e-real

Abstract

This thesis is a science fiction trilogy about relationship building and shattering between a human, robot, and supercomputer. The chief setting of the desert was an intentional choice to juxtapose the living with the lifeless, as well as provide a motif with the cosmos on a greater beauty. Similarly, the all-metal city (the destination) marks a precipice for machine ingenuity at the cost of everything else. I incorporated current anxieties around AI into the conception of the two non-human characters. Their existence and stories in this thesis are a response to hushed fears about AI's hold on things, it's lightning-quick expansion in knowledge and understanding and (well, not quite as fast) mimicry. I stamped a portal into a possible future where a supercomputer has a misleading, broken capacity to know “everything.” It’s in the city, waiting for greater and greater achievements in consciousness. My thesis hinges upon the very conversation it has with the story’s only human being, a woman who met its inferior counterpart, a robot, first.