I'm sorry, I tried to edit my thoughts into coherence.

[healingmirth]

Here, have some thoughts about fandom and artificial intelligences, and the potential to Do It Wrong.

You ever have one of those days when you wonder about things and you wonder if your wondering is making a mountain out of a molehill?

Sometimes, one has thoughts, and one feels the need to blog about them. I am hereby announcing that you, the subscriber to my journal, are totally free from any typical social obligation to read the train wreck that follows. (that said, anyone wandering by from the latest feed or their network page or whatever is welcome to chime in)

- You can file this under "things that I have not thought through all the way, yet"

- Also, file it under "I am probably going to use the wrong word, somewhere." Feel free to correct me.

- Also, this was initially related to a different fic I was going to rec, but the only way that they were related is by a thread that I am completely not going to explore, which is humans having sexual relations with something/one that is not/was not originally human.

- Er, also file this under "my memory is faulty, and there is lots of media with which I am not familiar," which is the reason I'm asking.

fanart: Marvel (Iron Man), Tony/AI!Jarvis, android, workshop Tab A, Slot B

So, my original thoughts were basically: 1) hot picture.

Then someone commented on Jarvis's resemblance to Paul Bettany, which I approve of in the sense that Paul Bettany is hot. This lead me to 2) human canon Jarvis is a white guy, so no huge leap there; and 3) if I were Tony Stark, what sort of android would I make?

I mean, if I were going to create an android, I would probably create one that looked more-or-less like me unless I had a compelling reason not to. (In Tony's case, a compelling reason not to might be that he's intending his AI to have a side job as a sex-bot. Or, actually, in Tony's case that could also be a compelling reason to make one that looks exactly like him.)

Can anyone think of examples of non-white androids/AIs/whatever? Or non-male ones? The SGA Pegasus replicators were probably somewhat diverse in appearance and gender, but my memory fails me. I feel like there's also some diversity from Battlestar Galactica, which I have not watched (and don't worry about spoiling me for plot twists. I already know about what I think is the major one). For my purposes here though, those sort of don't count, because those are (I think?) self-perpetuating societies, not individual entities created by humans and/or or biological entities. Also filed under not-counting, I think, is whoever Summer Glau's character from Sarah Connor Chronicles is, but since I'm not a Terminator fan, I'm not really clear on what the deal is with terminators in terms of whether they're self-perpetuating.

The sexbots from Austin Powers (or any other movie) also do not count. So, I came up with Vicki from Small Wonder. And that's it, so far. (under white male, I have Jude Law and that kid from AI, and Data and his brother or whatever from Star Trek, so, clearly not an exhaustive list in any sense. ETA: Also, let's count whatsisname the holographic doctor or whatever.)

I feel like there's enough trouble out there in terms of erasing and/or screwing up cultural context, and agency, and [fill in the blank] that creating a (potentially emotionless, certainly programmable) character opens up the barn door to fail. So I guess the next question is which fictional character or media creator would you trust to create a non-white and/or non-male android. I can't help but think of the jive-talking bots from Transformers 2, who I am choosing to interpret as a trustafarian- (or whatever the term would be for the 'hood version thereof) type parody, even though I'm not at all sure that's the case.

While we're on the subject, I also can't name any engineer-type scientists (other than Samantha Carter, who, having had replicator issues, can surely be trusted to never, ever create an AI) who aren't white males. I think there might be a guy on Eureka?

And that's sort of where I run out of thoughts on that.

have just realized that I do not have an art rec tag, so I'm just going to slap fic rec on this. Sorry. Will fix that later when I feel up to managing tags.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Rommie on Andromeada (see icon) was robot who presented as a woman of colour. I seem to remember the other ship's avatars being female for the most part.

BA from A-Team is an engineer of a more mechanical bent than a scientific one, but he's certainly brilliant. Joe Morton's character on Eureka.

Also

[muccamukk]

On Voyager between Katherine Janeway and B'Elanna Torres, they probably could have built an AI, though they didn't.

Dax on DS9 was a scientist, but not a mechanical one.

ETA: I have vague memories of Auger from Earth: Final Conflict being able to build crazy shit. But I'm not sure if it was physical or entirely virtual.

Re: Also

[healingmirth]

Is the guy on Eureka the one who went (tried to go?) back in time to save his wife? He also struck me as a likely candidate for creating an AI for emotional reasons, but it's been so long since I watched the show.

I'm sort of conflating the technical ability to built a robot with the coding ability to make an AI, for no better reason than the Smart People Can Do Anything sort of trope. I think it'd be a lot more interesting to read about two or more humanoids collaborating to create an android than about one lonely sciency person in a social vacuum doing it, but the latter is probably more common in fiction.

[ponderosa]

While not a film in the classic sense, my most recent favorite thing ever, Janelle Monae's Many Moons video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgbzNHVg0c

For non-male androids, there are the replicants in Blade Runner, although the most notable one I can think of which doesn't fit the function of pleasure would be Call in Aliens Resurrection.

Androids/AIs are terribly popular in Japanese media (Trinity Blood immediately comes to mind), although in general it's likely with a more demonstrably female and sexual slant (Chobits would be a prime example).

[healingmirth]

Oh, I'd totally forgotten about Metropolis and thanks for the video link, because I hadn't seen that!

I haven't seen Blade Runner in years and years, and sort of embarrassingly couldn't remember much of the plot beyond the replicants being able to blend in. So obviously they'd have to not be all identical to each other, but I couldn't remember anything else.

[scaramouche]

The first android to pop into my head was Vicki from Small Wonder, but you've already listed her. (I loved that show so much, ngl.) The only other film to have non-male androids I can think of right now is Stepford Wives -- which don't count if you put them under the sexbot category.

I'm doubly not sure if this counts, but Utada Hikaru's Can You Keep a Secret music video features her as a robot/android.

[healingmirth]

I'd forgotten about Stepford Wives, but yeah, I'd put that under my sexbots umbrella. Or, thanks to the Stepford Wives wikipedia entry, I have also now learned the term gynoid and found a bunch of other things to read, if I feel like it.

I have no idea what's going on in that video, but it sort of freaks me out.