re: #311 Feline Fearless Leader

The web-comic “Schlock Mercenary” has actually played with this a little bit. A few AIs have essentially gone insane due to sensory deprivation for an amount of time that would be trivial to a human being. And currently one that appears to have been sealed up for a considerably longer period.

Spoilers…like you didn’t already know.

In this case, as far as I can tell, all of the AI’s transcended beyond our ability to interact with them, and maybe left our universe altogether. Samantha asks Theodore to come find her when he is no longer confined to his physical body. They had gone wildly beyond their original programming and had started to alter their own code to be independent of physical processors completely. This is what a lot of Sci fi people and engineers have been looking at for some time as we approach the physical limit of computer processing and the dead end of Moore’s law when transistors become molecule sized. You are left with theoretical physics and processing based on quantum mechanics…and self awareness for an AI.