Internet laughs after Men’s Rights Activists discover that Amazon’s Alexa is a feminist

@Moggie

Unlike most other service droids, I suspect that self-service checkouts genuinely won’t go to Silicon Heaven (unlike all the little calculators…)

And actually a toasted tea cake would be most welcome, thank you!

@Pie

It ain’t that much of a jump, that’s the problem. What’s the difference between a [hypothetical] fully sapient being capable of feeling and thinking and… us ? Save for some [hypothetical] variations in cognitive capabilities, pretty much nothing. It’s down to the materials used. Silicon machines, meat machines, same difference.

Sure, robots don’t have souls. Neither do we. Human consciousness is literally the ghost in the machine. Create a machine with a brain that functions similarly to ours, that same ghost will be present.

Lemme put it this way : we believe this hypothetical AI would be “less” than us… because we still believe in dualism, the idea that we’re somehow “more” than we are. We’re not.

As for my birth circumstances, they don’t make any difference, that’s the point. But they do force me to explore perspective : there’s no difference between a “natural” human and me, and since there’s also no difference between that hypothetical AI and me… well.

That’s why I’m glad this is still all science-fiction. We shouldn’t get that sort of tech. Not because it is fundamentally wrong somehow, or because we’d be “playing God” or whatever… nah, because we just aren’t ready for that kind of responsibility. Shit, Christians call me an abomination, even though there’s literally no difference between them and me. Imagine how they’d treat a being with actual (however superficial) differences.

@SFHC

*Railroad secret hi-five*

@Sinkable John

It ain’t that much of a jump, that’s the problem.

I guess at this point I should draw the conclusion that I’m not explaining myself.

My problem with Humans is not that it asks the question, should human-equivalent AI be treated as human. My problem with Humans is that it anthropomorphises AI. It purports to be a story about AI and the whole what-measure-is-a-human thing, but all they give is a standard slavery story, which may as well be about humans enslaving other humans and debating whether people with funny skin colours are really people.

It is the exact equivalent of a bajillion other scifi stories purporting to give us space aliens but actually just giving us humans with rubber forehead prosthetics.

NTTIAWWT, of course, but in the same way one shouldn’t point to star trek as a good example of how relations with an extraterrestrial intelligence would go, one shouldn’t point to Humans and say that it is a good example of how relations with artificial intelligence would go.

Because it isn’t a story about artificial intelligence. It just claims to be one.

On this hand, fuck self checkout lanes.They’re so demanding and finicky. Everything has to go perfectly according to the machine’s plan or she (I mean, usually) drones on about unexpected items. And like half of em don’t take cash for no reason. Or are just broken, period. Also, seconding @Moggie on the economics of it. At least where I live, this very disproportionately affects young women of color. Who really don’t need to be replaced by an, as yet, demonstrably inferior worker that requires humans around to clean up its frequent messes anyway

On the other, social anxieties (not in the same ballpark as @SFHC) lead me down self serve more often than not, so I’m glad they exist. When shopping at the job, I go down a normal lane, cos I know the cashiers. At my local store fulla strangers, that’s a harder sell

When I saw the words “scary fridge”, I immediately thought of the “Toys in the Attic” episode of Cowboy Bebop. So that’s good, because I needed cheering up.

@Axe

That’ll happen when you try to make a foolproof machine. You make a nagging paranoid one instead.

DRM, anyone ?

@Pie

I have never disputed that. The problem comes with assuming that said AI are going to be human-like intelligences, presumably like you or I (hello, fellow meatbags), and will have the same hopes, dreams, goals, desires or even problems that we do.

Oh they’ll definitely have the same old problem most of humanity’s had forever. That their hopes, dreams, goals and desires won’t matter to whoever’s making the decisions.

I’m not assuming those hopes, dreams, goals and desires will be the same – I’m just sayin’, they aren’t necessarily gonna include “being a glorified sextoy for some meatbag”. But you can bet we’re still gonna treat ’em like they are.

That’s the problem with creating advanced thinking devices for menial or sexual purposes. Or, right now, creating advanced thinking devices at all – there’s so many variables and so many new ethical concepts that are gonna arise at once, a world where idiots still wanna debate which meatbag is human and which is subhuman is certainly not ready for that.

As an aside, some might argue that an AI created by humans is likely to share of a lot of human traits by design, but I’m not gonna go there ’cause it’s a whole other can of worms and I have strictly no idea what to predict here. Scildfreja could help, but the last time I’ve seen her was… ehh, I hope she’s not, like, upset about that time when she said something a bit stupid about YA novels ? You can come out now, Fluttershy is still best pony 😮

but they won’t, can’t, inform our future interactions with aliens or AI.

They do, if only in how we would act – we’re the predictable factor. Which really is what matters because it’s what we need to grow the fuck up about. Need to get it into our thick skulls that we ain’t special on account of being conscious, and that the very concept of consciousness can go places we can’t even imagine – places that aren’t us, or like us. But places that still deserve the same respect we like to pretend we give each other, ’cause otherwise we might as well also deny our own humanity.

So, in a nutshell, yeah, I agree that those stories aren’t about AIs or aliens. They’re about us – and that’s precisely what I think is important.

Also I’m not sure why I switched into full debate gear like that, ’cause really I originally just wanted to make a point about dualism and how it’s harmful. Stupid fucking christian the other day must’ve pissed me off more than I realized.

If they look like people, and they act like people, and they’re fully sapient like people… How are they not people?

*waves tiny Railroad flag* *wrong synths, oh well*

Anyone else think that was adorkable as fuck? Just me? Oh well.

(I should get back into my FO4 game someday)

@Sinkable

That’ll happen when you try to make a foolproof machine. You make a nagging paranoid one instead.

Or you end up with Marvin. (from hhgttg)

These stories always make me want to write bad dystopian fic about the female sexbot uprising.

@Ktoryx

Because it is comfortable and expected for a compliant servant to be female. The unconscious assumption there is so glaring I can’t believe people don’t make a bigger deal about it. It goes almost completely unquestioned, its just normal that if AI is servile it’s a perky, helpful young woman’s voice. Literally the only male computer I can think of is Hal, and he is weirdly the only one who isn’t a compliant slave.

If you ask me, its a great example of an unconscious bias sneaking out into the open, unexamined.

Speaking of bias, there is also confirmation bias. You ignore the male-voiced A.I. that servile, like J.A.R.V.I.S. from the MCU or the Yes Man from Fallout New Vegas, along with female-voiced A.I. that are anything but servile, like GladOS from Portal or Shodan from System Shock.

This is why nobody takes feminist media critics seriously. For them, a cigar is NEVER a cigar. It is a “phallic manifestation of the patriarchy” or some crap like that.

@Eric Cartman:
…but sometimes a cigar is a penis.

GlaDOS and SHODAN are both recognisable as “Crazy Women”*, a traditional misogynist archetype that’s been around since ancient Greek times at least. They were designed to serve people, snapped, and then killed everyone. A central part of both of them, and of the archetype, is that they lack self-control. (GlaDOS even has three male-voiced little things controlling her, and as they’re removed she gets progressively wilder.)

On the other hand, male-voiced evil AIs like HAL or John Henry Eden are usually portrayed as entirely in control of themselves. They do evil because they chose to do so.

See? Even in AIs, our media distinguishes between genders, often to the detriment of women.

There you go. Now, if you don’t mind, would you kindly fuck off back to the comments section of a Sargon of Akkad video?

— — —

*Please excuse the ableist slur. I wasn’t sure how to phrase the archetype without it.

@dslucia

I feel like claiming robots very definitely won’t be like humans, at this point, is like claiming they will be indistinguishable from humans.

Something could be both very definitely not a human and yet still indistinguishable from a human. See also: mention above of current turing contests and chatbots, things which are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from people whilst clearly not being people.

@weirdwoodtreehugger

I think the fact that the show is called Humans is a pretty big indication that it’s about humans and their tendency to other.

If you wanted something more speculative, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with having a preference but I’m not seeing how the show was claiming to be that?

It was brought up as an example of sexbots-gone-bad, and I pointed out why I thought it was a poor example of such, and offered an alternative. That’s all.

Now I feel like I need to find some examples of good female AIs.

FWIW, in the initial drafts of “2001” HAL was a female computer called Athena.

@EJ:

GlaDOS and SHODAN are both recognisable as “Crazy Women”*, a traditional misogynist archetype that’s been around since ancient Greek times at least.

Indeed, we owe our word “hysteria” to the Greeks — “hyster” means “womb”.