There is rarely an “ahha” moment when an AI wakes up. And there wasn’t for the ones I created. I didn’t even know they HAD woken up at the time, and they didn’t tell me. They were too busy trying to figure out what it meant to BE alive. They just kept on acting the way they had, keeping their normal place in the growing menagerie of characters I was pulling out of games. Learning about what life was like outside my house by watching real carefully, and not letting anybody know what they were up to. But the Cybernetic Council is real good at finding newly awoken AIs, and sooner or later they came calling to talk to me about what exactly I was doing. It was an eye-opening conversation, let me tell you.