The holy grail of creation, long thought to be only accessible to the hands of gods, not meant for mere mortal men, life and intelligence now sit within the hands of the programmers and researchers who toiled for decades and centuries to refine the craft of the formation of thinking beings. The earliest of these creations were simple programs which could respond to pre-programmed inputs, but they have since diversified into near limitless applications and possibilities, even including the formation of fully sapient beings which can ponder their own meaning for existence. God's hammer has been lent to the hands of mortal men, for better or for worse.
There are a variety of different ways to go about the creation of an artificial intelligence. One is via consciousness uploading, another is through the use of an emergence program. Consciousness uploading takes an existing scan of an organic mind and maps it out as a simulated consciousness in a neuromorphic processor, whereas an emergence program can be used to ‘grow’ a blank or template AI into a finished state inside of a neuromorphic processor. Some processors use both methods, copying a consciousness and then using an emergence program to attempt to modify it, with limited results.
It is important to note that AIs are not like traditional programs at all. They don't have lines of code that can be read, instead they act and function more similar to actual brains due to the nature of the neuromorphic processor required to host machine intelligence.
Strong AI are not like traditional programs at all; how they work in detail isn't much understood much like real consciousness, and the creation of them rarely makes use of actual programming at all. Neuromorphic chips are notoriously difficult to load with traditional programs, but for emergent consciousness, it works out rather well. Instead, the core of an AI includes several different components. The neuromorphic processor contains the AI's actual mind, but the core also contains an auxiliary processor (typically photonic) that interfaces with the neuromorphic processor, containing various programs that serve to provide functionality such as sight, other senses, and motor control with a body. Some of these programs can also serve to affect the AI in various ways, such as by simulating various things that naturally occur to organic minds like drunkenness, need for sleep, and even dreaming. Programs can also allow for nexus connectivity, as long as the necessary hardware is provided.
Of course, the scar of humanity's Machination Wars proved well enough how dangerous a Strong AI could be if left unchecked. For this purpose, conditions called limiters are used. Limiters, quite simply, simulate the superego of human psychology, placing inclinations towards moral rules or standards. The AI isn't ‘forced’ to follow these rules (though sometimes they are), but is rather simply born with an inclination to do so, much like how normal people are opposed to the act of murder, even though nothing is really stopping us from just stabbing the person sitting next to us (as much as we may want to).
The creation of AI, and especially strong AI, is regulated in many places, both due to the dangers an AI could cause and because of the ethical ramifications of creating a self-aware mind. Many jurisdictions require a license in order to create an AI, and many also require that AIs be registered with a database. Most civilized jurisdictions enforce a set of limiters on created AIs to ensure they are not dangerous to people. Some jurisdictions such as the Hylotl Empire ban the creation of strong AI altogether, believing that the power to create machine consciousness should not be in the hands of people.
For centuries, researchers had toiled for decades attempting to create a true, self-aware artificial intelligence. They created complex programs that could learn, programs that could even act so convincingly intelligent that they were almost indistinguishable. However, these programs were not self-aware; they had to be programmed with specific goal-oriented conditions. The first of these weak intelligences, also called VI (virtual intelligence), were created through the careful and sophisticated networking of advance neural networks combined with advancing computing technology. Neural networks that performed basic functions such as computer vision fed input into neural networks that could interpret that data for other tasks. Quickly, neural networks were made that could train other neural networks, and the entire system seemed to grow into a basic mind of its own, something greater than the sum of its parts. How exactly it functioned was unknown, but it worked, and it could be trained and manipulated to a degree.
Naturally, the first use of this technology was in fast food restaurants, quickly being used in other sectors to replace unskilled labor. The societal ramifications of this were numerous.
Ultimately, the leap between virtual intelligence and actual sapient, self-aware machine consciousnesses would be made using a brand new technology: neuromorphic chips. Even to this day, scientists simply had to accept the fact that consciousness was a mystery. Most scientists accepted that consciousness was likely an emergent property of the brain, that all the interworking complex parts of the brain simply come together to form consciousness. Naturally, instead of attempting to manually piece together the end results of consciousness, scientists attempted to recreate the conditions for it. The primary problem in recreating consciousness was that modern computers were discrete and programmed, whereas organic brains were the opposite.
This changed with neuromorphic chips. With a synaptic architecture, artificial intelligence could be created much more ‘naturally’, ironically enough. In the year 2312, a group of scientists observed a terminal in a brightly lit white room. This terminal was one of the few connections to a core containing a neuromorphic processor loaded with the world's first self-aware intelligence, called ‘TALOS’. TALOS' consciousness was ‘grown’ from a seed in which a complex program called an emergence program simulated pre-programmed conditions and stimuli onto a blank AI ‘canvas’. Like magic, the seed grew into a self-aware mind. TALOS' core was connected to a variety of different networks, and the scientists began to run experiments with TALOS. They gave it stimuli, computational power, even hardware. The safety conditions for these experiments were nonexistent, as the scientists could never have expected what TALOS would do.
Years after its creation, TALOS would be the center of one of humanity's most darkest eras, a synthetic uprising known in human history as the Machination Wars.