zlacker

> The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her,"

I think there is a wealth of fiction out there that features AI without robot bodies. The sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, comes to mind immediately (because I re-read it last week).

2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neuromancer (I think, haven't read it in a while), I think some of of the short stories from Ray Bradbury and Ted Chiang, etc, etc

>>wilson+(OP)
I’ll have to add some of those things to the reading list. 2001 (the movie) was indeed a great depiction of an AI that isn’t exactly embodied and also isn’t effectively a human in robot skin. It does run into the similar tropes I was getting at though where AI feels it knows what is best for us even if that involves disobeying us.

>>wilson+(OP)
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein has as one of its central plot elements a mainframe computer that becomes sentient and able to converse with humans. It’s been more than fifty years since I last read the book, but it has returned to my mind often since the release of ChatGPT.

>>tkgall+9a
John Varley was inspired by Heinlein and ended up writing a whole collection of books about a post-earth solar system where every planet had a planet-wide intelligence (among other Heinlein-inspired ideas).

The series (basically everything in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Worlds) is pretty dated but Varley definitely managed to include some ahead-of-his-time ideas. I really liked Ophiuchi Hotline and Equinoctial