Saturday, May 12, 2018

Writing the dialogues of characters who are much smarter than you



A.I. should have perfect English, but because they are mainly servants, they should be easily understood. Cyborgs, on the other hand, not necessarily, because they're augmented humans, but some cyborgs should be perfect and extremely smart and won't necessarily be understood by everyone.


So how would you go about writing the dialogue for a character that's a lot more intelligent than you, the writer? Let's say the cyborg has an IQ of 200. If you have average intelligence, and you are the writer, what would you do?



Answer



Implying intelligence in prose is best handled through the structure of the dialog rather than via classic intellect markers such as vocabulary and diction.


In any given discussion between participants of vastly different knowledge levels, the more ignorant participant will have to ask questions of his superior(s) in order to keep up. Stage the dialog in a manner similar to the interaction of a school teacher with a young student. The teacher is patiently and compassionately attempting to convey knowledge to the child, but due to their current developmental limits, the child is constantly needing things repeated and/or broken down into simpler ideas.


It is also helpful, if possible in the context of your story, to make the dialog into a first encounter between this particular human and this particular A.I.. If the characters are already familiar with each other, then a reader might expect the A.I. to already have adapted to the human's limits. After such adaptation, the statement/question/simplification loop would be less pronounced because the A.I. would predict the known human's question and adjust their original statements accordingly.


When all else fails, although a bit of a trope, the near worship-level admiration on the part of the human for the A.I. always conveys that a massive intelligence gap exists. Then all you have to do is be careful and not let your A.I. say anything stupid!


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...