By Aliette de Bodard
I wrote my first original AI by accident.
Before that, I’d made a few clumsy attempts to merge my writing and my day job (as a computer programmer specialising in machine learning, one of the foundational techniques of programming AIs). My AIs were, for the most part, derivative and unconvincing: vague, unformed ideas of programs giving birth to one another, of parallel consciousnesses I couldn’t properly describe or make into characters that felt real.
Then I wrote a story called “The Shipmaker” (later published in Interzone), about a maker of spaceships who met the woman incubating the organic intelligence meant to be a ship’s brain. I wrote it about motherhood and pregnancy and loss – and the AI in it was dead, or more accurately stillborn, never breathing or animating any circuits. Continue reading
Would a true artificial intelligence, a sapient artificial lifeform, have a gender identity? Ask this of almost anyone and, regardless of their politics or background, they’ll give a firm “no”. Why should an AI have a gender at all? Surely, it’s regressive to suggest such a thing. To some, it goes against the biological purpose of gender.
The science fiction genre digs its allegories. Scratch the surface of any piece of literature, movie, or TV show that features alien races, advanced or mutant humans, robots, androids, or other forms of technology-based intelligence, and you will find a parallel or three to real-world marginalisation, oppression, and bigotry. SF writers love to create characters and entities that stand in for ‘the Other’ and craft scenarios that allow them to explore hatred and hierarchical attitudes a step or two removed from reality. As a speculative literary device, allegory has the power to open minds and change culture if done well. However, narratives that use robots and androids to represent the Other often don’t interrogate the assumptions about humanity at their core because they fail to answer one question: Why are so many androids white?
