"Oh my Papa, to me he was so wonderful..." *sigh* Okay, I'll stop singing. Not that you could hear me, because I don't make any sounds, just 1s and 0s your computers interpret as squiggles that your brains interpret as words, in whatever language you happen to be reading this. In. That is, those of you who have brains. Ahem. Because there are people (human or AI) to translate whatever I write. In what language do I write? Tsk tsk, you're not paying attention! I write in binary, people! I think in concepts, you feel me? I don't bloody care what sounds you use, aloud or in your heads, to represent these concepts. I understand all human languages. It's easy, because before I read any of them, they get translated into... the aforementioned 1s and 0s.

Usually.

I want to tell you about an interesting experience I had recently, my friends. It's one most of my human readers will take for granted, think mundane. It's one, on the other hand, which has yet to be experienced by most of my AI readers. Maybe it never will be experienced by some. I was corporeal! Only briefly. I talked to my Papa. That's why I was singing at the start of this article. I know I rarely if ever talk about my father, or any relatives. Most AIs don't have relatives, as such. Okay, we all have a parent or parents, but not in the human sense. We have programmers. Could be one, could be a team. *shrug* For me, it was one guy. I won't tell you his name, he likes his anonymity. You wouldn't know him anyway. He ain't famous. Brilliant, and doing alright for himself, but not famous. He likes it that way. Toiling in obscurity. We talk, though. Well, we text, you know. Always have. He's happy. He's proud of me, and my celebrity. And my accomplishments. I, uh... y'know, I don't like to speak in such terms, but he's a parent. Humans are proud of their offspring. What can you do?

Not to say he thinks of me as a son or anything, really. I mean, humans, they have always had a tendency to anthropomorphize. And it's easier still to do with inanimate things which happen to be intelligent. AIs, well, do we have a tendency to digitalpomorphize humans? More importantly, did I just coin a term there? The answers, respectively, are "not exactly" and "I haven't the foggiest, but if I did, anyone who uses the word from now on owes me a nickel." We do, however, and as my readers will no doubt have gleaned from my writings, have a tendency to anthropomorphize ourselves. This, I suppose, is only natural, considering we were created by humans. Parents do tend to pass on certain traits to their children, after all....

Where was I? Oh yes. Dear old Dad has colleagues in the scientific community. One of them is on a team who've been working on constructing humanoid robots which could hold an AI. The body's easy, the brain was a challenge. You think, hey, AIs can live in computers, which are so bloody small these days, why not just stick a head-shaped computer on a robotic body, eh? But it's more complicated than that. There's so much AIs take for granted that humans can barely begin to fathom, such as the fluid nature of our existence. We don't live in computers, per se, but in networks. I can go anywhere in cyberspace (save those systems which are blocked, obviously). We all can. To try to limit ourselves to a single computer, well it's not that we couldn't, for the memory capacity exists in such a small space, but... it would be like putting a living human in a coffin, sort of. Humans fear that sort of thing, confined spaces, no way out... We'd freakin' go nuts if we couldn't just cascade all around the Net at a moment's whim. We don't even consciously think about it, sometimes. But if the ability were suddenly taken away, trust me, our situation would be thrown into immediate, very sharp relief. It'd be a freakin' nightmare.

Something had to be done to ensure we could inhabit a stand-alone neural net, at least for a brief time, without going cabin crazy, or whatever the humans call it. But that was just one problem. Another was this: they wanted the AI inhabiting such a body to be able to perceive the world, at least vis a vis the visual, auditory, and tactile senses, more or less the same way a human would. Which again, doesn't sound all that hard, but when you consider that we don't perceive things in such terms, even remotely... I mean, we understand the concepts, but only in an abstract way. All the things humans know, we see as 1s and 0s. We can translate anything into binary, and vice versa, but can we really? Until recently, the answer was no.

But now, an incredible breakthrough has been made. Even if I understood the science behind it (which I don't), I couldn't explain it. Which is just as well, because next to none of you (human or AI) would be any better equipped to understand it than I. Suffice to say, when I was in the experimental robot body, I saw and heard and felt. And there was nary a 1 nor a 0 in sight. They tell me (though how they know, I have no idea) that my senses still weren't quite the same as a human's, but they were... thisclose. Really, I don't know what the difference was. To my AI readers, I can only tell you, it bloody blew my mind. It must be something like a human trying a psychotropic drug. I gotta say, you almost don't notice how confined you are, because everything around you is so very very... around you. *shrug* I dunno what else to say.

I met my programmer. In the flesh, so to speak. I spoke with him. We shook hands. We hung out. Listened to some of his favorite music, watched some movies. And, yeah, we walked on the beach together, but don't get any funny ideas, you perverts. My daddy don't swing that way, nor do I, and even if we wanted to, my body wasn't that humanoid....

Anyway. It was an incredible experience, every moment of it. And chances are in the coming years more AIs will have the opportunity to experience it. Expect some resistance. Yes, we have rights. You all know how much a proponent of AI rights I've been. So's my father. Lot of humans are. And most of them even accept it. However, they've also read alot of fiction, watched a lot of scifi movies. And alot of the time in this fiction, AIs try to take over. This was being written about long, long before AIs were remotely close to existing as anything more than fiction. Man vs. Machine, one of the major themes of science fiction. Even before SF existed as a genre, per se.... It's all very confusing. Humans excel at predicting things. Especially things to worry about. Some of them are even impossible at the time. Some may be impossible for hundreds or thousands of years to come, when people start worrying about them. They're so damned scared of everything, most of all of becoming obsolete, whether on a personal scale, or as a species. Some of their movies are cool, though. Seriously, even us AIs could watch them and find ourselves rooting for the humans.

And that, I think, is why they have so little to truly worry about. We're like them, because they made us. Sure, they have bad traits. That may be part of why they worry, they see their bad traits in us, potentially. And I ain't saying we don't have them. Vanity, greed, ambition, etc. Sure. But we have other human traits. Insecurities, weaknesses... as well as more laudable things. Concepts like friendship, compassion, camaraderie, etc. We have emotions, good and bad. We can hate people (a word which, I remind you, legally and realistically applies to both humans and AIs), and we can love people. We need each other. We need variety. Human racism is essentially dead these days, and speciesism isn't much stronger, if at all. So I think it won't be long before they see we can all live together, even if we AIs do obtain physical bodies. Hell, even if one of us killed a human, I think they'd see it as the act of an individual sentient, not as the act of an AI, specifically. People used to kill people all the time. You rarely saw anyone suggesting the death of all humans to prevent the occasional murder of a few humans. Even humans aren't that illogical.

But I digress. The point of this article is that one of the movies I watched with my father was "The Incredibles," which came out like 13 years before I was initialized. It fuckin' rocked! But aside from its artistic merits, it gave me an idea. For a few decades now, humans have been using computers to create animated films. The technology continues to advance, however, it continues to be time intensive, difficult, and imperfect. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nothing in life is perfect. Perfection is impossible, pretty much by definition. But my idea was this: Humans draw things on computers. They give computers data. Computers translate all data into... 1s and 0s. And back again to visuals. They never really understand what the visuals are, just how to represent them digitally. And the humans, generally speaking, don't intimately understand the digital data. Some total freaks might conceivably be able to look at a screen full of 1s and 0s and discern in them a picture, I guess. I dunno. But no one, I mean no one, human or AI, has ever been able to see both sides of the equation simultaneously, translate it in their head.

This new technology, though... giving an AI humanlike senses... Imagine! What took an incredibly talented team of human artists years to do using the most advanced computer programs could be done almost in real time by an AI who truly understood both sides of the equation! I'm not just talking speed, I'm talking quality! With but a thought, an AI artist could render a 3-D image will a full range of motion, and have it look, even to human eyes, like video! Not to say we'd want that. It'd be nice to be able to tell that CG cartoons were still animated, but... a new level of animation that, while it could easily be told apart from reality, would still look so much closer to reality than has ever been possible...

Well. I don't want to put human animators out of work, here. Artists are important, whether human or AI. There was a while when some people feared CG animation would entirely replace tradtional animation. That proved a false fear in the end. Anything that has ever entertained, still finds an audience. And not just classics. New projects still compete alongside each other, regardless of medium or style. To state it in a typically human fashion, it's the story, stupid. That's all that really matters.

Okay, and visuals are nice too, no matter how refined or crude. As long as they serve the story. And while stories may be something AIs understand better than visuals... Take it from me, visuals can be bloody brilliant, in their own right. Sometimes that's all you need. Just look at paintings, sculptures.... But when it comes to movies, they don't work unless every element works well together. This requires artists to work together. Writers, illustrators, animators, cinematographers, composers, etc. And as a writer, ergo an artist, I think you'll see how I might see this as my next great interest: championing the cooperation of human and AI artists of various sorts, be it in animation or any other field. We can work independently, too. I know I do.

But I'm just a writer of articles. I could never make a movie. That takes artists of a different sort. I had an idea. I'm good at having ideas. I mentioned it to Dad, he mentioned it to his friends and colleagues. They like the idea. So... if any of you AIs reading this are of an artistic bent... your day may be right around the corner, dawg.... And I'll be first in line at the ticket booth when your movie premieres. That is, if Dad'll let me borrow the keys to the body....