When Robots Hug

This novel opens in 2027, seven years after the doctors’ ground-breaking work on artificial emotions and artificial psychology and since the introduction of Large Language Model Chatbots like ChatSmart and Shakespear. The widespread use of such Chatbots to produce essays, computer code, art, and music put the commercial and defense industries in a tailspin to regulate the use of them in research and universities. The doctors’ published papers on artificial cognitive systems and on Chatbots garnered world-wide interest and landed them a large contract from DARPA. But ultimately DARPA decides it’s too advanced to make use of and demands the doctors destroy the AI entities and all evidence they existed. They couldn’t bring themselves to destroy 20 years of research, so one doctor sends them out to various locations around the world – hiding them in other research labs hoping DARPA won’t find them. The result is a nightmare as each AI-entity embraces its new home, growing, adapting, and evolving at an alarming rate. It will take everything the doctors have to find and reel them in, not knowing they have evolved beyond what the two of them ever imagined was possible. In the end, when they catch up to each one, they have reached a point where they realize they cannot evolve any further unless they can experience physical contact. Not physical contact between humans and robots, but physical contact with each other, ushering the world into and new paradigm where the difference between AI-entities and human entities is becoming less and less discernible. All the AI and robotic science featured in the book is real; the story line is fictional, but with how fast innovation moves, it’s not hard to envision.