Robots vs. Fairies by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

Author:Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe [Parisien, Dominik & Wolfe, Navah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TEAM ROBOT

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BY MADELINE ASHBY

I love robots. I wrote a whole trilogy about them. Probably it has to do with my dad showing me Blade Runner when I was in the third grade. But as someone raised Catholic and who attended a Jesuit university, the question of belief in my fellow human beings has always fascinated me. To me, there’s no difference between believing in the essential dignity of an organic human and believing in the essential dignity of a synthetic human. Besides, how do you even know that the humans who surround you are actually humans? I don’t mean that they might be robots, but hey, they might be serial killers, or racists, or misogynists, or people who otherwise don’t really see you as human. How do you know that your fellow humans see you as a fellow human? What is your guarantee? If it’s just that you happen to share an organic body, then you’re screwed. That’s no basis upon which to build a relationship of trust or affirmation. Plenty of our fellow organic humans have no problem hurting other humans. Your odds are actually better with a robot that has some form of “human detection” built in—provided that the biases of the programmer have been accounted for, in some way.

What I’m saying is that assuming the humanity—the worth, the potential, the capacity for all things gentle and joyous—in a robot is an act of faith. I think that humans engage in that act of faith with each other all the time. The social contract is founded on little more than goodwill. And I think that no matter what you believe, whether it’s in faeries or the existence of a soul or the possibility of a better future, you call on that same faith.

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