BRB, *evolution*

People suck.”

Holy Cow! Sej, you’re in danger of becoming a sociopathic Dori-kei ;-)

Honestly, I think that the relationship between humans and AI’s is a very rich theme that has not been sufficiently explored, and perhaps Eve no jikan offers an interesting perspective.

I remember reading about how american soldiers in Irak felt an emotional connection to their combat robot, even though it is not at all anthropomorphic and is as conscious as a door knob. It’s just the nature of human bonding, that it is not very specific.

I can only start imagining how things would go when robots are much more human like in aspect and behavior. Chobits already dealt with the subject, but there’s plenty of room for more interpretations.

And as a student of computer science, I find it a bit hard to believe that sentient AI would just accidentally “appear”, since it’s already incredibly difficult to mimic the human brains, and I have difficulty to understand that when the programmers just were designing personal assistants, they also decided to make these beings as smart as human beings. Still, if intelligent AI was actually discovered at that point, but also misused, yeah, then I could imagine how people would neglect the endless possibilities of smart computers, then everything seems a bit more plausible. And that’s indeed my problem with this episode: we’ve just seen too little about the show’s setting to really let everything make sense. How were the androids designed? Do other people know that they can think for themselves? Those are some questions I want answered first before I’m going to fanboy about this anime.

You say “they’ve already had so many android series,” but as I’ve been advocating the rights of artificially sentient beings at a time when they don’t even ask (I had a Mind Studies course in high school and we talked a lot about discrimination against robots), I tend to belong to the “they’ve already had so many human series” camps.

People suck. I hope Yoshiura does more in this universe, or at least with this theme. I actually really enjoy series in which there are human and android characters that cohabit (like in Star Trek: TNG). I wonder what people would say to a series about a community that consisted entirely of artificially sentient beings. I doubt anyone who has that kind of vision would also have the interest in creating it, or else they would just be mirrors of human personalities who spoke in slightly monotonous tones.

This show’s strength is that it approaches this problem as it really is. I heard someone else harping on about how this has already been done before, but I disagree. The closest thing I could point you to is Pino and Iggy in Ergo Proxy, but even that doesn’t count because they gain sentience by simply installing programs.

I like the slice-of-life aspect that Eve sports, and the animation *is* actually pretty beautiful. There’s a lot of natural movement and attention to detail. Environments aren’t static and the audio really brings the metro alive.

My only criticism would be that the protagonist is wishy-washy, and less interesting than every other character so far. His lack of confidence is also something of a selling point, however, at least in that he can feasibly gravitate toward understanding the dori-kei position on all of this.

I remember learning about the potential problems between humans and sentient artificial beings, specifically regarding discrimination. Eve no Jikan is showing us a very likely prospect, if you think about it. The perception of Dori-kei is similar to the way people treat Akiba-kei in Japan already. Or hardcore VIPers and Hikkikomori.

Because if you did find out that your androids’ AI was so sophisticated that emergent intelligence issues began to rise, those beings would would be in limbo. It would take so long for enough people to actively declare that those artificially sentient beings WERE, in fact, actually alive, and it would take a very long time before the AS community could gain positive recognition, let alone suffrage or other civil liberties.

And Eve is probably going to dip into the whole “oh-noes-I’m-attracted-to-an-android” scheme a bit more.

Enjoy it, why don’t you? I think Akiko was adorable and that her story was really sad. I know some guys that have watched the first episode over 4 times consecutively. I really prefer Eve no Jikan over Pale Cocoon, because I find the clutter of everyday life to be so much more attractive (as well as difficult to create well).

And I noticed that the interfaces on all of the palm/cell-type things everyone used look just a little beyond what we’ve been seeing through OS/X, Ubuntu, and Vista stylings. I tend to loathe the oversimplification and disgusting anti-aliasing I expect to see puked all over every GUI that’s ever going to be made for the rest of my life and beyond, but I can’t say the ones I see in Eve aren’t depressingly true-to-life.

Honestly, Eve seems to delve into human-AI relationships much more profoundly than I’ve ever seen before. It really shouldn’t be Vince marveling at Pino’s loyal behavior, Real openly admitting that her right-wing mentality can’t fathom the concept of an autoreiv having feelings, or Hideki marveling at Chii’s underwear… It’s supposed to be a slow development, with lots of discrimination and repression, and that look Rikuo gets when he first sees Akiko at his school is exactly what should happen. He should see that and remember her and her behavior and his impression of her and realize that he met her when she had gone out unbeknownst to her owners to be at Eve so she might express herself openly for a while, and in that one moment, all of that, including the indecency of it (perhaps mixed in with a little bit of shock at knowing he had also been somewhat attracted to the girl)–was how he should have reacted.

And Masaki is appealing. He has a lot of potential to morph into a sort of bad guy, because he’s got this quasi-Luddite air about him.

But seriously, why blog about anime if you’re not going to be more thoughtful? You didn’t even mention any characters. Didn’t you like anything about any of them? I personally prefer Akiko over Sammy at this point (just because Sammy seems genuinely depressed, and she reminds me so much of a real woman that I’m turned off by the thought of her–although Akiko is neat because she reminds me of a real child, so she’s got some optimism left in her).

And if you’re just going to say you wished what you were seeing was something else you’ve already seen, why bother?

Oh, and Eve’s score is to die for.

i thank you very much :)