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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I liked Ancillary Justice. The premise is fun once you know what the author is doing. The ship can't properly identify as a human and understand gender distinctions for the same reason the empire folks (or whatever they were called) couldn't understand the native culture of the swamp planet enough to anticipate the brewing shitshow there. And why the ship didn't initially understand the plot. That disinterested misunderstanding was a big theme in the book.

This strikes me as like saying "well, it has evil Jewish bankers in it because that's part of the premise". The premise was created by an author, and premises with some in-story backing can still be created in a contrived way for political reasons.

"The AI just happens to misunderstand gender in a way which just happens to let the story appeal to real world social justice advocates, but that's purely worldbuilding, and has nothing to do with actual social justice advocates" seems like an unlikely scenario. There's a long tradition of sci-fi using proof by fictional evidence to have aliens (or in this case AIs) come to the humans and say how from their objective alien viewpoint untainted by human biases, some difference between humans which humans care about just isn't very important. Even evil aliens or AIs often do this. Is the AI actually shown to be wrong, in a strong enough way that this is not what's happening?

The (bad colonizing meat-robot-creating) culture that has practically no gender is shown in a pretty unsympathetic light whereas the one with a concept of gender is shown in a more sympathetic light.

It's often villains who do the "look objectively at human society" thing. There are a number of variations: the villain's only motivated by base motives so he doesn't care about complex human distinctions; the villain's outside society so human distinctions don't matter; the villain's naive and can't be tricked by human sophistry surrounding distinctions because he doesn't understand it.

The question isn't really "is the no-gender AI evil" or "does not understanding gender have negative consequences", it's whether the narrative treats it as a deficiency which makes it less than human, as if it couldn't understand grief or it had no appreciation of poetry.

I would say that it's treated as a deficiency, but not a dehumanizing one. In fact, the AI is one of the most human characters in the story, despite it's initial attempts to be above such things.

The irony is that both hardcore SJ crowd and anti-SJs miss any such implications.

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