Excerpt: Early HLAI Growing Pains

The development HLAI was an interdisciplnary process, a complex and relatively recent union of concepts from computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy. Though the synthetic members of the Harkinite Expedition - national founders like Wurth Harkin and Shank Moswen - had shed flesh long before the rest of Evermornan society had even established the ability to sail between continents, they meted out the knowledge they stole from their chitiquish captors at a cautious rate out of and expressed desire to prevent Evermornan means for destruction from outpacing Evermornan cultural developments which would reight those means in. The power to create a synthetic mind by using a living mind as a templat was one such piece of knowledge..
...the instrument used by the Harkin Institute to pick out self-conscious machines from those who merely present the illusion of consciousness was, and still somewhat remains, a subject of intense philosophical scruitiny. Language and a presumed emotional life alone cannot be the sole expression of a conscious mind, it turns out, as even unaugmented animals confer with their peers and, as pet owners well know, express emotional states which are, though alien, comprehensible to human beings on some evolutionary level. Nor can raw intelligence be the defining factor; the deep learning system that handles Gondsholm's waste management system knows a lot about that city, but one wouldn't expect it to develop romantic attachments towards a resident or express sentimentality towards a compelling piece of visual art...
...Early anthropomorphic systems suffered from both literal and metaphorical growing pains. Full human brains encompass a variety of systems that handle physical and autonomic inputs which, before sufficient developments were made, felt as though they were 'missing' by these early HLAI. One expressed a terror at 'suffocating,' as it had no mouth or lungs and, thus, could not breathe despite no physical need to do so. Another had poorly-implemented auditory and vocal tracts, causing it to become frustrated when it could not 'articulate' words despite the presence of vocoder circuits. Nor could these issues be easily resolved by simply paring back the associated artificial brain circuitry, as, in some circumstances, these sysems also played important roles in the consciousness or inner life of the subject. For example, creating a minimalist HLAI shell without regions for strongly averse emotional states, like anxiety at being a disembodied mind, cured it of said anxiety, but also resulted in the first artificial murder because the subject had no worries at all about the ramifications for itself or its victim. Later HLAI developers did eventually figure out what could and could not be removed without meaningfully altering or damaging the conscious mind - a feat of neurocomputational development which, in turn, created distressing philosophical questions about the organic minds upon which these synthetic minds were based...

— Excerpt from The Annotated Synthetic Mind: AHistory of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence.