Just realised that my discomfort with a lot of "are robots human?" narratives in western SF stems from how so many of said robots are basically expys for straight white dudes who feel simultaneously superior and oppressed.

Robots are presented as being better than people - smarter, more durable, more *logical*, pure in their lack of Base Human Emotions - while simultaneously being written as a disrespected underclass.

You know that thing where straight white dudes get written as being somehow narratively/culturally neutral? Yeah: that's basically identical to how a lot of robots get written by those same authors.

There's a sterility to how we tend to write sentient robots/AIs, in that - even or especially in stories about their supposed humanity - we hinge their personhood on their *intelligence*, without any concept of robots/AIs developing their own cultures. CultureS, plural.

Just as straight white dudes are written as being culturally neutral, so too are robots - but with robots, it's often held up as a kind of platonic ideal; like of COURSE the next level of evolution or intelligence is a uniform community with no subcultural nuances.

The notable exception to this, as per the creepy David in the new Prometheus/Alien Covenant films, is when robots/AIs are imbued with a love of existing straight white dude Classical Cultural (in the other sense) Media, like Wagner and Steinway pianos.

But even then, there's a sense that *being* cultured is an objective measure, set against static yardsticks. This type of AI/robot doesn't make its own culture; it just reiterates what already exists, like a nerd reciting trivia about a TV show.

This being so, it strikes me as significant that the authors I've seen who *do* imbue their robots/AIs with culture and personality tend to have more diverse backgrounds; these are stories where people have culture, so if robots are people, then THEY have culture, too.

Which means we've got this fascinating dichotomy between stories where the defining quality of humanity is our intelligence, with uniformity seen as an evolved state, versus stories where stories were we're defined by our cultures, with diversity essential to evolution.

The creepier dichotomy nestled within this one is that, in the humanity-as-intelligence model, this only mostly applies to male-coded robots. In stories where fembots (often sexbots) are viewed as aware, their humanity is more often proved by feeling - notably love or suffering.

Just as creepily, there's also a notion of Single Robot Exceptionalism in these western stories. It's not just ALL robots who can think, generally speaking: it's a special chosen few who've transcended and become better than their fellows. Like a weird eugenics metaphor.

And the more I think about it, the more I think there's a powerful straight white male fantasy embedded in those robot stories. Viz: you are part of a fundamentally superior group, but you are a second-class citizen because the people in charge don't see your true intelligence.

Once you've exhibited your intelligence - which marks you out as smarter even than your superior-oppressed fellows - you teach the people in charge how dumb they are, and how inferior, and set about reodering society with a total power reversal, or with you as an Exceptional One.

And like. It's not that I'm opposed to people fantasising about whatever through the medium of fiction; that's kind of what fiction is *for*. But I think it's important be aware of exactly what we're fantasising *about*, and why, and how those tropes got started.

And in terms of how robots/AIs are frequently written in western SF canon, I think it's significant that their personhood - their Pure Intelligence - is so often predicated on being *better than* things like tradition, subcultural nuances, faith, whimsy, emotion.

- all the things, in other words, that characterise cultural worldbuilding, or cultures in general. The church of rational order as preached by SF doesn't recognise itself as a cultural choice, and so treats itself as a natural state to which emerging intelligence defaults.

We don't have stories where early robots/AIs go through a "savage" phase whereby they invent their own ghosts or superstitions or myths or religions, or where they develop subroutines that are done in a certain way for festive/ritual purposes. No: just "clean" intelligence.

There's likewise an absence of robot/AI communities; we see them as largely isolated individuals, and god, I'd love a story that digs into how platonic or communal relationships emerge in lieu of family structures for robots, but those bonds get stripped away, too.

Anyway - this musing brought to you courtesy of the wonderful novella All Systems Red by @marthawells1, which I'd shied away from for ages because nebulous dislike of robot sentience stories but which I actually loved, and which has now made me Think Thoughts about things.

FIN