What would AIs call themselves?

[Roudi]

Imagine a future where sentient robots have achieved the same mental capacities and consciousness as human beings, and after many tribulations, became recognized as people with legal stats nearly equal to humans. I say "nearly" because no future human society could ever see robots as a truly equal race without some sort of laws to ensure they remain so, laws which would never be necessary to apply to human beings but which are extremely pertinent to the development of robotic civilization.

Keep in mind that this is a future where cybernetics is very common, so the ability to replace parts and modify the body is not exclusive to robots - just slightly easier for them.

Now that you've got that image in your head, try to imagine what these beings would call themselves. Certainly not AIs - "Artificial" intelligence implies that they are somehow not real, not genuine, when it is clearly obvious that they are indeed real. I know "artificial" in this context tends to be synonymous with "inorganic" which is really the only difference between a robot and a human at this point. "Robot" is probably viewed as a loaded term: an assemply-line automated arm is a robot. Calling a sentient robot a "robot" is akin to using a racial slur. And droid is a trademarked term, so it's out of the running.

So what would such a race call themselves? I've been wracking my brain but I just can't seem to fathom. Credit in the finished product if I end up using your suggestion or something based off it.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

cyber/digital -> sentients/intelligence


living logistic/logic

 

[Tonguez]

Autonomen (Autonomous Entities) - has the connotations of autonomous = free (as opposed to the former servitude of Robots)

Bots - only amongst themselves, as a minority reclaiming the term

and is droid trademarked? what about Android?

Another option might be Mech (although that might be more a slur directed at over enhanced humans) 'Dizzy is a real Mech-head, have you seen his latest implant?'

Replicants?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't remember which one, but at least one of the great sci-fi writers used the term "sophont"- a thinking being- as the generic term for all intelligent life forms in his short stories and novels.

I can see AIs pushing for something universal like that.

 

[Arkhandus]

I don't remember which one, but at least one of the great sci-fi writers used the term "sophont"- a thinking being- as the generic term for all intelligent life forms in his short stories and novels.

I can see AIs pushing for something universal like that.

Isn't that the Traveler system's term for sentients?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I believe they used it as well, but it originated in the work of someone like Niven or Heinlein.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm highly skeptical of such a future. It's not that I find the notion of robots being granted civil rights implausible, but any society which had the technology to turn out Turing grade robots would have the technology to produce alot of things that would be so alien as to defy any present legal and moral conceptions.

Without even getting into trans-humans...

What do you do about conciousnesses that can nearly instantly replicate themselves? Suppose a robot turns out 50 or 50,000 copies of itself? Do they all get the civil right to vote? What about a hive mind inhabiting collectively hundreds of small bodies (say a weather survellance drone inhabiting dozens of solar powered gliders)? One vote or many? How do you count?

What do you do about an AI that is programmed to control a guided missile, but can within a limited framework pass a Turing test? Why would you need such a sophisticated AI on a machine designed to commit suicide? Well, for starters, so that you were certain to have a machine sophisticated enough that it couldn't be 'hijacked' and used by an enemy with any more ease than you could hijack the mind of a human pilot and turn it against its friends. But, does a machine designed for such a limited purpose need civil rights? And for that matter, why would a society capable of designing AI's build all of them to desire and want the independence that is a prerequisite for excercising human rights? Why would you give say a toaster (or some more sophisticated domestic servant) the built in desire to be rebellious? Wouldn't you program such a being to be satisfied with its purpose for being created? Wouldn't it be insanely cruel not to? And why in the world would you set out to replicate in a robot all the things we loathe and fear in ourselves - our violent anger, our self-centeredness, our hunter-gather instincts, our irrationality, our jealousy, our envy, our laziness and all the other negative traits we rightly deplore in our own behavior? Are any of those things needed for functionality? Wouldn't it be insanely cruel to bequeth such a legacy to an AI - even one we intended to be our peer, near peer, or even a intellectual superior? I think it is a vast failure of imagination to think that robots would have a basic personality structure so similar to humans that what we think of as 'human rights' would even apply, much less be necessary.

And, while it is arrogant and cruel to treat another human as property, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is arrogant and cruel to treat a robot as property. For one thing, why in the heck would a society build robots if it couldn't treat them as property? Isn't the point of building and buying something so it can be property? Do you intend to give the same civil rights to your car that you grant to yourself? Do you buy a car so that it can be cab and earn fares for itself, or do you buy it to be your car?

"Now that you've got that image in your head, try to imagine what these beings would call themselves."

I'm not convinced that the need to self-identify and label the group or tribe that you belong to would be very common among AI's. And, I'm extremely skeptical that created AI's would tend to self-identify in groups which were based on a likeness of form - the way humans tend to instinctively do. In other words, why would an AI feel like he was a part of a race? Why would even a super-human AI feel that he needed some name for himself collectively other than whatever was given to him?

"Calling a sentient robot a "robot" is akin to using a racial slur."

And again, why would a robot care? Would you build or buy a robot programmed to respond to racial slurs, or to have the sort of feelings and behaviors humans have when they feel they've been insulted? Why would a robot care? I believe you are confusing sentience with humanity. Being able to pass oneself off as human in a particular context in no way means you are human. Sentient or not, a robot would have less in common with us psychologically than a rabbit does (or at least, it need not have more in common with us).

I imagine that there would be many fine graduations in what AI/robots where called, depending on thier designed level of independence, thier intelligence relative to people (presumably genetically engineered people at this point), and thier body type/function.

I likewise imagine that any society that takes such a niave view of machine life as, "Lets make mechanical people and give them rights.", quickly goes extinct. My assumption though is that on the whole, people sophisticated enough to design and build such machines will do so responseably, and people that don't act responseably (for example, they build a machine that thinks it deserves to be treated like people and acts like an insulted person when it isn't) will be treated as highly dangerous criminals.

 

[Tonguez]

Sentient would work...

and Celembrim - you rock!

 

[Celebrim]

The problem with the terms 'sentient' and 'sophont' is that they don't actually answer the question. You wouldn't call robots sophonts to distinguish them from other sorts of sentient life, and robots wouldn't call themselves sophonts to do so either. I'm a sophont. You're a sophont. We are all sophonts here.

No, if robots didn't feel the need to distinguish themselves, then sure they might call themselves sophonts. I'm a sophont. You're a sophont. We are all sophonts here. But, then if they didn't feel the need to distinguish themselves, they'd probably be perfectly happy with 'sentient robot' or 'sentient machine' or whatever and they'd probably be perfectly happy with that shortened to robot or even machine.

There is no reason to imagine testiness or emotional sensitivity is a prerequisite for being intelligent.

 

[Roudi]

Good suggestions so far, folks.

I'm pretty impressed with the conclusions Celebrim was able to jump to based on so little information. I did specifically refer to certain legal inequities between robots and humans in the original post, and without giving away too much setting detail, let me just assure you that they deal with many of the issues (replication, unethical design, programming) that you bring up. As to why a future society would ever construct such machines, well, clearly you assume that constructing self-aware machines was the goal of society at one point, when it very well could have been far from the truth. Facts of the setting are that at some point, self-aware machines grew in number and were, with the help of sympathetic humans, able to achieve legal recognition as sentient beings (with certain strings attached). This is definitely not to say that all humans view robots as equals, and it is most certainly a fact that not all robots view humans as equals.

In any case, I'm not here to debate the logistics of the setting concept; I'm just looking for suggestions for a politically-correct term that robots would use to refer to themselves. So far the suggestions are good and I think I'm getting close to the term I need.