Murderbot: An Autistic-Coded Robot Done Right

[jesse_the_k]

Cassie Josephs’ excellent Tor.com essay, "Murderbot: An Autistic-Coded Robot Done Right" explores how Martha Well's series provides insight into autistic lives and rights.

As an autistic person, I recognized so much of Murderbot in myself. Since my early childhood, my life has been full of non-autistic people who think that they know what’s best for me without ever bothering to ask me what I want. There’s this very prevalent idea that autistic people are “eternal children” who are incapable of making decisions for themselves. Even people who don’t consciously believe that and know it’s harmful can very easily fall into thinking that they know better than us because they’ve internalized this idea. If you asked them, “Do you think autistic people are capable of making their own decisions?”, they’d say yes. But in practice, they still default to making decisions for the autistic people in their lives because they subconsciously believe that they know better.

Likewise, if you had asked the Preservation humans, “Do you think Murderbot is a real person who is capable of making its own decisions?”, all of them undoubtedly would have said yes—even Gurathin, the member of the Preservation team who has the most contentious relationship with Murderbot, still views it as a person:

“You have to think of it as a person,” Pin-Lee said to Gurathin.

“It is a person,” Arada insisted.

“I do think of it as a person,” Gurathin said. “An angry, heavily armed person who has no reason to trust us.”

“Then stop being mean to it,” Ratthi told him. “That might help.”

But even though the Preservation humans all consciously acknowledged that Murderbot is a person, they still fell into the trap of thinking that they knew what it needed better than it did. Ultimately—and very importantly—this line of thinking is shown to be incorrect. It’s made clear that the Preservation humans never should have assumed to know what’s best for Murderbot. It is, at the end of the day, a fully sentient person who has the right to decide what its own life is going to look like.

https://www.tor.com/2022/06/21/murderbot-an-autistic-coded-robot-done-right/

Comments

[sasha_feather]

I missed this earlier and it's great, thanks for sharing!