My favorite AIs are probably the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. They’re not a particularly novel or complex portrayal of AI, but it’s cute watching AIs discuss concepts in philosophy of mind despite being essentially children.
For the first part of the conversation that included the definition of android and the innate values imbued by being born vs. being made, I can’t help but mention Fantasy Flight Games’ Android Universe. It’s the setting IP they put the latest version of Netrunner in. It started with a board game called “Android” and they’ve since used it in a number of board games, novels, and a world bible. As the name implies, the line between androids and “natural” humans is a main theme. One corporation in the setting, Haas-Bioroid, creates humanoid, Asimov-like robots and AIs from human brain scans. They range from Westworld-esque (ie: indistinguishable from humans) to canine in form with no attempt to hide their robot-ness. Their main competitor, Jinteki, creates clones. Most are identical to humans, although they do have lines that vary, including cyborg workers design for labor in space and a group of psychics. Because Android is relatively optimistic cyberpunk world, they had a storyline set in India where the populace voted to give clone full human rights. We never saw the aftermath of it, but it’s interesting to think about what would cause a population of accept that point of view. It’s world full of interesting vignettes about these concerns, from rogue, unchained robots to Lovecraftian AI to clones forming their own family units.
Also Netrunner is great and you should play it.
Ironically, a lot of the other examples I could think of when it comes to minds that work differently than ours come from fantasy, not sci-fi. Most recently I read The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. (READ IT. It’s the best series of books I’ve read in a long time. All 3 books won the Nebula, and the first 2 won the Hugo. They deserve it.) In it there are beings called Stone Eaters. Without getting into spoilers, they are human-like in appearance, except they are made of stone. However, there is one main difference in their existence that separates them from humans and makes them seem rather alien: they think in term of geological timelines rather than human ones. Because of this they CAN communicate with humans, it’s just often difficult, riddle-like, or just not worth the effort. You get the real impression that lifetimes of that scale fundamentally change how they view the world.
So one of my favourite childish thoughts coming back round things is my first reaction to the definition they start with here. “Humans are born and androids are made.”
So when we talk about our favourite androids in fiction, what’s on the table? As a kid, my view was that this definition gives us the option to discuss anything as our favourite android. It’s fictions, everything is constructed. The entire line between the people we meet and the android we would interact with is that the former were not constructed, not designed precisely to be exactly what they are to us.
In my teens I looked back on this as a childish nonsense, trying to reject the question or definition. And then, as I grew out of that, I’ve started to circle back. What are the characters you meet in fiction (especially when we now think of high fidelity gaming experiences which so easily evoke human performances or advanced parsers that go well beyond Dr Sbaitso) if not primitive androids? Even just written on the page, you are getting to know a constructed performance.
Clearly the galaxy brain extension of this: what are we to ourselves if not our own creations? We are the product of our own crafting of a self into what we have become today. We make ourselves so are we all androids to ourselves by this definition?
This discussion about the collapse of android binaries unexpectedly brought NieR: Automata back into my mind. While I very much enjoyed that game, I thought its treatment of philosophical concepts spread themselves a bit thin and often repeated themselves unnecessarily. As this podcast continued, the more I started to realize just how many binaries that game was purposely juxtaposing or collapsing. Almost every combination of android/robot/AI concepts discussed in this conversation had a direct manifestation in that game, alongside some interesting and meaningful commentary.
This realization has made me want to go back through that game, soaking in all of the details that I previously thought were boring, repetitive, or irrelevant.
My favourite android is Murderbot from Martha Wells All Systems Red. The main character is a bio-synthetic security bot who broke their governor to watch bad tv. It’s great, short novella.
I also recommend FFG’s android series, the world book is great and Netrunner is still the best game out there(and you can play as a rogue robot or as an AI who wants to end the world)
Robo from Chrono Trigger complete with kinda-Never Gonna Give You Up theme music. But seriously, his combos were some of my favorites. His healing move was extremely useful.
The Galaxy S7 Active has great battery life and is stupid durable, which is great because my line of work in field biology has even led me to accidentally destroy Nokia units before. Just wish you could jailbreak it to stock Android a bit easi-
oh, wrong kind of Android, you say?
all my other favorites have been mentioned already so let me namedrop an honorable mention, the Takeshi Koike-animated psychic murderbot from the second episode of Cyber City OEDO '808
So I come back to this tread with two more. Giglo Joe from A.I. is kinda cool. I also start to think about where do we draw the line here on inanimate objects that are still given a human voice like Hermes from Kino’s Journey.
These books are really great at showing just how different life forms can be. Without spoiling too much, there’s this one line that comes up a couple of times in the book: “Hello, little enemy.” that forshadows a tried and true fantasy/sci-fi trope in an interesting way. The Living Planet Trope
I love the Stone Eaters so much. They just felt so distinctly alien. The way the communicate and escentially have to code-switch to be even remotely understood was so inspired to me!Their origin story, along with the revelation of why they look the way they do, dovetails really nicely into the trilogys core themes of systemic oppression, how it comes to be and gets reinforced and twisted.
I suppose he’s not technically an android but he is an artificial human and his storyline follows typical android tropes (including being a rip-off of Blade Runner). Anyway my favorite android is Vivi the adorable Black Mage from Final Fantasy IX! Vivi is created by Kuja as a prototype Black Mage, an army of artificial magical soldiers who conquer the world. Vivi is the first one to be sentient, and questions his existence along with what his purpose is, and finally what he can do with his limited time left.
Also Vivi is the best Final Fantasy character by about a mile.
I always have to push down my pedantry when these topics come up, with how Androids are specifically male humanoid robots due to the Andr- prefix. But… colloquial definitions change and i’ve just got to deal with it.
My favorite artificial human is The Android in Dark Matter. Zoie Palmer did a phenomenal job portraying her, her mannerisms and expressions and movements are all incredible. Easily my favorite character on that show, and it really sucks that it got cancelled.
Also got to give a shout out to my boy Kryten from Red Dwarf.
