Compelling AI characters in books

[Patrick Thistle]

One of my favourite literary characters ever is the Culture ship-mind called Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints in the book Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. Some of his other AI characters are memorable but that ship was just hilarious.

Anyone else find themselves drawn to AI characters?

[delicatemoth]

Philip K. Dick does some great ones. Ubik starts with the protagonist arguing with his apartment door to let him out.

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

I can see the influence on the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation elevators and drinks machines in Hitch Hiker's Guide.

Dick also used apparently sapient machines to stage philosophical and ethical conversations on the nature of being.

From Now Wait For Last Year:-


“All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"

"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."

"That's right," Eric said.
"I'd stay with her," the cab decided.
"Why?"
"Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."

"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her."
God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”

And of course, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep asks at what point does a constructed intelligence/consciousness so resemble a human that there is no perceptible difference, and what does that mean for rights and responsibilities.

[Jobi1]

You're supposed to fall in love with the 'Artificial Friend' Klara in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, and indeed it's really hard not to be desperate for everything to work out for her.