Detroit: Androids face oppression! No one likes them! They are dehumanized!
Actual literal real people I know: This is my roomba. His name is Gilbert and sometimes I drop cheetos on the floor just so he has something to snac on.
Whenever I play this game all I can think about is that story where someone coddled their roomba during a thunderstorm because “it was scared”
Okay but how many of y’all have made fun of Siri or Alexa especially when they are giving directions
Ive made fun of my own flesh mother when she gives me directions robots aint special
“Sentient” means to be able to perceive, feel, and/or be aware of the surrounding world – to have senses that allow one to experience things. Animals are sentient – they are able to hear, see, smell, taste, and/or touch. Plants are also arguably sentient, albeit in a much slower and more cryptic way than animals – but we don’t generally count them as such for practical purposes (I could… get into this). If you built a robot no more intelligent than, say, a goldfish, but it was able to see or smell or feel pain, it would be sentient, but not sapient.
“Sapient” means human-like wisdom or self-aware intelligence – the ability to engage in complex reasoning and judgement. In sci-fi, it usually denotes personhood and identity. A computer could therefore theoretically be sapient, but not sentient.
Robot stories are almost always about exploring the formation and value of consciousness and personhood. Star Trek is probably in large part to blame for “sentience” to mean “sapience” in loads of media – it’s certainly the reason I used to get it wrong! I lost count of how many times Data refers to himself as “sentient” when he’s describing self-awareness aspects of his personal identity – he even contrasts himself with his cat, claiming she is not sentient (he’s uh… wrong…).
Data is, of course, both sentient and sapient. An android that can walk around and respond to the world around it, using artificial senses that allow it to gather information from its surroundings, is sapient. (Being able to analyze flavor, scent, and temperature counts as sensing – not just seeing and hearing). An android that can reason and form self-awareness is sapient, whether or not it has traditionally human-like emotions. HAL 9000 is obviously sapient, but his sapience is limited.
who are you calling terrifying this is clearly a friend of the highest quality
all yall with ur “uwu smol friend” bullshit gonna let us walk right into the fucking robot apocalypse someone could make a metal gear in real life and youd all say its adorable
this is exactly the kind of shit im talking about when i say i have no patience for people who look at robots and immediately start thinking about terminator shit. why is this terrifying? because it looks like a snake? so the fuck what? the reason robots are made to look like existing organisms is because those organisms have a several million year head start on robotics engineers on solving problems like how to move in water while expending minimal energy or how to walk over uneven terrain while carrying a heavy load.
it’s also really telling that people are much more scared of these organic robots that fall into the uncanny valley than they are of drones, which are robots that currently exist and have been killing people for several years. if a “robot apocalypse” does end up happening, it wont be due to organic-looking robots suddenly achieving sentience and deciding to wipe out all life on earth, it’ll be because some rich asshole or a war-hungry country sees new technology with the potential to kill people and harnesses it for that purpose, which has already happened several times over the course of human history.
tl;dr: stop opposing technological advancements with massive potential for good because you watched Terminator once, also this snake is cute and a friend
Procrastination Station 