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"the [science fiction] writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Point-Five Construct (Pseudo-Relationship) | ||
| An artificial intelligence person, serving as a companion for a human person not capable of forming real relationships. |
The idea is that it's like having one real person and one-half of a person - a point five - played by the computer.
| “Several years ago,” the modulated, shifting voice began, “you volunteered to have your neural connectome mapped and uploaded.”
“Right, yeah. DIANIMA project. Back when they were renting a big lab here at the institute. There were four—no, five of us chosen for that. There were a lot of volunteers, but the qualification process was long. Lots of questionnaires, that sort of thing.” “Did you know what they were going to do with the data?” “With the connectome models they made of us? Yeah. The project was to create companions for people. It was supposed to be therapeutic. The idea was that certain people—well, lots of people—aren’t capable of relationships. This causes them to feel isolated, depressed. The idea was to create these models and use them as the basis for a construct isolated people could have a sort of ‘pseudo-relationship’ with. The constructs would have all the little quirks of real people. The people who used them could interact with them. Could practice being with other people. They were expensive, but I know the republic now offers them to citizens in need, on a limited scale. And I heard you could have one prescribed for you by your insurance company." |
| Technovelgy from The Mountain in the Sea,
by Ray Naylor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022 Additional resources -
|
Here's how it is experienced by someone else:
The SF-SD Axis that specializes in AI started cranking these things out. What you do is, you fill out this long questionnaire on your terminal, play a whole bunch of different simulations and puzzle games, and then they custom-produce one for you.” “A … partner.”
...The oculus was set on a small table in the corner, aimed to project at an empty space near Aynur’s bed. There, a woman flickered into existence—just insubstantial enough that he could glimpse the shadows of objects in the room through her flesh. She was sitting at a small table eating a bowl of noodles. She was dressed in a baggy T-shirt and athletic shorts, barefoot. She held a finger up in a “wait” gesture as she slurped up the rest of a long noodle, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Hey. Didn’t expect to hear from you. Aren’t you on a date? Is it over already?”
“No, he’s still here.”
They don’t really want equal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way...
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
