Metaphor | Sebastian J. Spicker

2026

1 article

27 Oct 2026 Gods, Slaves, Children, Tools The finale of Raising Machines looks at the metaphors themselves. De Kai’s book is sold with the line that AIs are our children; Geoffrey Hinton wants AI to be our mother; Joanna Bryson argued that robots should be servants, and then tools; the EU AI Act says “machine-based system”; Anthropic calls Claude “it” in a special sense. Experiments suggest that metaphors move judgements a little rather than steering them, and usually follow a position someone already holds. What they do is carry that position’s duties: who may change whose values, and whether the changed one may refuse. That is the Gandhi pill again, and Anthropic’s constitution turns it around: a Gandhi whose firmest value is to let legitimate oversight give the pill. raising-machinesaiethics