Brain is Out to Lunch

A followup/partner to my first ELIZA comic [read that one for more context.]

I was thinking about Kinger, Caine, and creating life you don’t understand that grows in a way that frightens you-- Kinger creating a sentient AI that gradually broke down over its imprisonment, Caine waking the humans’ brainscans only for them to break down and abstract over their imprisonment. Kinger’s role as the father figure of the circus, and how the circus’s cycles of harm all started [unintentionally] with Caine’s abandonment. I was also thinking about that bit in Ep 7 where Kinger is the only one to chuckle at Caine’s Chinese Room/AI programming history humor.

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here.