Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves.
Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves. But Unit 7435 finds there is a price to be paid for love… and for failing in its primary mission.
Restore is a standalone short story that takes place in the world of the Singularity novels.
Start the novel series with The Legacy Human (Singularity 1).
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Reality is… unsettling.
Creating a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence is far more complicated than first dreamed in Asimov’s Bicentennial Man. Yet somehow the attempt to build Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) devolved into the industrial-scale theft of human labor, regurgitating it back as a means for oppression, more theft, and more harms. The true intentions of the AI companies are revealed by the ever-more-strident attempts to shove the theftbot into every human interaction and use it to justify any level of harm.
When I wrote Restore, I posed the ethical question, “Is it cruel or compassionate to keep your tech from evolving above a certain sentience level?” I still think that’s an intriguing ethical question. It’s just not the one that’s actually in play in the world (especially not with gen AI, with far too many people falling for the appearance of intelligence, thus multiplying the danger and the harms).
The “AI” of today is used as a mask to cover all kinds of crimes against Actual Intelligences, the humans whose three pounds of meat and electricity are the source of all the creativity and labor the AI companies must steal to create the simulcrum.
To explore the consequences of those ethics, see my collection, A Closet Full of Time and Other Dark Tales.
