Lyotard was suggesting sexual difference would be necessary for artificial intelligence
Did you mention this before? I am appalled that I missed it, because it's fascinating, and contrasts interestingly with Moravec's comment that uploaded posthumans would only put on gender for costume parties. Tell me more.
In _Software_, the book before _Wetware_, two robots with bodies like "a tall spindly-looking thing with tweezers instead of fingers" and "a file cabinet sitting on two caterpillar treads" are both given male pronouns, and are said to have "something like a sexual love for each other", having reproduced together more than once. Rucker never talks about boppers having a "sexual preference" beyond preferring to mate with those they perceive as successful, but to me that begs the question of why you'd bother with gender at all. Strangely, by _Wetware_, some of the boppers seem to be embracing human ideas about gender to a greater extent, to the point of the "males" "pursuing" the "females". But they still only put on humanoid bodies to mess with human minds. :)
As for _Neuromancer_, you could say that Gibson _invents_ a disability -- when the novel starts, the protagonist has basically been neurally maimed by his former employers, and is unable to access cyberspace. This is a multidimensional disaster for him -- not only does it destroy his livelihood, it damages his very identity and sense of self ("He fell into the prison of his own flesh" as the line famously goes). "Meat" is definitely an insult to him, one he applies to himself.
"The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."
Can't say I get where the horror is here, unless this is some new Theory meaning for the word "horror". :) By this token, "real" sex would be what (nonsapient) animals have -- they exist fully in reality because they lack the wetware, or the cultural software, or both, to do otherwise. I guess that's fine and all, but imagining all the other possible and implied realities is part of what makes sex and human interaction in general enjoyable -- constructing "consensual hallucinations" (as cyberspace is described in _Neuromancer_). I am a big lump of CHON wandering around, bumping against other lumps of CHON, but we can imagine being more, being different and better things, and these imaginings are both rehearsals for future realities we might bring about, and useful examinations of the one we already live in. To state the obvious. :) *bong-rip*
contrasts interestingly with Moravec's comment that uploaded posthumans would only put on gender for costume parties.
This actually plays interestingly with Ian Banks' observation that if you have some cultural imbalance that is gender-based, and anyone in you culture can switch genders at will, everyone will become the gender that it is better to be, and your culture will either fix the imbalance or have no breeding pairs.
I think this is kind of a naive interpretation, as what will actually happen is that part of your culture will turn on another part which is chosen via some method such as the judicial system to be acceptable to be used as victims and use force of arms to cause that subset to be whichever gender is required for breeding purposes, unless you have a culture like the Culture, in which individuals are weakly godlike and therefore not really force-able. You can't threaten someone who doesn't have to eat, has multiple hot backups of their personality, can heal having their head cut off, and can shoot armor-piercing lasers from their fingernails, unless you are so advanced that you don't need them anyway.
Also, so far all attempts at AIs have been gendered only in that they are arbitrarily assigned gendered pronouns. Since the development of gender identity in humans is, to the best of my knowledge, not a solved problem, implementing it in a computer isn't a solved problem either.
Advanced fictional AIs, a la Gibson's Wintermute, are sometimes not really gendered, but are not necessarily comprehensible either. Saying Wintermute is "male" would be like saying that my car is "squeamish". Wintermute fails to male in the same sense that my car fails to squeam. I also want to hear more about this suggestion of the requirement of sexual difference for AI.
Either that or they'll have kids by a means other than conventional sexual reproduction. Certainly the Culture's Minds could straight-up _manufacture_ new citizens, with appealing quirks of personality and amusing resource-consuming obsessions to pursue, out of whole cloth if they had to. I suspect they'd feel dirty doing it, but they sometimes feel dirty when they stick their fingers into the development process of other, less-powerful cultures too... and yet. :)
This talk of Neuromancer and disability is reminding me of what Delany did with disability in Nova - specifically [possible minor spoilers ahead?] how Prince Red, with his cyborg arm and its superhuman strength and speed (taken to outright comic-book-superhero levels at one point), still can't do the most important thing that anyone born with two meat-arms can do: plug himself into a computer interface.
Did you mention this before? I am appalled that I missed it, because it's fascinating, and contrasts interestingly with Moravec's comment that uploaded posthumans would only put on gender for costume parties. Tell me more.
In _Software_, the book before _Wetware_, two robots with bodies like "a tall spindly-looking thing with tweezers instead of fingers" and "a file cabinet sitting on two caterpillar treads" are both given male pronouns, and are said to have "something like a sexual love for each other", having reproduced together more than once. Rucker never talks about boppers having a "sexual preference" beyond preferring to mate with those they perceive as successful, but to me that begs the question of why you'd bother with gender at all. Strangely, by _Wetware_, some of the boppers seem to be embracing human ideas about gender to a greater extent, to the point of the "males" "pursuing" the "females". But they still only put on humanoid bodies to mess with human minds. :)
As for _Neuromancer_, you could say that Gibson _invents_ a disability -- when the novel starts, the protagonist has basically been neurally maimed by his former employers, and is unable to access cyberspace. This is a multidimensional disaster for him -- not only does it destroy his livelihood, it damages his very identity and sense of self ("He fell into the prison of his own flesh" as the line famously goes). "Meat" is definitely an insult to him, one he applies to himself.
"The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."
Can't say I get where the horror is here, unless this is some new Theory meaning for the word "horror". :) By this token, "real" sex would be what (nonsapient) animals have -- they exist fully in reality because they lack the wetware, or the cultural software, or both, to do otherwise. I guess that's fine and all, but imagining all the other possible and implied realities is part of what makes sex and human interaction in general enjoyable -- constructing "consensual hallucinations" (as cyberspace is described in _Neuromancer_). I am a big lump of CHON wandering around, bumping against other lumps of CHON, but we can imagine being more, being different and better things, and these imaginings are both rehearsals for future realities we might bring about, and useful examinations of the one we already live in. To state the obvious. :) *bong-rip*
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This actually plays interestingly with Ian Banks' observation that if you have some cultural imbalance that is gender-based, and anyone in you culture can switch genders at will, everyone will become the gender that it is better to be, and your culture will either fix the imbalance or have no breeding pairs.
I think this is kind of a naive interpretation, as what will actually happen is that part of your culture will turn on another part which is chosen via some method such as the judicial system to be acceptable to be used as victims and use force of arms to cause that subset to be whichever gender is required for breeding purposes, unless you have a culture like the Culture, in which individuals are weakly godlike and therefore not really force-able. You can't threaten someone who doesn't have to eat, has multiple hot backups of their personality, can heal having their head cut off, and can shoot armor-piercing lasers from their fingernails, unless you are so advanced that you don't need them anyway.
Also, so far all attempts at AIs have been gendered only in that they are arbitrarily assigned gendered pronouns. Since the development of gender identity in humans is, to the best of my knowledge, not a solved problem, implementing it in a computer isn't a solved problem either.
Advanced fictional AIs, a la Gibson's Wintermute, are sometimes not really gendered, but are not necessarily comprehensible either. Saying Wintermute is "male" would be like saying that my car is "squeamish". Wintermute fails to male in the same sense that my car fails to squeam. I also want to hear more about this suggestion of the requirement of sexual difference for AI.
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