onsdag 16 mars 2016

We need a couple of new pronouns

Exciting things are going on. I think we need at least one new pronoun. It should be used for entities that are made of AI technologies and interacting with us in a "human like" fashion. You can already now hear people talking about robot vacuum cleaners or Siri or other "smart" devices using "he" or "she". This is of course incorrect. On the other hand, apparently it is quite unintuitive to speak about these things using "it". Hence, we should come up with a new pronoun for there entities.
I suggest "mai", short for machine artificial intelligence.
Of course, this will have to be complemented by the other forms for the pronouns first person and so on.

In addition, I think we need a new pronoun for cyborgs. People and machine will merge in the coming 100 years or so and it might be appropriate to consider how different entities should be denoted. In Sweden this discussion has been around for some time in connection to a gender-neutral pronoun. We use "han" for "he", "hon" for "she" and the new "hen" for the gender neutral version. It might be that this pronoun should be generalized to denote someone also with cyborg qualities.

However, there is an important thing to note about the usage of the word "hen". There are two different cases. First we can talk about a person without knowing its particular gender, e.g. a general teacher or something like that. Or we can talks about an explicit person but which to not disclose (or it might even not be possible) that persons gender. It is not completely clear to me that these two cases should use the same word.

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