I’m finally back to writing and finally getting around to jotting some thoughts down on my number 2 game from last year, The Fall.
These are more the beginning of thoughts regarding The Fall‘s display of consciousness and intelligence than fully formed conclusions. One of the big issues a lot of science fiction has is that when it presents alien intelligence it generally just shows off a facet of human intelligence. Star Trek is the big example. The Human of the series get to be the American stand in while other races stand in for other cultures. Vulcan’s are Ancient Greek, Romulans are Roman. Cardassian, some mix of Stalin Russian and Hitler’s Germany. They are rarely, truly an alien consciousness.
The artificial intelligences in The Fall, while they concern themselves with understandable and somewhat relatable goals for humans, their modes of thinking are completely alien. Humans don’t react or behave like this. Not even the most pedantic bureaucrat would function like the three principal actors do. The subject matter may be familiar, but the intellect is alien to us. That would be true of any machine. That’s all this intelligence is an extrapolation of how computers “think.” We try to characterize machines in our terms, but they are dumb. They have no intelligence, no malice, no consciousness. It makes us feel good that they are like us, yet should those steps occur that they become more like us in actual consciousness then we get frightened.
Those above two paragraphs might be a better way of phrasing what I tried to do in the original post. Well, read it anyway.