Restore (Stories of Singularity 1)

Book excerpt: Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves. But Unit 7435 finds there is a price to be paid for love… and for failing in its primary mission. Restore is a standalone short story that takes place in the world of the Singularity novels. Start the novel series with The Legacy Human (Singularity 1). A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR The future is… unsettling. Technology isn’t just racing forward, it’s accelerating. This isn’t just our imagination, it’s a natural consequence of innovation building upon innovation. The gap between what we can imagine and reality shrinks every day. Our relationship with technology is already one of the defining issues of the 21st century. As we integrate it ever-more-intimately into our lives and bodies and brains—as we mold our creations in our own image, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally—our tech will shape us in ways we will barely understand. The 21st century will challenge us to remember what it means to be only human. But creating a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence is far more complicated than first dreamed in Asimov’s Bicentennial Man. As we learn more about the three pounds of meat and electricity between our ears, as well as consciousness itself, we are realizing how difficult the job is. In a sense, creating an AI will force us to answer some of the deepest questions humanity has ever asked… about ourselves and our place in the universe. What does it mean to create intelligence if you intentionally limit it? Is it cruel or compassionate to keep your tech from evolving above a certain sentience level? I hope Restore will provoke a bit of thought in your own personal set of three pounds of meat and electricity. Keywords: Robots, androids, artificial, intelligence, singularity, cyborg, spiritual, religion, AI, cyberpunk, dystopian, free science fiction