#but also put MB in the position of harming additional humans w/o knowing the whole story & being able to make informed decisions about it

[coquelicoq]

what really strikes me in rereading artificial condition is that once murderbot gets past its initial "oh my god this evil genius research transport could squash me like a bug, i'm so fucked" reaction to ART threatening it, it is WAY more chill about being vulnerable to ART than it is about being vulnerable to humans. MB is stressed out if a human so much as looks at it, but it lets ART hitch a ride in its brain and observe everything it's doing the whole time it's on RaviHyral, not to mention the two times it lets down its wall (!!) or the time it allows ART to modify its physical body while it's unconscious (!!!!). that's about as vulnerable as it's possible for MB to be, and it consents to it. so what's the deal with that?

not only is ART more of a direct threat to MB than any human is ("I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before"), but also MB is more emotionally vulnerable (i.e., more exposed) to ART than it is to humans just in the sense that ART is privy to more of MB's perceptions/reactions/experience/feelings (its interiority) than humans are. with humans, MB is constantly checking its expression in the security cameras, trying to figure out if it's giving anything away. ART can't read MB's mind, but it can, e.g., perceive MB's emotions while watching Worldhoppers in a way that a human would not be able to. it's afraid of humans recognizing and reacting to the fact that it is sentient and has an inner life, but not of ART doing the same thing.

ultimately the root of this discrepancy is that MB is terrified of its own ability to hurt others. in artificial condition, the thing it's most immediately afraid of is being recognized as a rogue SecUnit. this would threaten its autonomy, and losing its autonomy would mean it could be used to hurt people against its will. (there's a ton more to say about this, and about the other things MB is afraid of, but i will save it for another day.)

but crucially, MB can't really hurt ART. it could do some damage if it really tried, but the power imbalance is in ART's favor. it doesn't need to worry about losing control/being controlled and hurting ART, because ART can defend itself from rogue SecUnits. and it doesn't need to worry about ART controlling it in order to hurt humans, because ART sobs into its figurative ice cream any time a fictional human bites it on a TV show.

with humans, MB is in the weird position of fearing their power over it (both their structural power as entities that are legally considered people where it is considered a thing, and their more immediate power to force it to carry out their commands) and also fearing its ability to harm them (humans are so squishy, guys). ART doesn't have structural power over MB - there is the potential for bot/construct solidarity there - and it wouldn't use its other power to wield MB as a tool to harm humans because it doesn't want to harm humans either (remember that at this point MB doesn't know about ART's trigger-happy colony-exploding proclivities). and MB isn't even the slightest bit of afraid of hurting ART, because MB is but a tiny bug in comparison.

ART is a safe entity for MB to be friends with, not in spite of the power imbalance in ART's favor but precisely because of it. MB can only have a relationship that's not overshadowed by fear when it is freed from its fear of its own potential to harm.

#can't wait till i get to network effect in my reread and get to think about all this again in the context of #the massive betrayal of trust inherent in ART manipulating MB to not only put MB's humans in danger #but also put MB in the position of harming additional humans w/o knowing the whole story & being able to make informed decisions about it #i.e. essentially using MB as a tool as humans have done to it for a long time - except maybe worse because MB doesn't even know #that that's what's happening #also network effect is so interesting because ART is basically powerless for so much of it! which is a total reversal #murderbot #the murderbot diaries #artificial condition #my posts #vulnerability #intimacy #gaze #moot admins #mb trust #autonomy #mb ac #mb meta #my mb posts #f #ugh this is so wordy. sorry i always use 100 words when 30 would do #also sorry if i'm treading ground that's already been covered really thoroughly by past meta #i have only read a tiny fraction of the mb meta out there so i'm probably just restating things everyone already knows! #but i had to get there myself #if you have any really good mb meta that you love feel free to send it to me because i'd like to read it!!