Timeline with sentient androids?

[Black Leviathan]

The Mechanical Turk is more than just a side-show Novelty. It becomes a challenge throughout Europe in the dawning industrial era to create a man from gears and hinges. Instead of discouragement at failures the quest becomes obsession. Leading to Chinese Horse-drawn difference engines designed to mimic simple decision making trees. Neorationalism focuses on the nature of artificial conscience and leads to the construction of the field of Neolithic Consciousness. The very first water-clock AI's are developed at the dawn of the 20th century with massive tidal pools that turn towers of gears that are thousands of feet high. The last World War is fought over the control of an immensely powerful AI constructed by advanced German technology, the world's first Ice-box AI and the looming threat of AI constructs on the battlefield.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Dr. Beckenstein

Hallo,

I have some vague ideas for a close parallel with sentient (or "awakened"?) robots.

Does anybody know an even remotely plausible POD where this could happen, say a corporation develops a gaming console with multiple parallel running CPU in the 90's or something like that?

It depends on what you mean by 'plausible'. If you mean with our current technology and modest variations, the answer is a straight 'no'. It isn't plausible at all no matter what you assume.

Now, if you make some more basic assumptions about Point Of Departure...then it becomes a maybe.

To make it better fit my taste, I am more interested in world that looks like animes like "Ghost in the Shell" or "Armitage III" than the Swedish TV Show "Real Humans".

So, any ideas?

The thing is that we don't have a clue what 'consciousness' even is. We use the word to describe the thing, but all of our definitions are circular and we don't have a clue how the brain actually works at any basic level. We know some things about the processes occurring in the brain, but not how they relate to self-awareness or 'knowing' or the like.

People talk about AI (meaning artificial people in this context) as if it's just a matter of processing power, but we don't know if that's true or not, and if it is, we haven't got a clue how to use that processing power to create an artificial general intelligence.

If you want human-like androids in a modern-like world, and some semi-plausible backstory...I'd go with biology. Somebody make a breakthrough of some kind back in the 20s or 30s, learned about DNA and RNA and other stuff besides, enabling artificial life, and subsequent advancements enabled the possibility of growing artificial people, in tanks or vats or some such system, with specialized abilities, and at some point, some of them started to 'wake up'.

That way, you don't have to worry about the society understanding the mechanisms of consciousness, or about the natural knock-on effects of such Ai tech that haunt settings like THS. There would inevitably be some knock-on effects in (esp.) medicine and chemistry and so on, but those could reasonable be subtler.

If you want them to have exotic abilities, there are some ways to go: genetic engineering could give such creatures several unusual abilities, and for more intense stuff, the 'android' could be grown around various hard-tech implants and devices, making them cyborgs of a sort. Alternatively, depending on how out there you want to get, they might have psi abilities. Or both.

But if you conscious waking robots in the classic sense, in a current or near-future setting, that's really, really hard to make plausible.

[Flyndaran]

One could take your acknowledgement of our ignorance and go the opposite direction.
If consciousness doesn't depend on our modern brute force computational power direction, then perhaps it could just as easily be developed long before we would expect rather than later.

[Daigoro]

It all started when Alan Turing was seconded to the Manhattan Project in 1942 due to the mathematics they were dealing with being too complex for them to calculate in a reasonable timeframe.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

It all started when Alan Turing was seconded to the Manhattan Project in 1942...

It's intervention on his behalf during the indecency trial was a bit of a cybernetic equivalent to "coming out (of the closet)".

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

It's intervention on his behalf during the indecency trial was a bit of a cybernetic equivalent to "coming out (of the closet)".

Coming out of the wiring closet?

[Sorenant]

The game Omega Boost had an artificial intelligence called Alpha Core that had its beginnings on ENIAC. You could go for similar route and say computers just kind of awakens on their own, they're just dumb at the beginning due to complexity limited IQ and all that.

[Daigoro]

It all started with the commercial success of Google Glass. Google soon released Google Cranium and started mass data collection on users' brain waves. Now, connected households have an Alexa, or their rival's RealSiri, to do household chores, babysit or have wide-ranging but slightly disconnected conversations with.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Coming out of the wiring closet?

C-3P0 can translate, but only with a lisp and an on-running commentary on the locale's interior design.

[dcarson]

Can always base something off The Questor Tapes with androids that have been around for millennia from aliens.