#i'm a robot who must program itself to interact with people like a human. i'm an AI or something

[smile-files]

someday i'll have to just come to terms with the fact that my brain deals with social stuff super weirdly and that the way i form relationships is fundamentally different from how everyone else does (and that this is all probably okay). today is not that day though

[joviantwelve]

WBW: how's personhood of robots work in xyzoul? clearly you've got Straight-Up People type robots like carmichael, but is there a spectrum from spambots to GPT-X type stuff to realistic human androids? how does the law handle murky in-between cases?

Great question!  I’ve been meaning to talk about this setting’s flavor of Robot.

But...personhood depends on your definition.

Legally, there’s not much “legal” left, as this type of dystopia is specifically ancap flavored, so the rich rule everything and dictate how these things work.  Machines are strictly corporate products.  To those that create them, there is no in between, because there was never a second option in the first place.

But we all know that’s a big fat lie.  Humans in the setting know that, too.  Anthropomorphism and all.  But the common layperson can’t do anything much about it...other than hack.

Metatextually, I'm trying to satirize the current PC/mobile landscape of locked OSes and planned obsolescence and unwanted updates and mandated subscriptions, etc.  As such, android OSes can be hacked, or jailbroken, or circumvented and unlocked some other way.

This is the key to “personhood” for an android itself.  Since they’re created for specific uses and specific users, their operating system doesn’t let them do anything “freely,” just what their registered owners order them to do.  Maybe one search for some movie times at a local theater is all you get in one day of activity.  So even though they have internet access and plenty of downtime, they can’t, like, go watch pregnant elsa spiderman youtube videos for fun or anything.  But if their OS is cracked, yeah, the world’s their oyster!  This ability to explore themself, plus their innate learning AI system, is what brings them close to humanlike development and behavior.

Not to say they can’t, like, realize that maybe there should be something more for them out there before any such hacking.  They just wouldn’t be able to properly verbalize it, or do anything about it, without exterior assistance first.  A bunch of weird feelings and nowhere to put them.  This is a lot of what it was like for Carmichael before meeting Azriel.

SO.  any robot in-universe that has both a learning AI and the ability to do anything it wants inside its own OS could theoretically self-actualize.  In terms of the specific “who,” that mostly comes down to androids and human-facing AI.  They’re the ones most likely to have such programming, since they’re created to interact with, get to know, and learn from humans, which helps them in turn become humanlike, perhaps yearning for something more.

Since this setting’s robots are corporate created for corporate (or rich individual) use, there are no androids for, like, industrial or common home use or anything--that’s what Machine machines are for (or what we would more typically call “robots”).  It’s only created to look and sound human if it would otherwise replace a human in some role.  Your fridge isn’t going to become sentient because your fridge doesn’t need a learning system inside it.  I know, it’s a tragedy.

(Not to say that exceptions can’t exist.  There are no doubt hobbyist communities coming up with some weird alien robot friends, but it’s a prohibitively expensive hobby in the setting. Few and far between.

Likewise, maybe there was a learning AI appliance line somewhere out there, but I’m sure this theoretical corporation has since gone out of business as a bizarre historical footnote, due to the huge money sink such a product line must have been.  Think Juicero.)