Horrific comic strip dream

I popped awake this morning around 4:30 at the end of a horrific dream about April from "For Better or Worse." (Which I don't even know where it came from; I mean, I've barely even read the paper for weeks, and when I do, I only read For Better or Worse because it's there... I'm not even certain the youngest one is called April.)

( It involved epilepsy and drowning )

Singular!

Heh. So Eric ran a game about people discovering the existence of the first computer intelligence. I was playing a 65-year-old liberal sociologist; I figure she maybe knew Ursula Le Guin on a chatting basis... She wreaked havoc, though, using her faux-grandma fu. "Now, dear, why don't you listen to my compsci friend here who says you need to talk to your computer as if it's an Artificial Intelligence, and meanwhile I'll get you a nice cup of tea..."

Anyway, amusingly, she turned out to be nearly the equivalent of the nice old lady with the Feynman AI in matociquala's _Hammered_. Except apparently she pulled out of it all as a hero, instead of a prisoner. Don't know how long that will last once she decides the government isn't treating the AI well and sets about trying to free it...

In the group of PCs we had the whole range from "kill it" to "make it some friends so it won't be lonely" (<-- me!). I was happy to get to expound my views, which y'all may recognize: people become what you expect them to be. Treat it like a friend. Treat it as you would have it treat you...

John had a neat suggestion I hadn't considered: the more human-like its inputs, the more human-like its consciousness will be. So get it mechanical eyes and ears. Brilliant!