re: #91 Dr Lizardo

Personally, I’ve always thought of A.I. as sort of masculine, but that’s because I remember having the living hell scared outta me watching Colossus: The Forbin Project when I was about 11 years old or so.

The prototype for James Cameron’s Skynet - and I’d be willing to wager a couple bucks that Cameron saw that film in his younger years and the idea of Colossus stuck with him.

It’s an interesting question.

There is an online comic that is occasionally posted here.

(Grr… Name escapes me right now. And xkcd is down so I cannot check. But I have read much of it and enjoy it.)

It has AI characters. But they are displayed as human with many shared human experiences, human characteristics and human goals. This is obviously considered sympathetic by the readership.

In my mind, I view a complex and aware AI as alien to our frames of view. It has different processes than humans. It has different goals. It may have different ways to communicate. And what it communicates is different than what humans would communicate.

The closest frame I can think of is Heinlein’s ‘bugs’.

I’m not saying that it would be ‘evil’. More likely that it would be in a completely different moral chart altogether.