Humanoid acts up
A bug, or mental illness?
Two cases this week
So, this week we once again have multiple vignettes with a common theme. This time, it’s the ethics of rewriting personality or memory. It’s an important topic to address when Humanoids clearly have AI-based brains, but also one that can be an uncomfortable proxy for more directly human issues. I say uncomfortable because there’s a clear and probably intended transparency, but at the same time… it’s not the same issue, and if it thinks it is then it’s getting hamfisted in a bad way.
The case that’s more relevant to that deals with a humanoid child with serious rage issues. He gets into fights all the time at school and flys off the hook whenever addressed, seemingly pretty much always angry… except when he’s playing the piano, at which he’s quite good. Anything but piano gets “Screw you, not piano.” His parents bring him in to Sudo, and Sudo’s AI assistant suggests doing a little patch work to put his emotions more on the level. After yet another brawl at school, the procedure is done, despite the doctor clearly having his misgivings about it, and we get a long narration from the kid about how he’s able to fit in and make friends and still loves to play the piano, even if it doesn’t consume him anymore. The doctor, however, is quite melancholy, and expresses this listening to recordings of the kids’ pre-operation playing.
Suffice to say there’s a deep, real-life stigma regarding psychiatric medication that often involves the boogeyman that it will kill some sort of spark or uniqueness in a person. I’ve known folks who flushed pills as teenagers because of that fear… and eventually, as adults, decided that they really did need help, because human brains are complicated lumps of jelly and their chemical balances are really finicky.
Well, enough about that: the other case relates to an adult male having nightmares, which Sudo tracks down to a memory alteration incident that must have been done to him some time in the past – not that he knows as his memory of the procedure was also covered up. He tracks down the doctor who did it, an acquaintance of Sudo’s, and demands an explanation. It seems that back then, the Humanoid in question was hopelessly lost to addictive behaviors, and pleading to be fixed. The robopsychologist (to distinct him from Dr. Sudo) offered that instead of just treating today’s addiction, he’d get to the cause, and the man agreed.
Thus, they went through a fairly lengthy and detailed process of addressing and changing the memories of his traumas, in order to weed out the deep-seated source of the addictive behavior… not unlike therapy, except the part where this is invasive and involves the creation of false memories rather than the addressing of real ones. In the end, the man was cured (but for this whole nightmare bug cropping up most of a decade later, which Sudo deals with once he’s got the patient’s data) and left with the impression of an “old friend” who helped him out as a proxy to ensure he’d still pay for a procedure he couldn’t remember. Sudo opts not to tell him about this, even though he clearly disagrees with the way his acquaintance does things.
I think this episode was half good. The kid stuff was weaker than it could have been, not just because of the unfortunate implications but because Sudo really did seem to be overreacting to the treatment (we never confirm if, post operation, he’s actually less skilled or passionate while playing) or else underreacting to how out-of-control that kid was, given that other figures of reasonable authority in the setting, like the medical AI, don’t share his hangups. We’re left wondering where to stand on it, and not in the good thought-provoking way but in the “Where’s the drama?” sort of way. The side with the memory rewrite, however, was much better done. The robopsychologist was pretty slimy aside from his use of an invasive technique and willingness to craft convenient fictions, and the proxy was distant enough to not be such a mismatch. There was a clear value to the questionable procedure (as well as Sudo’s aftercare for it) but also a serious ethical concern that wouldn’t come up the same way in a human version, at least not a realistic one, making it an interesting exploration of the potential differences between Humanoids and Humans.
And that’s all there is for this one. Onward to the next!