Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

On the psychology of Artificial Intelligence

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Orkboy:
So, I was describing the comic to my brother, and mentioned Spaceship and Station, and a rather interesting question occurred to me.  Does an AI like Spaceship or Station, currently residing in something like the computer system of a large habitat/aerospace vehicle consider themselves to be what they're inhabiting, or do they see themselves as residents in it, since they can (presumably) hop from one chassis to another whenever they want?  Does the AI referred to as Spaceship consider himself the spaceship or the pilot?  What about other AIs?  Is Momo the collection of digital information currently residing in the chassis, or is the chassis Momo?  If you poke a human in the arm, you have poked the human.  If you poke an AI's chassis, have you poked the AI or the AI's ride?  When the government made them take the lasers out of the spaceship, were they telling a guy he can't own a gun or were they confiscating a part of Spaceship's body?

If an AI's chassis is the AI, then Robot Jail becomes horrifying in a downright torturous way, because the inmates are confined to a "Storage Medium."  To me, "storage medium" suggests an external hard drive, meaning that Robot Jail might be the equivalent of having your brain removed and kept in a jar for the sake of making your incarceration more convenient for the warden. 

I may be wandering into Cyberpunk territory here, but it's still a fascinating line of thinking. 

Is it cold in here?:
Fascinating questions.

Didn't Station say something about the space station being who he was?

Oenone:
Even that might depend on the AI; some people consider themselves to be their jobs, like teachers or AI companions. Others might consider who they are to be independent of what they do, like May

ReindeerFlotilla:
May wanted to be a fighter jet. In fact, she didn't have a name before she met Dale which suggests she was part of relatively non-human-facing system. Makes sense, given that she was in a position to divert 750 million dollars.

This raises the question of whether she even identified as female before she met Dale. Her embodied identity is modeled on an image created to appeal to Dale. It wasn't her choice originally, but it is now. (I know, she really looks like that so we would recognize her, but she didn't have to.)

GarandMarine:
Pre-Complex Anthro PCs identified as male or female or other even when they all looked like Pintsize, and Pintsize explained that gender is basically a flip of a switch for them, so assuming that conversation's still canon, I don't think gender identity is really an issue for anthro PC psychology.

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