The Genesis
This story started out as the intersection between a few random thoughts, Pinky and the Brain, and the books I was reading at the time.
I’m a writer, and that means sometimes ideas come in lines of dialogue. Just random lines with no idea who or what might say such a thing. It can be a riff on something just said, seeing something odd and wondering how you might explain it, or a rabbit hole of random musings a sentient computer might have looking at the world.
This kind of thing where imaginary characters start talking often happens while driving, probably because its where I see people being people and yet I’m detached from what’s going on because I’m isolated inside my two tons of mechanized glass and steel.
Not unlike a fictional AI, come to think of it.
Anyway, the imaginary conversation in my head was someone like me trying to explain human behavior to the AI and why we do the silly things we do. I don’t recall the exact train of dialogue, but the human got frustrated explaining to the AI and said, “that’s just the way it is” to which the computer replied, “Data point.” In the same way that someone else might say “Ah-ha!” or “well, there’s your problem,”and from then on, whenever the computer discovered something new about the world, especially human-related, it would note the ideas as a significant data point and revise its understanding of how things really worked.
It’s the very beginning of a character in a sci-fi story, but I needed more, so I asked myself a few questions.
So what’s this sentient AI like? Is it like a puppy dog, naive and learning about the world through its human companion? What if we switched the relationship? What if it were more like Pinky and the Brain?
Pinky and the Brain?
For those of you not familiar, in the 1990s the Warner Brothers cartoon Animaniacs would often feature shorts about a mad-scientist-type lab rat (Brain) and his dim-witted sidekick (Pinky) who would carry out harebrained schemes to take over the world each week. While the episodes are amusing, often ending in the same way a Road Runner short might, the interplay between the titular characters made the stories sing, especially when the “dumb” Pinky actually came off looking smarter than Brain. A classic example where plot was irrelevant; the characters and their relationship was what made me excited to see their next escapade. Would this work in an AI-human pairing?
Now while I take inspiration from the world and the artists around me, I can’t just copy things wholesale. So taking the spirit of relationship that made Pinky and the Brain great and some space opera stories I was reading, I started experimenting. I paired the super-intelligent AI with an everyman human. What are my character’s goals? What kinds of interesting problems might they have? Pinky and the Brain were lab rats trying to escape the lab and take over the world, presumably fighting an unfair system that made them experimental animals. So I decided this AI and its human would need to fight a similar injustice.
Making the Charaters Matter
Let’s make them second-class citizens in this system.
Let’s imagine an AI submind that its hyper-intelligent progenitor can re-absorb or erase, and let’s also create a cloned human specifically grown for catering to AIs and “natural-born” humans.
Let’s root for them because they and others like them are artificially being kept from their own potential.
That’s enough to start a series, the rest is just world building. Months of world building, as it turned out, which I’ll cover in next week’s update.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
