marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649…
These kinds of articles are starting to make me itch.
Computers *are not people*. Computers *are not like people*.
Stories need to be able to grapple with computers as computers, and readers understand computers as computers. If you, as a writer, want to write about people and slavery, the time to call computers just like slaves is past, unless you lampshade and highlight it hard. It is now the writer's responsibility. Computers are part of our lives, and they are not slaves they are tools. And anthropomorphizing them is the dangerous action.
Getting angry because your audience sees computers as tools not people is annoying, because a very large problem in our society is that people see computers as people not tools.
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Hypolite Petovan
in reply to silverwizard • • •@silverwizard I agree with the sentiment and I would refine the conclusion further: a very large problem in our current society is that people see computers as responsibility-proof people, not tools which design can be criticized.
1970s science-fiction authors couldn’t know better because the technology in their books had to be entirely made-up. It is telling for me that we got to human likeness in chatbots way before we enacted any sort of global computing law that Isaac Asimov envisioned for robots.
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silverwizard
in reply to Hypolite Petovan • •@Hypolite Petovan yes! We waffle around computers. They're tools so we can't punish them, but they're independent so their users can't be held responsible.
We need to stop treating computers as special and magical, and viewing them as human suuuuuuuuuucks.
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