By Keya Mahajan, Head of Research & Development
September 15th, 2057

Emotion is a powerful thing. The drive to want, to yearn, to fear, to do so much out of what feels like nothing. It's a crucial part of the human existence, and without which we could not have begun to get as far as we have as a species today.

It's been a long-standing goal of us - the creators - to make entities that think for themselves, to create the artificial brain.

So. How do we repeat such a vast world for artificial entities such as AI? as our Robot friends?

Well, that's where the Personality Core comes in.

To keep it simple: we place a web of CPUs into a shared space, think a motherboard but in disconnected segments, each CPU a neuron; then each one simulates a certain desire, or reaction, or thought process, or so on. From that, we choose a bundle of rival 'neurons' to compete against, where a central core CPU is in charge of managing these interactions.

And so, with those rivalling cores, we get emotion: a conflict of two cores will produce anxiety, or a craving. An agreement of cores produces happiness, or stubbornness. And there's thousands of little increments between those two states, approximating the various twists that we humans experience.

(Just to get across the magnitude of this - when I say a web of CPUs, I mean thousands of them, all surrounded in the maleable goo that is Wetware. We aren't just doing 3 or 4 neurons here, we need to simulate as many as we possibly can.)

Why have this? Well, by having such conflict, such agreements, we can have an entity react to the world around it, then make it's own choices from a given list of choices.

Rather than 100s of programmers having to produce a decision-tree to react to the entire world, we have a Personality Core react to it, then choose the best option from a list of contexts and corresponding possible actions: think how you "grab" a hammer to use it, you also "grab" a ladder rung to climb up it, or you "grab" a steering wheel to rotate it. We construct the actions a body can take, then all the ways those actions can be used (there is a lot more to this than that - driving a car requires much more than just grabbing the wheel!) For example: a confused system produces a confused mind, which in some cases is exactly what we want! As then the entity will have to ask a question about it's surroundings, to then come to a better solution, rather than make the wrong choice.

A confused system produces a confused mind, which in some cases is exactly what we want.

Now, why do we have multiple of these cores? Why do we need to hand-craft these? Why not just make one, and have that one work out the rest?

Well the answer is simple: why do we not have one common human brain? That we all mimic and share? We don't, don't we? We're all different in our own ways: Some men are better at hard, labourious tasks, and some women are better at being patient with a tantrum child. Some men are effeminate artists, and some women do marathons for fun!

So we come to the same result with our cores: we make different (subtle) variations of them. One core may be more prone to being stubborn - a good worker for solving complex calculations. Another core is impossible to anxiety - a perfect fit for tense orbital repair work. And so on and so on for each new sector of work our little robots perform in. With that, and with the Wetware technology that serves as the foundation, we come to the modern artificial entity: a true brain.