Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

AI civil rights and status

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SomeCanadianWeirdo:
Momo's apparent change in attitude towards Pintsize may simply be a case of her finally getting tired of giving him the benefit of the doubt, or he did something that went over the line as far as she was concerned.  AIs are presumably like people and sometimes cease to like others they initially were friendly towards. 

AIs did seem to have some rights even early in their appearances in the series.  Remember Deathbot 9000?  He apparently was allowed some freedom of movement given that he could come to Northhampton to confront Pintsize, and go someplace where he met Wil Wheaton(assuming Dora wasn't joking about that of course).

ASB84:

--- Quote from: ReindeerFlotilla on 25 Jan 2015, 12:26 ---The shift from property to people occurred sometime around the Singularity (which, BTW, Jeph has exactly right except that everyone knows it happened. When {if} a technological singularity happens, we probably won't notice anything special). Between then and strip 1900, there was an amendment to the Constitution (United States) granting AI equal rights. The logically consistent way to view the property/people conflict is to view them as  property until about strip 1780. But understand that an effort, probably a decade or two in the making, had been pushing for citizenship rights. The logically consistent way to view the change in Momo's personality is to realize that Jeph is a seat of the pants writer, and Momo changed as he found more uses for her. This is exactly analogous to the fact that semi-punk girl, smokes in the bar bathroom, Henners is fundamentally inconsistent with Hanners we got in the end. It's clear that they are the same character. There's hints that Hanners has been awake far too long when we first meet her. She was definitely supposed to be OCD. But she developed crippling hypochondria and extreme social awkwardness over time. Jeph has flatout stated that he was still working out her character.

Momo was a sight gag and joke about hentai. She developed into a fully realized character. Unlike Hanners, Jeph hasn't added a bridging explanation (Hanners was really high on brain meds) for the change in Momo's behavior, so it best to assume that those scenes didn't happen, or that those not consistent with her current personality involved an anthroPC that had the same chassis (and may have also been named Momo). Beyond that, try not to think to hard on it.

--- End quote ---

Makes sense. There's still something of a retcon in place though, since the strips that explain Pintsize's backstory show him entering a companionship contract with Marten, which would suggest that he was never property.

I think with any long-runner, canon isn't necessarily established by what comes first, but what's presented most often and consistently.

DSL:
Why does it need to be a retcon? Haven't you never had someone come into your life who turned out to be more than they seemed at first glance?

ReindeerFlotilla:
Not necessarily. I had thought that would require a retcon as well, but there's another option.

Technically, Pintsize would not have been a free individual at the time. BUT an AI rights foundation could have been responsible for the companion program. If they owned him, and used the corporations-are-people-my-friend principle to protect his legal rights, then the contract Marten entered could have been a limited responsibility and liability contract that gave Marten day to day guardianship while foundation continued to act as person in Pintsize's stead. That would explain the whole thing. I mean, nobody would use "limited assigned responsibility" in conversation when "owner" would do. (Though there's probably a whole rabbit hole of hurtful language and flesh-privilege. Let's not go there.)

So AI probably were owned by entities other than this putative foundation, like Station. But those AI weren't in the companion program.

Is it cold in here?:
There's a huge legal difference in that Momo is apparently a legal adult less than three years old.

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