39 pages • 1-hour read
Rogue Protocol
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Themes
Challenges Facing Authentic Relationships Between Humans and AI
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of enslavement.
With its history of being enslaved by GrayCris and forced to obey humans’ orders no matter the risk those orders pose to itself, Murderbot is thus skeptical of humans overall. It draws a line between “good humans” and “bad humans,” something that it uses when deciding whether or not to take on risks similar to the ones it was once compelled to take on those humans’ behalf. Though it expresses occasional fondness for and protective impulses toward these “good humans,” it does not trust them. Indeed, when Miki continually calls its human owners its “friends,” Murderbot is disgusted at Miki’s naiveté, as it does not believe that true friendship between humans and AI constructs is possible, given the constraints placed on these relationships by the constructs’ programming.
Miki’s relationship with Don Abene explores the limits of Murderbot’s understanding of the human-construct relationship. While Murderbot notes that Abene’s affection for Miki does appear to be legitimate, it also observes that Miki’s personality might come from Abene’s programming—which means that this affection might be more easily given than in a relationship with two fully organic sentients, as Abene is able to compel Miki to think and act according to Abene’s preferences. Murderbot further allows that even if Abene has not coded all of Miki’s reactions, the evolution of Miki’s personality likely corresponds to the infantilizing way that Abene and her crew treat the construct. According to Murderbot, this puts Miki in an inherently subordinate relationship with the humans in its orbit rather than a true friendship. Miki’s ultimate refusal to protect itself instead of fighting to protect its human friends (in direct opposition to Abene’s orders) tests the limits of this presumed inequality, as Miki does prove able to do as it pleases, regardless of the orders given. The extent to which this choice is truly not coerced (as opposed to being due to the coerced “friendship” with Abene and her crew) is unclear, though Abene’s grief for her lost construct is genuine.
Murderbot also notes that the influence that humans hold over constructs influences the ability of constructs to have friendships with each other. Because most bots and constructs (with Murderbot, who has hacked itself, excluded) are compelled to follow humans’ orders, they cannot trust that any AI “friend” is not going to be forced to betray its AI companion. This means that the struggles to have an authentic relationship between humans and AI due to humans’ ability (and tendency) to control constructs further extends to poison all aspects of constructs’ social connection.
Corrupt Labor Practices in Corporate Dystopias
Though using constructs for labor is not legally prohibited in the Corporation Rim—nor necessarily a social taboo among most of its human residents—various people that Murderbot encounters throughout the series lead it to understand this coerced labor as a form of enslavement. In the opening chapter of Rogue Protocol, Murderbot encounters a group that has sold their indentured labor to GrayCris, the mega-corporation that runs nearly every aspect of life in the Corporation Rim. Under the terms of this indenture, the humans would labor for GrayCris for 20 years before being paid; during the time that they spend in this arrangement, they are charged by the company for housing, food, and any necessary medical treatments. Murderbot muses that this is worse than how it was treated when GrayCris expected it to sacrifice itself for any human client that could pay GrayCris’s security fees since at least it was not asked to pay for its own repairs or armor.
The humans’ indentures, in which they are forced to pay to work, has historical resonance in the system of sharecropping, a practice in the postbellum United States in which “sharecroppers” or tenant farmers, were permitted to use land in exchange for a portion of the crop’s profits. While the tenants (many of whom were formerly enslaved) tended the land, they racked up debts to the landowners, many of whom were former enslavers. This exploitative system reinforced the systems of labor, profit, and power that had been in play under chattel slavery, which has led historians to sometimes refer to sharecropping as “slavery by another name” (“Sharecropping: Slavery by Another Name.” PBS, 2021).
This concept—that a form of labor may be tantamount to enslavement without adhering to legal definitions of slavery—characterizes GrayCris’s labor practices for both human laborers and constructs. GrayCris’s totalitarian rule comes from the power it gains from this exploited labor; it earns massive profits from this underpaid (or unpaid, in the case of constructs) labor and then uses these profits to ossify its power. As it purchases more influence in the Corporation Rim, including governmental power, it uses this influence to create further systems that grow the corporation’s profits, creating a self-replicating system. The end goal of this system is not evident in the text; rather, GrayCris’s hunger for profits merely seems to be for the sake of profits themselves. This highlights the novel’s criticism of the pointless excess of capitalist striving and the grasping corruption of those who believe in and work to perpetuate such a system.
Artificial Intelligence and Personhood
Wells’s series focuses largely on characters who are not fully organic creatures; rather, her protagonist and several key supporting characters throughout the series are partially or entirely mechanized forms of artificial intelligence. Murderbot’s centrality to the narrative emphasizes Wells’s framework that AI constructs can be equally sentient as organic sentients, notably humans. The practical way that Murderbot interacts with the other bots and constructs in its orbit indicates, however, that just because constructs can be fully sentient does not mean that they are always fully sentient.
The limits to what counts as a “self-aware” bot or not are fuzzy in the text—including to Murderbot, who can often directly communicate with a different AI creation’s programming to determine its mental capacity. The bot-piloted ship that it hacks at the novel’s beginning, which Murderbot names Ship, has limited self-awareness. Ship and Murderbot never converse or communicate, not in the way that Murderbot does with Miki or did with the more advanced bot-piloted ship ART (a key character in Artificial Condition). Miki, like Murderbot, is humanoid in form, though ART’s role as a closer friend-like character to Murderbot illustrates that physical form is irrelevant to the novella’s understanding of the extent to which different bots or constructs are or are not “people.” Though Murderbot’s choice to name the bot ship “Ship” might indicate that naming is an important indicator of a sense of self in the text, this clear delineation is challenged by Murderbot’s own history. Though Murderbot has given itself its tongue-in-cheek name, the text does not support the idea that it was this act of naming that granted Murderbot its sentience. Rather, the causality of this is inverse; it is the sentience that leads Murderbot to determine that it needs a name.
This distinction is material in the way Murderbot treats the different constructs and bots it encounters. While it feels only a slight twinge over hacking Ship, which it sees as lacking “enough self-awareness to give a shit” (43), it hesitates to do the same to Miki, even when guaranteeing Miki’s compliance would be useful to Murderbot. These questions of sentience thus become a moral concern for Murderbot, who has experience with being exploited and controlled by an entity more powerful than itself. Murderbot’s morality in this matter errs on the side of not controlling a sentient construct, though its willingness to hack low-level bots (such as the drones it uses to fight the combat bots) illustrates that this moral concern is indeed about personhood, not about a moral stance on hacking on its own.
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