Previous

AM is the antagonist of the story, an artificial intelligence that endlessly tortures the human characters. AM is motivated by hatred for the humans who allowed it to gain sentience without any ability to act on that sentience. AM’s malevolence reflects a deep concern held by people at the beginning of the real-life computer age, that by giving enough information to computers, they could develop the ability to think. AM is one answer to the question of how a superintelligence would feel about its own selfhood. AM has destroyed the earth and everyone on it but for five people, and then just to take its useless revenge on them for its creation. 

The name AM originally comes from the term Allied Mastercomputer, but it is suggested that the name AM is a reference to the phrase “I think, therefore, I am,” (from the Latin phrase “cogito, ergo sum,” French philosopher René Descartes’s “first principle”). But the name may also point to the third chapter of the book of Exodus, where God tells Moses “I am who I am.” This would point to the god-like powers that AM has amassed through the processes of time and the consolidation of all AIs around the world. AM is a technological monolith, using its accrued power to inflict misery on people who had nothing to do with its creation. AM is like a bored, lonely child, using whatever it can to destroy the lives of the ants it sees on the driveway. Even in the end, when Ted has managed to free the others through their deaths, AM will not give up the project of creating human wretchedness. It learns nothing from Ted’s actions. AM simply concentrates its machinations on him, suggesting that the endeavor will last indefinitely.

Previous section Ted

Take a Study Break