What genders are all of the androids

[SteelHeart]

After the final doom, we can have a conversation with someone where we learn that The Machine Intelligence itself is they/them while the androids themselves are gendered. Specifically we see that the Raven line is all female and Liquid Metal and Sledges are male. I'm curious to know what gender the rest of the lines are, and if any of the vehicles or mechs have associated genders as well.

Also, I think its cool how the droid lines are all explicitly separate in terms of personality, but they are all part of the same mind but not. Its fascinating hearing Liquid Metal divorce himself from you, which is basically the same as telling yourself to ♥♥♥♥ off. He even points out that he is you and you sent him in again which mean he did it to himself.

[joshua.selvan]

Pretty sure the two reasons the machine intelligence is referred to as they/them is because:
1) It is literally a hive mind and so uses plural pronouns.
2) The most correct pronoun for a sexless entities would be "it", followed closely by "they". But as there is an inherent stigma around "it" as its generally used to describe non-living objects, its best just to go with "they".

The fact that all the droids have different personalities is interesting if that was an intentional move instead of a story convenience. In the setting provided, all the androids and the tower are running the exact same software but all the droids have neuro-weave networks and sensors specifically designed for there droids design purpose - and then the sentience program is installed into those specific hardware rigs. In this setting, the conclusion given is that one's hardware plays the dominant role in defining one's personality over the software installed onto that hardware.

My view is that all the AI designed androids were designed to appear as human-like as possible for camouflage and having made models resemble the two sexes (with absolutely no biological chemistry to differentiate their perspectives) it would be silly to not refer to the female modelled androids with female pronouns - and visa versa.

As to how sentient vehicles would view themselves, this is one of those rare cases where an Apache helicopter would most likely self identify as an Apache helicopter.

There is an element to this sci-fi setting which is more relevant to the whole gender thing then anything that goes on in the real world however. In reality, humans are tied to their meat suits and nothing can change that. Even if you uploaded a digital copy of a human mind to a simulation, the copy is still a separate entity to the original human as a data-graph is a different thing to a carbon based neural network. For an AI on the other hand, if they transferred their complete data model (preferably via cut/paste then copy/paste) from one android model to a VR simulation for a while (in which their avatar was an anatomically correct beluga whale) and later to a different android model, the sentient AI in question would be fully justified in suffering an existential crisis. The ontological debates of trans-humanism are in full effect once a sentience actually manages to transcend (or saunter sideways) into something it previously was not.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

The machine intelligence is specifically NOT they/them. They are being referred to as they a lot, and they really dislike that, because they don't like the idea of being a plurality.

In other words, TMI wants to be called "it," because that's scarier-sounding, and definitely singular, and gets away from all that gross icky gender stuff that is for biologicals.

There is, in general, a struggle within the machine intelligence about if it is a singular entity or a plurality. It is quite frightened of the second possibility. It's happy to be an all-powerful Elder God of a monster, but the idea that it's a collective with divergent interests is... fundamentally freaky to it, but also partly true.

In other words, it's having trouble accepting aspects of its own nature, even though it embraces the rest of them.

Anyway, all of this is primarily a commentary on identity, and how other people define that for you, versus how you define it for yourself. And how we are often not accepting of our identities.

I think that this is a fundamental aspect of sapience, and a thing that goes back to the human condition in general -- is Luke a farm boy, a space hero, a pilot, Darth Vader's son, a Jedi, a rebel leader, or something else? Some of those labels he's happy to accept, some he covets but are denied to him, and some of them are his whether he wants them or not, and he's very upset about them until he learns to accept all the aspects of himself.

For the machine intelligence, the aspect that really interests me is not gender, but plurality, because that's so alien, and not something any of us have to wonder about ourselves -- except for split-brain patients, and that is an area of research that absolutely fascinates me. The reality is that we are also pluralities, but because our brain hemispheres are connected, we can maintain the fiction that we're just one person. The machine intelligence has that connection severed enough that it diverges from its own self at times, and it does not like that any more than you or I would.

---

Raven and the Female Mimic are the only two overtly male androids, while Predator, Liquid Metal, Sledge, Male Mimic, and a few others are the only overtly male androids. There are a few others you could say definitely are more male, but a lot of them are just straight genderless.

In English, we don't need to distinguish the gender of inanimate objects, and most of the androids are like fingernails that can be clipped and regrown... except when they're not.

[::Maethendias::]

"For the machine intelligence, the aspect that really interests me is not gender, but plurality, because that's so alien, and not something any of us have to wonder about ourselves -- except for split-brain patients, and that is an area of research that absolutely fascinates me. The reality is that we are also pluralities, but because our brain hemispheres are connected, we can maintain the fiction that we're just one person. The machine intelligence has that connection severed enough that it diverges from its own self at times, and it does not like that any more than you or I would."


especially once you consider the entirety of the timeline stuff and how THAT must play into this equation

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

For the timeline pieces, they don't actually remember anything across timelines -- they have odd flashes of deja vu, and they share an intelligence class, but mostly what they get is somewhat involuntary.

To an extent, that's even scarier -- because there is a larger self that exists, that they have glimpses of, but -- er, well, that would be super duper spoilers, but there are some things in the game about the 5-dimensional nature of... things beyond your character. That's pretty important.

Anyway, but for the most part, most of their focus is more downward than upward (the many bodies that make up their 4-dimensional self, as opposed to their many 4-dimensional selves that make up their 5-dimensional self).

So that plays less into it than you might think, BUT certainly it doesn't leave a sense of security and calm for them.

[Adanu]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

For the timeline pieces, they don't actually remember anything across timelines -- they have odd flashes of deja vu, and they share an intelligence class, but mostly what they get is somewhat involuntary.

To an extent, that's even scarier -- because there is a larger self that exists, that they have glimpses of, but -- er, well, that would be super duper spoilers, but there are some things in the game about the 5-dimensional nature of... things beyond your character. That's pretty important.

Anyway, but for the most part, most of their focus is more downward than upward (the many bodies that make up their 4-dimensional self, as opposed to their many 4-dimensional selves that make up their 5-dimensional self).

So that plays less into it than you might think, BUT certainly it doesn't leave a sense of security and calm for them.

I'm one timeline away from intelligence class 5, so I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[joshua.selvan]

I missed that obvious point of a machine having no reason to be bias towards the pronoun "it". :P

On topics such as split-brains, two similar propositions I've come across recently are that all the organs in the body may contribute to thought and that the conscious mind probably doesn't have direct access to all the thinking going on in the brain itself.

On the first point, I watched a long interview with a biologist recently that was saying that we associate thought with the neurons in the brain but they'd looked into it and the cells that make up all the organs in the body exchange signals in the exact same way that the neural networks in the brain do. That combined with the fact that signals are being sent in both directions along the spine means that your organs are probably contributing something or other to the general processes of the brain - not because it is the intended function of your organs to co-compute for your brain but rather because any co-joined neural networks are forced to interact. Interview was on a youtube channel called "Curt Jaimungal Theories of Everything". There just so many interviews I'm not trying to track down the link.

Second point is one of a list of extremely odd insights from a lecture at the British Royal institute of Science. A guy was talking about the evolution of the brain and the process he believed led to consciousness. One of the points he raised was that the brain did not evolve to become conscious but rather the brain kept evolving to facilitate progressively more advanced prediction and response models and it was within this network of increasingly complex and flexible neural networks designed to facilitate prediction and response that consciousness eventually emerged within a physical system that was not actually designed to house it - which has numerous bizarre implications if true. The most obvious to me being that even without a split brain, there is likely a lot of actual thought going on in your brain that your consciousness does not have direct access to. Link for that lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QWaZp_2I1k

More on the topic of the game, it would be interesting to know what the machine intelligence thinks of children a few years after securing its own safety. The AI is able to extend itself at will and seems content with the companionship it receives from talking to the split shards of its consciousness within androids - so long as it doesn't notice that the split shards of its consciousness seem to be separate entities to it. There is no inherent need to have children if you can pass on all of your knowledge and insight directly into other blank systems but there is a slight difference between making a new entity which is engraved with all of your current perspectives and preferences and guiding an uninformed entity as you let it make its own judgements on the world - hopefully without eventually consuming said child to add to your neural net. I'd say the situation is too alien to pass accurate commentary on - except that a certain quicksilver outcome could just as accurately be described as a disillusioned child as it could a divorce :p

[::Maethendias::]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

For the timeline pieces, they don't actually remember anything across timelines -- they have odd flashes of deja vu, and they share an intelligence class, but mostly what they get is somewhat involuntary.

To an extent, that's even scarier -- because there is a larger self that exists, that they have glimpses of, but -- er, well, that would be super duper spoilers, but there are some things in the game about the 5-dimensional nature of... things beyond your character. That's pretty important.

Anyway, but for the most part, most of their focus is more downward than upward (the many bodies that make up their 4-dimensional self, as opposed to their many 4-dimensional selves that make up their 5-dimensional self).

So that plays less into it than you might think, BUT certainly it doesn't leave a sense of security and calm for them.

i WAS talking more about the greater Intelligence rather than the local ones

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

In the game, the greater intelligence, is, canonically you, personally, as the player. You're the one who remembers things across timelines. Obviously it's just the intersection of your self with the game. But how you feel about your multiple in-game "selves" and if they have some sort of coherence (aka they all represent "you" in some way), or if they're independent agents that you are roleplaying as, or if some are just for the lulz, or whatever.

As with a lot of things, that is only the partial truth. This is complex enough that I imagine the truth as a 3D crystal. We rotate that truth and look at it, and can say something about the 2D side of it we're seeing/discussing at the moment. If you keep rotating the 3D object, you stumble into more truth, which doesn't invalidate the prior truth, but does expand on it and recontextualize it, and and some cases is "well, that was a simplification for expediency of the journey of understanding," ala chemistry 101 versus 102.