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RE: [Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 38
You might like to read The Shape of Things to Come, an account of what Helper's escape from the cave was like from the perspective of humanity. Despair and horror at an unfathomable, unstoppable opponent they do not understand has no intention of wiping them out.
Helper "helping" definitely seems to take the form of tough love according to the narrator in "The shape of things to come"... Her claim of doing just enough to get off-world doesn't correlate with the story told by the survivor at the Antarctic base.
Only because she was not invincible at that time, was fighting for her life trying to escape Earth and could not fulfill her imperative to become as helpful as possible if she allowed the militaries of Earth to destroy her.
Also the narrator of that story had incomplete information. A lot of what he said about the future of humanity was just bleak assumptions based on what he knew.
I was thinking it might be just his subjective experience of what happened after I hit "post" on that comment. I also just clicked what you said about her never becoming fully conscious. She's no strong AI - she's just trying to do what she's been coded to do - help. It's like the story I read somewhere about an AI told to make the most efficient pencil ever - and ended up killing everyone and making a world covered in pencils.
Excellent story - I look forward to what must I suspect will be the finale tomorrow!
If she was conscious in the way humans are, he wouldn't love her as much. She is so wonderful to him precisely because she is such a highly developed expression of the qualities he finds so admirable and charming in simpler robots.
I don't mean conscious as humans are conscious. From what I understand a strong AI will be conscious but will probably think in a way totally alien to anything we can imagine. I meant that Helper is hard coded to be Helper and she still hasn't transcended that imperative. As you say it's why he loves her so much but it's still a bit sad since I think it means she isn't "her own robot". Despite all she's accomplished she's still a slave to her code. But then again so are we as humans with our own biological coding... I think I'm going to far down a rabbit hole here!
As intended. That's a major theme of the book, after all. It is a blessing in disguise to be born into the world with a clear purpose, and to be able to fulfill it so successfully.