parents?

Also, HTML solidarity: I've never got footnotes to work correctly in whatever style I've used---I know my syntax is correct, so I've just done it and moved on.

Also also, you must read AUTONOMOUS right now because it's about trans robots!