However, I think the point of the tech demo was to show the character on screen exhibiting emotion, not necessarily to evoke emotion in the viewer because we all know you can do that with plain text, or robots like in Wall-E.

A follow up story would be quite interesting if the new owner were one of the “I prefer mine not self-aware” crowd, and she, not wanting to become refurbished (hence disassembled/”killed” etc.), were to fake being non-self-aware all the while trying to figure out a way to make him want her self-aware or something like that.

Bonus points if she actually must keep obeying him, not having *any* additional defect that’d allow her to simply run away. That’d make things much more interesting, but the storytelling much more challenging.

Extra-bonus points if it’s a social commentary/slice-of-life kind of story, as I prefer those to action packed stuff. :) But this being a video-game project of sorts, I doubt it’d work.

Tech sure is damn nifty and kinda exponential and all, but I don’t quite buy Kurzweil’s singularity.

Anyway, getting back to my point; you either have sufficient hardware for awareness or you don’t, right?

Something ‘accidentally’ becoming aware when it was never designed to be even a tenth as complex as that requires just doesn’t fly.

Are we saying that paternalism is an affront to the paternalised, or that there’s a tendency for mature, dark men to be regarded as expendable?

Which are we supposed to fix?

No, me too. I found it really hard to watch once the machines started disassembling her. Bad writing usually doesn’t bother me, as long as it still conveys emotion, and this does.

Then I was disappointed to see she was just getting into the packaging.

…disclaimer. I worked on this. I don’t think I’ll say anything to get me in trouble… I hope, but the misogony had it’s place in a larger context but it went on too long. It was intentional.

Right now, your average open source project is being updated hundreds of times a day. Now, imagine it in a world where a computer is itself designing the systems and architecture of the program. Programs making, testing, and running programs. Through the process of analytic and testing algorithms and systems, you could eventually have a system that in days updates itself in ways it would take a much larger open source community to do it.

Robots themselves are simply automation of standard human practices. And the idea of robots making robots is a rather standard idea in itself. Just follow that to its natural conclusion, and this seems a lot less outlandish.

Especially when you discover that the last 1% is the hardest part. Hence the uncanny valley in general.

For crying out loud, awareness is something that requires an epic degree of complexity. It’s not something that’s just going to pop out by accident; it’s only going to happen as a result of countless dedicated man-hours.

Catching up with evolution to match its greatest trick is really going to take some doing.

This fact renders this vid hopelessly implausible.

Me neither. I like a girl with HUGE tracts of land!

Blade Runner

The whole baby doll thing was odd, but I didn’t like anything about the way the male character was played to be honest, I thought he was terribly scripted and badly acted.

If they really wanted to make the narrative more interesting, they could have let him finishing disassembling the robot only to apologize and make a statement about how no one should live with her fate. Or maybe I’m just terrified by how realistic the reaction may be.

Who knows if any of the above is true. I would have found it just as compelling if it was a man. If anything, the skin growing and the artificiality of her was just slightly repellant. (Oddly enough, the uncanny valley didn’t even enter into it, as I found the rendering of her extremely good–my reaction was entirely down to the setup.)