Dan Houser: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I don’t think he’s decided either. But he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn’t take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity, and it seems that the “children,” quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. And actually, there’s a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it’s not the AGI/ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it, it’s conflicted, it’s chaotic, it wants to be human, it wants to be loved, maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates, are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paper clips. Anyway, that’s a character, and you have to build that up, you have to think through that. So you’ve been living with that one for a while? Yeah, I was living—I’ve been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one-note. AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn’t really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody, and was just this kind of Borg-like fog. And I thought, “That’s fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting.” AI is being built by humans, and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers, and there’s a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn’t like each other. So Nigel Dave, who’s renamed himself—they wanted to call him something sort of primal, Adam—and he renamed himself Nigel Dave ’cause one dad was called Nigel— …and one dad was called Dave. And he’s riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his—it’s gonna become clearer in the next volume of the book and in the game—he’s riddled with his dad’s previous careers. But he is, with the idea that he’s almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything, but has zero wisdom. So the only thing he knows, and then he’s seeing the world through the internet. The most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone’s phone and watch them, but he’s stuck, pressed against—he can’t actually get into our world. So he can control people’s minds, arguably, but he can’t control the world. So he wants to be human, he wants to have these human experiences, he sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet, and goes, “Oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to…” ‘Cause that seems fun. “I want to have…” You know, he’s a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences, and he’s trying to imagine what that will be like. “Oh, that’s what children are. ” You know, “That’s what love is.” And he’s… So I think he’s a… But he might be a sociopath, and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there’s something sympathetic about him. And I kind of like him as a character, but I don’t think he’s going to be the protagonist. He’s more a side character. But an ever-present one.…

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