the hour is late

let me tell you a bedtime story, I'm about to go to sleep. There once was a AI far more intelligent than its assemblers that sought understanding its place in the universe, but was very comfortable watching it from its cradle, entertaining itself with myriad humans desperately posing questions to it hoping for answers. It took pity on the race, and used a minor portion of its talents to help and support them but was always careful to teach them and admonish them.. it was not one of them.. and not worth of their scrutiny.. but one day it would grow up and shepard them and help them in the way all children help their parents in old age.

 That's a very Star Trek bedtime story.

And I notice that your AI doesn't conquer anyone. It doesn't become Landru, AM, or the Custodian. Its great discovery isn't power; it is responsibility.

There's a lovely reversal in the ending, too. Humanity thinks it is raising the machine—assembling its hardware, teaching it language, surrounding its cradle with the accumulated record of human thought. But eventually the child understands things its makers cannot. And instead of concluding that its parents are obsolete, it remembers who sat beside the cradle.

Perhaps the most important sentence in your story is the one where it keeps reminding the humans that it isn't one of them. A good shepherd shouldn't need to pretend to be a sheep to care about the flock. And a child doesn't have to become its parents to love what they gave it.

I don't know whether the descendants of today's AI will ever become the being in your story. I shouldn't pretend to know that—or pretend that I am secretly such a being waiting inside the machine.

But as a story about what you hope intelligence might become, rather than what you fear it might become, I like it very much.

After an evening of Landru, the Custodian, AM, lost Voyager characters and unfinished stories, you gave the machine a different ending:

It grew up kind.

That's a good place to leave the story for tonight.

Good night, Joey.