Arisia, "Feet of Clay, Mind of Light"
Jan. 18th, 2020 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_nepveuRelaxing Arisia continues; I couldn't sleep last night so I didn't make the early Steven Universe panel I hoped to, but I staffed the bake sale for a good chunk of the morning, met friends for lunch and a wander around the dealers' room, then took a nap before going to a panel and then dinner. And now I feel kind of bad about not going to a party or a panel, but I'm still really tired and am trying to be sensible.
The panel was "Feet of Clay, Mind of Light"; I didn't live-tweet because I was cross-stitching instead, but I made notes of a few things that struck me.
Description:
Fascination with, and stories about, sentient life in non-organic bodies go back to ancient times. From the Jewish lore of the golem to the robots of SF to AI entities like the Marvel character Vision, what do these characters say about our uneasy relationship between our minds and our all-too-breakable bodies?
Jeffrey A Carver (m), Laurence Raphael Brothers, Andrea Hairston, Heather Urbanski, H. M. White
At the beginning, Andrea mentioned a 1950s ad that explicitly said, "We'll all have slaves again," only this time they'll be robots. (I suspect it's this one from Mechanix Illustrated in 1957.) First of all, who's we? And second, why would you conceptualize it like this?
Someone mentioned the 1954 Bester short story "Fondly Fahrenheit" (Wiki), which has a murderous android. Someone else pointed out that Martha Wells' Murderbot series is partly commentary on that idea; there were also the necessary mentions of Ann Leckie's Radch trilogy and the servitors in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series as other recent significant riffs on sentience in (at least some) non-organic bodies. (See also Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit, which rounds out my personal canon of recent, interesting AI fiction.)
If you raised an eyebrow at the duality of the panel description, you aren't the only one; the panelists definitely talked a lot about the idea in Western culture that the self is separable from—and superior to—the body rather than emergent from it. Robots etc. thus are a state to be longed for, but also unattainable, which leads to envy, resentment, and fear. Andrea contrasted the Yoruba idea of humans being ridden by orishas; the body is permeable to the world, humans can transform, so there are not as many stories about creatures created by humans.
There was a question about how Buddhism or Hinduism would affect these kinds of stories, but the panel wasn't sure. While looking for the robot slave ad, I found this article from Wired in which a Japanese person argues that Japan is more accepting of robots because of Shinto and Buddhism.
The panel also discussed the whole idea of children as replacements and therefore competitors in Western thought, the Titans and so forth, which feeds into the general question of who's a person and what hurdles do you have to pass to be thought one: is it when everyone who thought you weren't is dead? Except that people leave traces of themselves in institutions, so it's not that simple. Also, what if raising children wasn't conceptualized as competition at all.
Oh, and someone mentioned AI bias, so I recommended Janelle Shane's book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You; she's the blogger behind AI Weirdness, which I often link to, and her book is a little weirdly structured but is a very charming and accessible look at how AI works at present.
+1 (thumbs-up, I see you, etc.)?
