Why do sci-fi AIs crave humanity?
1st of, this is not about the AI that's plagin the NET as we speak, telling people to put glue in their pizza because they scrapped that info from Reddit, nor to ask Goku to cook a chicken at 38ºC. THis is about fictional AIs, more trending towards the cyberpunk genre. I have a cyberpunk section and this question comes from a conversation I was having about the cyberpunk ttrpg setting however I consider it a generic enough theme to be added here instead of in the cyberpunk ttrpg section as it applies to the genre on top of the ttrpgs.
To preface in the cyberpunk ttrpgs there's an STAT called EMPathy, from this stat derives the value of Humanity. They both measure your connection to yourself and fellow homo sapiens. Their naming is a choice... and plenty of people have talked about how they could be taken the wrong way, specially when it comes cyber-psychosis a term that pops up when you're low on your humanity. Plenty of people have talked about how finicky it can be to associate low humanity with psicosis. Specially since the generic conception of cyber-psychos seems to be that of the rambling homicidal dissociating maniac, to the point that one of the bosses stat blocks in cyberpunk RED it's a C-Psycho. Also in RED it's explained how not all C-Psychos are violent, but this is like many other things, it only makes the news/mouth to mouth when it's shocking, in this case a big bad evil boss. But specially when I look at the community they seem to understand that not all c-psychosis is violent, that most c-psychos are regular people with regular lives that are affected by their c-psychosis in many other ways.
Every time a character adds cyberware to their body their humanity lowers, this can be a representation of the different nature of machine contrasted with the organic, specially when we're talking people that use cybernetics to chop healthy limbs rather than use medical substitutes (that appear in RED). Ways that the brain isn't supposed to work, like having 3 arms or 5 eyes, this scales, and scales until you get into Full Body Conversions, FBCs. These are the maximum exponent of cybernetics a complete body of machinery, the brain is extracted from the original body and you become and FBC. In chromebook 2 for 2020 where they made their debut in the cyberpunk ttrpgs there's an option called interchangeable biopod. On the flavour text they mention how it would be technically possible to introduce the biopod, the person, into a car, or another non human shaped body, however it's noted that the nature of this change the alien nature fo this body for a human body would lead to a shock for the person being interchanged, a whole lot of Humanity Loss if you will, and this though lead me to the original though of this post.
How many times have we seen the trope of an AI wanting to escaped the digital constrains, of an AI good or evil in their nature crave and pursue the chance to get a human body, maybe robotic but in other occasion fully biological, take over a real brain. Well, how would this pose for said AI, would that AI take "Humanity" loss (using humanity terms to make things clearer but one might give this another name) after all it's not that different from modifying their body like meat beings do in the same setting. With the existence of netrunning and the gibsonian cyberspace if the AI takes over a robot it shouldn't cause a mayor loss in humanity if any, after all brains can connect to the NET and control remote machines without suffering humanity loss in any of the cyberpunk media I've seen, I guess this is because they just give orders to the machine rather than becoming said machine, but what about AIs, they can also control machines, it's nature to them, the cyberspace it's their natural habitat, if you give them an FBC without a biopod conected to the net they should be able to move it around without much problems. But what if you put them into the FBC, they should still be fairly comfortable with it, they still have access to the cyberspace, they can move freely inside it. But what if we airgap their systems, suddenly they world becomes much smaller, their reality of infinite electrical expansion is severed forced into this small portion of the cyberspace, cu from any other machine, limited to that body and nothing more, they suddenly have to use a body for everything, they want to watch a movie? read a book? all of that must be made through their new body. Wouldn't that shake their reality? Their natural processing of things? Wouldn't that cause humanity loss? They became trapped only able to access the cyberspace if they plug in with a interface plug and a cybermodem/cyberdeck. In some instances they wouldn't even be able, a lot of net tourist in cyberpunk 2020 and in the book Neuromancer use electrodes rather than cyberware, that would completely sever the AI from their original world, much like Alt was trapped in the NET in cyberpunk this AI became trapped in the meatspace. And what about meat bodies, not robots or machines, just regular human bodies, not only are they limited like we said before, but they would have to adapt into this new flesh, and also the processing power of the human brain, that couldbe greater or smaller depending on the setting. In both cases it's a great deal, in one they find themselves capable of great thinking speeds and much more while in the other they're changes to the point of though, also now thay have to grapple with things like eating, and while AIs would also have necesities in the cyberspace like storage space or power to feed the machines they run on and both can be traced to paralels, I feel the change would be far greater and a much weirder sensation than you can parallel between the two. And this is without getting into Ais with one purpose, these setting usually feature AI cars, what if you put the AI of a car, made only for cars, into a humanoid body, machine or meat, whatever, they would suffer a bodily difference in much the same manner as the human in a biopod that's put inside a car.
Well, that was today's ramblings. Not much more to add to them.