Sam also plays it straight during the visit to Ecosystems Unlimited, when all of Florence's belongings disappear during what's supposed to be a routine checkup.Sam: My original mistakes never draw half the attention as my attempts to cover them up do. Retirony: Blunt had one week and 3 days left until retirement.Florence theorizes that Bowman's creations are intended to outgrow the Restraining Bolt, as a sort of moral training wheel. The "bolt" on Florence is not that heavy, and tends to be a bit flexible. Restraining Bolt: The necessary restrictions and limitations of Restraining Bolts, with which most Artificial Intelligences are designed, are often discussed.Reference Overdosed: For the most part the numerous references to a wide range of concepts are worked into the storyline well enough that they're not jarring, though occasional references to 20th/21st century pop culture phenomena roughly five centuries later can sometimes seem a little odd to some readers.I've got to admit that scores some major brownie points. Has he really done anything special?įlorence : Okay, he saved my life. The Sam in question is a tentacular Starfish Alien whose body is practically a Brown Note to look at, and there's not enough Brain Bleach on the planet to spare the viewers.įlorence : I might be attracted to Winston because he's the first nice human I've gotten to know on this planet.
Reclining Venus: Parodied with Helix's ( mercifully offscreen) topiary sculpture "Sam As A Reclining Nude".Clippy exploits this to ensure the legality of his actions under Mr. Read the Fine Print: Ecosystems Unlimited heavily discourages this trope by ensuring their EULA, which is six petabytes long note 6000 terabytes, the text equivalent would be a book 3 trillion pages long, is too long to be read in a single human lifetime note An EULA of this size in Real Life would be held to be unenforcable, as its size prevents the user from giving informed consent.Reading Your Rights: In strip 2257, the police arrest a robot, reading a set of Miranda Rights modified to better apply to robots.
She did get someone to listen to her within an hour of re-realizing the danger, but needed to defer a full explanation until the following day. As of this strip, Florence has two days to stop the program from going live.