History Headscratchers / AIArtificialIntelligence

* Is there ''any'' sense at all behind [[spoiler: the one-day rule]]? AllThereInTheManual explains that the "New Robots" are actually transhumans, implying [[MindUploading transferring consciousness into robotic bodies]] has been achieved. So even if the cloned body was for some reason unstable (why would it be, anyway? Not to mention how cloning from DNA is somehow enough to also bring back the ''memories'' of the person), why not transfer her consciousness into a shiny new silicon body?

** There are probably a [[HeroOfAnotherStory whole lot of interesting stories]] concerning how they got there in the first place. While probably most of the other androids weren't exactly abandoned as David was (though a few might be "orphans" whose former owners died), their former owners might have had any number of reasons for failing to destroy them or return them to the factory to be recycled. For just one example, old robots and their parts would certainly qualify as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste E-waste]], and a lot of local and national governments have ordinances requiring people to pay a fee to dispose of that stuff; and those governments have plenty of trouble with lazy people and cheapskates illegally dumping their electronics in secluded places (such as the woods) instead. If their "E-waste" is also somewhat sentient, programmed to obey their orders to the end, and has a self-preservation instinct, how much easier would it be for illegal dumpers simply to "emancipate" their robots on the condition that they never tell anyone who their former owners were?

** Ultimately, the problem wasn't one of cloning the physical body. It was that the memories, the things that made the body more then a shell, were suspended in the space-time continuum as a sort of "imprint" by the living person. Once made, it couldn't normally be duplicated. The ultratech androids managed to pull out the imprint with ''great difficulty'' and put it in a body, but after one day, the revived personality was pulled back into the ether, and the now-empty shell then died. It was a spiritual sort of CloningBlues, rather then a physical one.

Basically, Joe's fear is the robotic version of the CloningBlues: he ''knows'' humans only value him for what he does, and how easily he can be replaced. He's also self-aware enough to realize that even an exact copy of him won't actually ''be'' him, and that the police will for all practical purposes be killing him as a matter of routine just for being the witness to a murder. Thus, his self-preservation programming mandates that he must try to evade them; that license of his probably also serves as a financial tracker for his owner(s) and can be used as a homing beacon, so of course the first thing he does at his earliest opportunity is to dispose of it.