: Re: Characterizing a sentient robot: inhuman PoV Following the previous question: Characterizing a sentient robot: sensory data I'm writing a robot character with a particular PoV. In the previous

@Ravi5107385

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You mention that the robot

has to feel both alive, sentient, relatable and alien, different, and inhuman.... I'm interested in ways to portray an internal thought process different that the human one.

Taking those first three points individually will help answer the other points:

Alive means there is some capability of growth and death. So how would a robot differ in this? How does a robot grow? Yes, it can gain more "information" in its memory (learn), but what does it do to change itself, its life status, its relations? Does it worry about having enough power to fuel its existence (and does it have a means of persisting in some "hibernation" should power fail or run too low)? Does it fear death... or seek death (perhaps feeling trapped in "life" by its makers)? How does it fix itself (or can it, does it require external robots or humans to do so) if damage occurs? The answer to that will then relate to what it sees as important to have "on hand" should the need for fixing arise. Can it feel pain (and if so, why... does it need such a warning to know that something is "wrong" with it)? Whatever the answers to these types of questions, they will be different (in various ways) from a human, but relate to its "life" as a robot.
Sentient means aware of sensory perceptions in some conscious way. I think your prior question already deals with some distinctions of how a robot might be different from a human in this area, yet still be sentient.
Relatable (in this context) deals with sympathy toward and similarities one can understand. Yet there are various ways something can be relatable. A human does not relate to a dog, an ant, and a tree in the same way, yet there are still things that a human can be sympathetic toward with any of these. So a robot might relate to a human who is feeling tired or weak in a parallel idea of being low on power (having to conserve energy by not being as "active" in certain ways it would normally). But could a robot relate to how a human "forgets"? Probably not normally: if something is erased, it is gone from its memory, and likely no inkling of that prior memory is "there" yet inaccessible (like what happens with the human brain; though there can be exceptions to that I guess, depending on how a robot's memory is set up to function). Humor would probably be different (if it exists at all in a robot).

So just thinking through how the robot is different in being alive, sentient, and relatable will automatically reveal ways that it is alien, different, and inhuman, and then affect its thought process appropriately.

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