was reading a fic where a home ai becomes "sapient" (because i guess normal home ai is "nonsapient" and basically a very advanced alexa) and so she's declared "legally a sophont" free to do whatever, after a thorough "examination" of her digital consciousness, and it's portrayed completely positively and man this gives me really weird vibes.
like in the story it's celebrated as a beautiful thing, but personally it freaks me the fuck out to imagine them having a system of determining who is legally sapient vs nonsapient where a line is drawn. the inhabitants of the home are aware of the fact that she is becoming "self-aware" for days leading up to the event, based on signs and behaviors that artificial intelligences don't normally do, but she isn't legally fully "self-aware"/sapient yet. they even time their estimation of when she will become that in a matter of days. and that just scares me, that there would be a possibility for someone to be "almost sapient, but not"
like it gives me bad associations and bad vibes because of autism, because of plurality, because of ecology.
and like i was talking about this with the author and they really didn't see anything wrong with this. when i brought up the terraformers as a really good exploration of these concepts, they were outright horrified in a way that confused me but maybe i didn't explain the story well enough
anyways i would like scifi authors to consider for a moment that "sapience" is kind of a fake thing that can't actually be quantified or measured or defined. what people mean when they say "sapient, and not just sentient" is that the being "thinks and acts like a human" (and by human they often mean, "a neurotypical abled human").
and if that's your definition of sapient, at best you will find yourself "alone" in a universe, none of the life you find will fit into a neat easy box that's simple and quick to understand. you will disqualify beings who have truly beautiful but very alien intelligences as not being "sapient" enough to be included in your definition of personhood for you, because they aren't able to be reduced to human behaviors, human language.
i think in a lot of ways, sapience in science fiction is defined by if the language barrier can be broken. so are orcas "sapient"? is Alex the Grey Parrot, or Koko the Gorilla? are crows? if a fungus or plant was "sapient", how would you ever really know, if their desires and behaviors and ways of speaking are so radically different from you?
even the terraformers acknowledges this. their definition for what is a "person" cow or train or earthworm or tunnel boring machine or moose vs a nonperson cow or train or earthworm or tunnel boring machine or moose is literally that the ones who are "people" were bioengineered to explicitly think like a human, instead of a cow or train or earthworm or tunnel boring machine or moose.
theres just so much fucking grey area within humans too. is someone in the latest stages of Alzheimer's disease "sapient"? or someone with "braindeath"? is it suddenly okay to strip them of their personhood, their rights, just because they don't think or act like a neurotypical abled human? nonspeaking autistic people have historically been considered "nonsapient" by the medical establishment. even speaking autistic people, often treated like we are less "cognitively aware" than them. and when experiencing a psychedelic dissolution of the ego and the boundaries stop existing, there is no experiencer or experiencee, only Experience, is there "sapience" there? is the Experience temporarily stripped of "sapience"?
"sapience" as a concept in sci fi feels like a comforting quilt they drape over the uncomfortable truth of the world, which is that there is no line between "nonaware" and "sentient" and "sapient", these are human constructs at their core, influenced by prevailing ideology. humans deciding who is similar enough as a human to be a person. ways of thinking and being exist on a multidimensional field and "sapience" is a little circle, a little fortification, a little gatekeep of personhood, drawn around a spot in that field where the thinking seems similar to how neurotypical humans think. there is an entire universe out there tho. and theres no reason that humans should expect to meet someone who thinks like a human, or that in a sci fi context the only way to become a spacefaring species is to be like a human and do it in a similar way to how humans did it.
