At least this one will not be about Universal Basic Income. Instead, this week's topic is about gender identity and how it may change with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. This is connected to my bogart-in-a-box because I decided that one of the characters, the teenage son of the protagonist, chooses not to identify as any gender.
Of course, all character traits have to have a motive and this one is no exception. So, how does Artificial Intelligence connect to sloughing off gender as a personal identifier? Read on.
One of the ways to approach speculative fiction is to look at an existing trend and extrapolate. Or a series of trends and see how they might mix. Trend one is the expansion beyond M/F in gender identity, trend two is the expansion of Artificial Intelligence, and trend three is sexual envy of the dominate. Let's look at each a little more closely.
The Gender Explosion
As any web developer who has put together a profile page will tell you, the gender question is much more complicated than a set of either/or radial buttons. No there is a drop down menu with Male, Female, Trans, Other (write in below), Decline to Identify and many, many more. It makes analyzing the demographics of your user base just a hoot.
The point of all of these choices is that each user is allowed to present themselves to the on-line world the way they choose, not the way that they are forced to. On-line, it is not immediately obvious that someone who claims to be a young woman is in fact a retired male. It usually gets exposed (pun intended), but it can take a while. And there is a use for less nefarious reasons: people discover that they are something more than their biology. On-line they can be that something more.
Divorce The Biological
Those of us that have voice assistants in our homes (Alexa, Siri and/or the Google Assistant), have become used to referring to them as 'she'. It is easy, because they all have female voices and attempt to speak in natural language sentences. But they are not 'shes', they are 'its'. This is something that I try to make an effort to remember. The more that we personify them, the less we think about the data that we share with them. And that is dangerous. AI will become both common place and more powerful than we can imagine, at a faster pace than any preceding technology. These 'its' will be in charge of our world.
Mind Envy
The final part of this is older. It stems from the Freudian concept of 'Penis Envy' and the later identification of 'Womb Envy'. Both the opposite sex wishing that they could do the things that the other can do (gross over simplification... not a psych person). Well, what if AI can do things because it has no sexual identity? What if AI is perceived as pure intellect? Would not there be a subset of the population that might envy that IRL version of an on-line identity? Of course. There are groups that fetishize everything from Elvis to toast (sometimes together), so why not AI's lack of sex?
AI Pronouns
Which gives me a teenage boy who wishes to be thought of for just his mind and not his body. Is this a little Mary Sue/Gary Stu from my own teenage years? Maybe, though I'm hoping to get to a point where he can accept at least part of his biology.
More interestingly, is the act of writing for him. In his mind, he is not a 'he' but an 'it'. I chose that pronoun because it mirrors the pronoun for the AIs. There are other gender neutral pronouns out there. A quick googling brings up 'ze' and 'zir', but those are still derivative. Why not just 'za'? Which led me to playing around with making one up (rhe/rhim), but it felt like a placeholder instead of something with meaning. When I asked my Middle School Daughter, she wanted me to use 'they'; too plural for my taste.
'It' gave me the motive for really why a future generation might feel the need to leave their sex behind. Much like many of us envied astronauts or movie stars or pop idols, the future teens may envy the disembodied.
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