Information About Artificial Intelligence Systems
1. AIs are typically male or female. This is in part because of our own human preconceptions and comfort levels, as well as the fact that reproduction between AIs requires two AIs in certain circumstances. Moreover, because of the need to give AIs personalities and identities aside from just computing power, the way the databases are created (because of the way we understand…or think we understand…ourselves) trends an AI toward a male or female personality anyway.
2. AIs come in two major types: Primary and secondary. Primary-class AIs are the most powerful and versatile and most “human-like” and they can, essentially, live damn near forever (thousands of years, in any case, at least). They tend to be in large buildings (or in the case of the warwagons, in starships) both because of the sheer size of their hardware and memory requirements, and more important to allow for sufficient physical and virtual security to protect them, as they are high-cost, high-value assets.
Secondary-class AIs have lifespans that are far shorter, in some cases even less than a human’s, because their systems and coding don’t self-repair and self-replicate as well, and they eventually become muddled and useless (this is somewhat comparable to the way Alzheimer’s disease strikes humans today, being insidious and incurable). These AIs don’t take up as much space both because of their relative simplicity and because of their lesser value, and thus lesser need for security provisions. Secondary AIs mostly end up used for entertainment purposes (movies, virtual brothels, music, as virtual pets, etc.) but they also serve purposes in rich households, corporations, etc.
3. Almost every AI (primary or secondary) has a base template for what it does: full military, tactical, espionage, medical research, surgery, information management, breeding, etc. The most well-known exception is the Godhead, which was set up with a unique template and designed for the sole purpose of storing the memories and personality traits of the popes, and integrating them into a single personality. Various primary AIs have been created with extremely complex multifunction templates, but because of these complexities, they generally cannot sire an AI with another primary AI.
4. Reproductive capabilities. A primary AI can spawn an AI without the aid of another primary AI, but in such cases, the offspring will never be a primary AI. Secondary AIs can also reproduce in certain cases, but with a far lesser success rate.
Reproduction sometimes results in a DI (demi intelligence), which is, essentially, an AI with cognitive disability. They can be useful, but usually only for very specific kinds of tasks, and their lifespans are even less than a secondary AI’s.
To make a primary-class AI, the only two ways are to build it from the ground-up or to have two primary AIs (male and female) create inception routines that can be combined together to form a new AI, which will usually be a primary AI (though cases do occur when a secondary AI or DI is the result).
5. An AI’s template has a lot do with reproduction, for two reasons.
First, the combination of the templates of two primary AIs (if they are different templates, that is), will cause the AI to typically have certain other templates, within a limited range. So, a military AI and an espionage AI who reproduce together cannot create certain types of offspring (they couldn’t, for example, hope to produce a palliative care AI or artistic AI).
Second, certain templates are imcompatible. A theological AI, for example, could not reproduce with a pure logic AI.